The bird, marbles, The Undertones, and Pear and ginger crumble
Abundance: Saturday 19 April 2025
This Monterey pine is saying ‘Looking forward to a sunny Easter, a few days just like today? I have a message from the universe’.
And so it transpired. I’m looking out on a scene of wind and constant torrential rain. It feels utterly impossible that Thursday’s skin tighteningly welcome sunshine has given way.
Luckily, I stole a few hours in the garden while the sun shone. I had no ambitions other than to clear beds of weeds and tired annuals. A clean slate for another day’s pleasure.
It takes me perhaps half an hour for my mind to stop latching on to other things, to stop raising thoughts like bubbles in a glass of fizz, to allow whatever my body is doing to be enough. When that moment finally comes, it feels so similar to the effect of the first pint catching up with your need for the effect of the first pint.
Solvitur ambulando1 - it is solved by walking - is something I wrote about a dozen years ago. There are any number of interpretations of its essence, but to me it has always felt like whatever clarity or inspiration you need can can be found in the act of placing one foot in front of the other for long enough for your mind to let go. With luck, a quiet state of open receptiveness results. It’s a beautiful, positive, emptiness - not quite boredom but a distant, perfect cousin2 of it. It is here - without intending to - that creative leaps are made, unasked questions are answered, ideas germinate, and resolutions are found. I start feeling like a sock full of jumbled marbles, I arrive gently shaken into perfect order; a complicated mind resolved by a shallow river grading the pebbles as it flows. It may not be as guaranteed or as wholly effective as when I walk, but once in a while, gardening does this for me too.
And so too, yesterday. My trowel slipping into the soil in hope of reaching the very extent of the deepest roots: it is not intellectual work, it requires little more than patience and purpose. Quietly getting on. Leaving all other thoughts. Not mithering myself about tasks I’m not doing right now.
It occurs to me that this raised bed, built by me a couple of years ago, is made of a Monterey pine - perhaps a sister of that one giving me the bird - that had fallen only a couple of postcodes from where it now lies, dividing the cultivated from the clipped.
I like that very much. Looking back, that little satisfaction might’ve been the moment everything quietened in my busy brain.
More garden delight plus a recipe for Pear and ginger crumble below