There is a large wild field beside where I live and I noticed today while passing en route home from work that planning permission has been applied to build an apartment complex there.

As I passed, the warm summer breeze sang through the leaves of the young oak trees growing in the field and so I headed home, picked up my little dog Luna and we headed off on an adventure down a back lane to see if we could find a way into this beautiful, wild, untouched field.

A few fences and nettles later we were in – and what a worthy adventure it was!

Teaming with mid-summer life, the field enveloped us and time seemed to melt away. Butterflies, breeze, dancing grasses, poppies, birds, spiders, ladybirds – we enjoyed them all. I thought of Mary Oliver’s beautiful poem The Summer Day (below) as I lay, idle and blessed in the long grass. Luna pottered about on her doggie adventures, every now and then returning to me, just to check I was still there.
Bliss.

Some precious ‘stepping-out-of-clock-time’ time, to celebrate the abundance of mid summer and the simple nourishment of time spent in nature.

I am glad to say that my website is getting an overhaul and we will be adding a lot more content over the coming months – so stay tuned…and find some long summer grass to lie idle in if you can!

Midsummer blessings 🙂
Fionnuala

‘Who made the world?
Who made the swan and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
The one who has flung herself out of the grass,
The one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
Who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearm and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
Which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else would I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?’

— Mary Oliver from House of Light