Stepping Out to In-Betweeness

Today has been one of those pet days which seems to have hopped in from Summer to say ‘hello.’

The garden beckoned and that delicious feeling of being embraced by nature. These lines from W.B. Yeats’ Among School Children kept floating in and out of my head:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

There was such a sense of glimpsing Spring, yet admiration for Winter’s glory. At times, it seemed wrong to disturb nature, especially when she gently closed her curtains on me:

Curtain of Pampas

Wise and wrinkled textures from Winter were glancing at the enthusiastic shoots of Spring.

The Hydrangea by the Gate

It seemed right that it would be the climbing hydrangea that was springing forward, wrapping herself around the solid trunk of the Monkey Puzzle Tree:

Climbing Hydrangea

The snowdrops that were showing white a week ago were nodding their heads every so gently to assuage my amazement that they could have survived the vicious Storm Rachel that ravaged Ireland a few days ago.

Snowdrops

The thorny debate around Aristotle’s theory that Nature abhors a vacuum, that has lain dormant since the dark days came, re-emerged from under the front hedge with a burst of orange. Here lay one of the many buoys that have begged to be brought home from the windswept beaches over the last few months.

Buoy Blossom

The dreamy in-betweenness of today was starkly questioned by the shadow of a tree at sundown as I ran to the shop to get some coal for tonight’s  fire.

Shadowland