I see you, May

I have a thing about May. Perhaps we all do, whether we’ve consciously noticed it or not. I begin the month with the best of intentions: that I will notice it all, suck it all in, revel in it, embrace it fully. But, as the month is already slipping between my fingertips, I begin to wonder how I could ever have imagined that it might be possible to remain in a state of reverie for a whole month.

I’m not sure when I first flagged May as a month to be taken seriously. For most of my teenage years and into my university days, it was a month of sufferance, of revision, exams, hay fever, general torment. Perhaps it was not until my twenty-fourth year on this planet that I finally began to understand May had a power all its own - when I travelled to the isle of Mull on a National Express coach and camped amongst the buttercups for a week, on the shores of the western tip of Loch Linnhe. I felt as if I had uncovered a secret. Everyone went on holiday in July and August, so going away in May felt forbidden, bizarre almost, like I should be somewhere else, working hard.

It has taken me some years to come to grips with the full gift of May, and to understand that to fully appreciate its glories I should avoid working through it where possible. Last year, at last, I made a decision. Mindful we only get so many Mays in a lifetime, I marked the month in my internal calendar as worthy of saving my annual leave up for and spent some delightful time with family and distant friends, taking them for picnics in woodlands and aimless meanders through gardens, all near our home on the edge of Dartmoor. This year, once again, I accurately anticipated that my future self, starved of light and life from the winter months, would stumble into May in a kind of a panic that once again the land around me was presenting its most joyous, burgeoning self and I simply had to spend the month outside, free.

This year, I booked two weeks’ leave for the first two weeks of May. After a shaky (and cold and rainy) start, we settled into a circumstance-enforced holiday-from-home. I can’t complain - our home sits in a charming valley between the two holiday counties of Devon and Cornwall, so there are plentiful day trips to choose from, and places long on our list to visit.

One of the first we took was a bike ride through unknown lanes to Meavy, Sheeptor, and Burrator, the reservoir that waters Plymouth and surroundings. Skylarks chattered above us, singing Moor as they scooted about the expansive palest-blue sky. Gorse bushes cast the scent of coconut around our heads. We watched a Buzzard. We were high up the moorside, so it was at a level with us and it soared, sun on its back, without a breath of effort. Buzzard folded his wings abruptly, poked his nose down and soared into the space beneath. He narrowly missed Raven, it was intimidation clearly. We hear a distant Cuckoo, a cow. Skylarks, the persistent soundtrack to this corner of the world, to a summer in the wings. Specks of yellow tormentil, tufts of new grass blades. I felt held by my chosen land. We couldn’t see the water: the land tilted gently to the valley below, the far side a patchwork of bronze-brown gorse, new green swathes with fainter green-brown tracks between. Slices of tended green fields nosed into the uncultivated moorland. There were hawthorn trees, oaks below us, an upper stand of Scot’s pine denoting a house and someone's labour from centuries ago. We talked of the old cinematic skill of matte painting and imagined the towers we could superimpose on Wotter Moor with its ready-made quarry slab. I closed my eyes and let the skylark song tumble over me. (extract from my journal, May 4)

We took a brief trip to the tip of Cornwall, to watch the early morning sun over St Michael’s Mount and to visit some National Trust properties. In a meadow at Godolphin, I wrote:

A warm May afternoon. Is there anything more lovely than lying in a meadow watching the swallows dip and glide, stall and swoop? Dandelion clocks. Breeze shakes the leaves, almost cool. Buttercups. An old lichen and moss-coated granite wall around the Kings Courtyard. Such closeness to power and inheritance, titles and landedness. Shapes emerge, appear to step out of the wall but, no, it's a trick of the light catching that soft silver-grey plant. Is it Old Time that I'm feeling? I have a strong sense of a spring day that John Clare may have had, dreaming in the meadow, tools lain down for the moment, watching the swallows. (Godolphin, Cornwall, May 9)

Later that afternoon, we walked along the coast path and I wrote some more from the beach at Trebah Garden:

We sit on the shingle beach and listen to the insistent drum roll of the windswept Helford rivermouth. The sun, so long hidden from searching eyes, strokes my bare skin with an intensity that only new light brings. Rocks root and hold fast to the eternal beach. There are pebbles of grey slate and white quartz, small round jewels of white heat, glimpses of buried crosses, white-on-grey. A scattered tide line of dulce, kelp, and cuttlefish, the familiar detritus of lost lives. Sea thrift waves from pockets of flowing rock that pauses only for human time, but always still pressing forward, weathering back. A fly tickles my knee. The waves play their old tune on the shingle stage. White frothed confusion tops the arcs of water, scaled with light and salt. The water, like life, retreats. Too soon out of reach, witnessed for a moment, it is the twisted ebb and flow of moonpull. A ship skirts the horizon: close your eyes for a moment and it's the galleon from that Georgian painting at Saint Michael's Mount. This land and water is layered with saints and wealth, mining and fishing, prayer and rest, skimmed now with a flicker of tension and unrest. The garden we have walked through to reach this shore was created over so many lifetimes, now gone, lost to time. Are we all brief waves, making our mark on the shore for a crushing moment, then retreating to stillness, contracting?  A gull follows the edge line of water. Fragments of wave and tip of water refract the sunlight, cracking my heart open into a thousand mirrored pieces. It has always been so in these places. The pull of life, the repose, the reverie, the moments when we tilt towards the inevitable end. Soon, there will be a gathering of coats, a return of flask to bag, a remembering of phone and apple amongst the rocks. An inexorable leaving, tracing our footsteps back through the garden of devotion, back into our lives. (Trebah Beach, Conrwall, May 10)

One afternoon, when we are back home, I listened to a conversation between Krista Tippett and the children’s writer Kate diCamillo. Kate shared a phrase she wrote in one of her books and it caught my breath:

“[Rainer Maria] Rilke never lost his conviction in the utter reality of the world or in our human capacity to redeem it through that act of transforming attention, which is naming, or love.”

What if my sacred task in this life is to speak of the wonder of nature? To tell stories of how, if we learn to pay attention and to notice, we will be shown how to live well on this miraculous planet? What if this were enough? To name it simply, and to name it often, to speak clearly of the world so that another soul might learn to love it as I do?

I see you, May, in your shiny newness, your bright zesty verdure, your multitudinous growth.

I see you, Clematis as you shine your mauve and purple plates next to the linen-white roundules of your neighbour, Wisteria.

I see you, Bramble, staking your summer claim to soil and space.

I see you, Lupin, bursting each hour it seems with fortitude and colour.

I see you, Red Campion, splaying your hearts, pinning me down with your tiny beauty.

I see you, Rhododendron, at home on the quarry bank, spilling your fuscia-pink tongues across our soil.

I see you, young Ash sapling, so rooted and sure of your footing, yet so naive to the fate of your sisters around you.

I see you, Pear, Plum and Apple, offering your small pockets of tissue-white blossom that promise to mop up my tears.

I see it all. My phone is full of blue and green photographs. But, I have discovered something else this May. There is something profoundly different about seeing May and dwelling in it. It is not enough to simply see May. I want to crawl inside the life outside my window. To share its energetic channels towards the light, to reach beyond the knowing of desktop and page, to dwell in it. To pay attention to every cell, every tiny buzzing life, every perfect song of new bird. This yearning has no resolution, I fear. It is an impossible puzzle. It needs time.

Dwelling invites an immersion, where all nerve-endings of our bodies are alive to the exuberant growth of it all: the light, the life, the potential, the shout of it. Now, back working at my desk, I steal the occasional glance out of my study window, grateful for the pots of flowers, rose, and fatsia that we have planted for the arrival of this moment of disconnect that I encounter at the end of every free period. I am no longer dwelling in it. I’m not even sure what that means from this vantage point, but I have the faintest memory of it, a lingering trace on my skin.

My advice to you for next year: book some time off in May and sit with the swallows and the buttercups. Take a notebook. Dwell. Your soul will thank you for it.