It's already four months since I moved house. I'm still in the same road, only four doors down from my previous home at L's bend, but in those few yards lie different views, and a wealth of difference in trees and light, and sunlight's angles, which I have been discovering over the weeks. During autumn mornings I enjoyed the soft play of light filtered through the leafy tree opposite, gently waving in my front room, catching and transforming a box's metallic gleam. At a certain point in the afternoon the sunlight would play different games around me as I worked at my desk, until, with winter, it began to slant much lower, and the games faded away. Recently, the weather has been depressingly grey and wet, but we started the year with some bright winter sunlight, glowing golden brown on some trees beyond my wall. All this has been new to me, each new gleam or shadow a lovely discovery, which will continue, as the weeks and the seasons unfold.
And some lovely, completely unexpected surprises in my garden, especially at the front! Green shoots, spring's early heralds, pushing through bare patches of soil, decorating a gnarled root, and even peeking through the slim gaps between concrete slabs of paving! Nature has a way of always coming through... And truly, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in God's Grandeur... There lives the dearest freshness deep down things... Deep down things incubating in darkness, but intended for light: deep down things filled with promise, whose appearance in the midst of winter's cold darkness proclaim revival, new life and hope... and spring's eventuality. And right now, in a world and a new year already filled with darkness and death, and seismic events, I find joy in each one of these tiny joys.
I find joy... I have to find joy, in these and other tiny joys; have to delight, give thanks, live with hope and expectation, even - especially - as my heart breaks and my spirits sink. I have to savour, and be surprised; just as I have to love, and love more intensely, pray and pray more deeply.
And in case you need some tiny joys too, I will do my best to share some more, as the year unfolds. In the meantime, here are two more photos, of barren soil and concrete being greened by nature's resilience...
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