Now, I thought it was about time for a new post. The title reflects more of my thinking than of an actual ramble – that would be fine too. Saying that, I am missing going outside at present and have a real longing to have a winter walk. I can say that now as today we pass into the Winter Solstice (Read more about this on Why do mornings get darker in Winter?). Even going outside the back door and feeling the fresh cool air and continuing my garden work gives me a hankering to ramble.
The love of the outdoors doesn’t always come easy especially this time of year when you want to be indoors or snuggled up by a roaring log fire. (Now is that very Green and is that sustainable? – In another post maybe I’ll deal with that!). I think it would be good to have a crisp Winter this year as there are numerous bugs about, I mean the germ type ones not the Bumblebee type ones (I’ve seen a couple of the latter in the last few days)! I did send up a prayer whilst gardening recently that we would have a good winter this year that would be beneficial to human, beast and plant.
I did manage to have a ramble a couple of weekends ago at one of the local haunts for birdwatchers. It was a cold afternoon and I ventured out to this spot on the edge of suburbia meeting only four other people and seeing two from afar in my time there. There wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy as far as birds go but good to see them all the same getting on with their everyday lives. It’s at times like this that I begin to enjoy the simpler things of watching a commoner bird feeding or flying. Maybe this is something to do with age.
In our garden recently we’ve had some common birds (and our 20th species since moving here – a Pied Wagtail) demonstrating bird behaviour which I have overlooked before. A Crow has been caching bits of food in our lawn, similarly a Squirrel and two Robins were having a scrap on our patio being refereed (is that a word?) by a Blackbird at one point. Keeping your eyes open and your senses keen is very much what it’s all about when you take to the outdoors. I have read somewhere that the Crow is an intelligent bird (and I include Jays there as they are in the same family) and they can remember where they put the cache compared to the Squirrel who doesn’t so easily. Looking the word squirrel up I discover that it literally means shade tail and has nothing to do with hiding away. We must have taken our views of the Squirrel’s habits into English meaning for that. The urban dictionary has another meaning which I’ll let you look up!
Anyway enough of this purposeless rambling – well isn’t that the nature of rambling anyway? (|Notice I got the word nature in there!) I think life can be like this and has a way of teaching us more of God by an overall picture of our surroundings as we ramble – He’s subtly at work through these random connections with nature.