It’s a damp day out there – so perfect for spending some time writing for our Newsletter…
The trees we planted on the land last autumn and this spring are celebrating the life-giving rain after the warm sunny weeks we’ve just had.
The transformation out there at this time of the year always blows me away.
From the barrenness of winter to this lush abundance of fresh green leaves, flowers, blossoms and new shoots on trees… During the last dry days there were clouds of yellow pollen from the pines wafting through the woods, and the ocean of the bright yellow blossoms of the gorse between here and the sea smelled deliciously of coconut !
And we’ve got to enjoy that every day as we’ve been busy these last weeks with hand-cutting gorse…loppers and hand saws and the noisy brush- cutter… cutting back the regrowth of gorse back on firebreaks, on the heathlands and the grasslands in our care. The all important maintenance of precious habitats. And – we also did little improvements on each of those areas (extending them a bit, where it made sense). Prickly issues… we got scratched & prickled plenty as we worked in shorts and sleeveless T-shirts.
As always I challenge myself and our volunteers to find the ‘inner equivalent’ to the work we were doing out there… So that our outer work becomes a physical ritual for what we need to do inside of ourselves. Hence the question – what are we doing with ‘prickly issues’ in our lives ?
Of course we also did other things these last weeks & months. The mixture of sunshine and rain is perfect growing weather and our baby trees are all of the sudden sticking their heads out of their little spiral tubes. We need to beat the deer to get to them and put them into taller tubes to put the tips out of reach of our four legged friends. We staked and tubed around 150 trees !
So – how are we protecting the fragile, delicate and vulnerable things in our lives ? Within ourselves, and within our communities and societies ?
We are part of nature, and our inner nature and nature around us are deeply interconnected. As we become increasingly conscious of this connection, it is easy to turn our work into authentic ‘worship’ – sacred rituals honoring all life.
‘Rewilding the soul’ – a week-long camping retreat we’ve planned for July – aims to explore the question of what we can learn from ‘rewilding’ nature around us for the process of remembering and embodying our own true ‘wild’ nature ?
“Buddha nature’ some would say…
Enlightened nature…
Or to quote Eileen Caddy – ‘The Christ within’…
And finally an extract from a well known poem by Thich Nhat Hanh :
“…Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone…
Please call me by my true names,
so i can wake up,
and the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.”
T.N.H
Kajedo Wanderer
Land Manager of the FHT
News from the Land – Spring Early Summer 2024
It’s a damp day out there – so perfect for spending some time writing for our Newsletter…
The transformation out there at this time of the year always blows me away.
From the barrenness of winter to this lush abundance of fresh green leaves, flowers, blossoms and new shoots on trees… During the last dry days there were clouds of yellow pollen from the pines wafting through the woods, and the ocean of the bright yellow blossoms of the gorse between here and the sea smelled deliciously of coconut !
And we’ve got to enjoy that every day as we’ve been busy these last weeks with hand-cutting gorse…loppers and hand saws and the noisy brush- cutter… cutting back the regrowth of gorse back on firebreaks, on the heathlands and the grasslands in our care. The all important maintenance of precious habitats. And – we also did little improvements on each of those areas (extending them a bit, where it made sense). Prickly issues… we got scratched & prickled plenty as we worked in shorts and sleeveless T-shirts.
Of course we also did other things these last weeks & months. The mixture of sunshine and rain is perfect growing weather and our baby trees are all of the sudden sticking their heads out of their little spiral tubes. We need to beat the deer to get to them and put them into taller tubes to put the tips out of reach of our four legged friends. We staked and tubed around 150 trees !
So – how are we protecting the fragile, delicate and vulnerable things in our lives ? Within ourselves, and within our communities and societies ?
We are part of nature, and our inner nature and nature around us are deeply interconnected. As we become increasingly conscious of this connection, it is easy to turn our work into authentic ‘worship’ – sacred rituals honoring all life.
“Buddha nature’ some would say…
Enlightened nature…
Or to quote Eileen Caddy – ‘The Christ within’…
And finally an extract from a well known poem by Thich Nhat Hanh :
“…Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone…
so i can wake up,
and the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.”
T.N.H
Kajedo Wanderer
Land Manager of the FHT