Noticing Nature.
I have noticed less this week.
Or perhaps that isn’t quite true.
Three journeys to Southampton Hospital, my sight increasingly blurred and uncertain, and much of the week has seemed to pass beyond the reach of my usual attention. And yet, even through blurred vision, travelling the motorway, there were wildflowers blooming along the verges despite the austerity — drought, tarmac and traffic.
Resting in our garden between visits, in the company of wildflowers, willowherb stood tall, drifting into seed — soft and downy, travelling into the meadow, mimicking my vision, their uncertain flight somehow echoing my own journey. Between showers, magnificent voluminous clouds tumbling into view, like clowns performing in the interval between acts, assuming curious shapes as if to entertain, or simply to cheer me up.
I haven’t stopped noticing beauty at all. I have been noticing it differently.
I’ve noticed it in the kindness of clinicians too. And in Neil’s eyes and the grasp of his hand. Always.
This morning, with the drugs beginning to hold back the rising tide of fluid in my right eye, and treatment for my left scheduled, I looked out and this was the first thing I saw.
A rainbow, painted in refracted light across the morning sky.
I stood gazing at it for some time.
Rainbows have gathered so many meanings around themselves that it is almost impossible to encounter one without metaphor. Hope. Covenant. Promise. The passing of a storm. Yet this morning I didn’t need to decide what mine meant.
I was simply grateful that I could see it.
And that was meaning enough.
Nature’s perpetual promise of beauty and solace — not necessarily waiting for us at the end of the storm, but quietly present within it.
