There is a community, or rather layers of communities that live in the hedge outside my front door. When I am feeling as though the world is too full of busy it it the first place I can calm that down.

A good part of yesterday I spent outdoors, with very little achieving at the center of the plan. A bit of puttering in the yard, but mostly watching. One day I will try and list the names of the bird groups we have beneath the hedge, there are many. When I begin to count or classify, my thoughts wander to their stories in place of a list.

Yesterday a pair of nesting osprey gathered twigs and fairly large branches from a dead wood by the edge of the forest wall. The male would swoop in and pull branches off the tree, breaking attached pieces, carrying them away. The action overhead was not well photographed, he was generally a step ahead of me!

Today is a studio day, things to do at least in the morning as my hope is to wrap these existing projects up in the next ten days and have a week for plein air before i head off for another week. I brought a little mole skin watercolour pad, i have refilled my travelling paint box, and everything can fit snuggly into the small front of my backpack.  My mind is restless. I am not sure the basis for this feeling of I must, but it is here all the same. So, first on the morning call, I will take my coffee to my rocking chair that sits feet from the hedge, a line of seedling brought down from the mountain and planted by the boy who lived in this house some fifty years ago. The boy, now man retired from his job with the department of fish and wildlife this past winter. How funny with the passing of time, some threads run through the years.  A tapestry imprinting a love story, that started with a boy, threads dropped, picked up and carried forward by a women he never met, and yet they share something of value, something important in the world of small things.