Skip to main content

From Death comes Life

There is a small churchyard a few roads from my house. It's where I was christened, where my mother rang the bells for twenty years, where my younger brother was christened and countless family friends married. Though I myself am not overtly religious, I still value the church for its memories, and for the tranquillity that can always be found there.

Surrounded on three sides by roads, one of which I walk home along every day, the quiet and stillness maintained between its walls are a small miracle, and this time of year, the yew trees and tall building are lit below with a riotous carpet of colour, the beginnings of Spring.

As I first enter the churchyard, through the small wooden gate that so many different versions of me over the years has passed through, the sound of the road dies away and is replaced by the soft song of a blackbird, hopping along the path in front of me. As I crouch to admire the tree's blanketing cover of crocuses, a robin watches me from the branches, small beady eye daring me to try to get closer to him.

I think about the birds beginning their nests, as I walk the transition from crocuses to primroses to snowdrops, the occasional lesser celandine just starting to poke its head in too. Most of the graves hold cut flowers, but some have beds of living daffodils planted over them, bowing gracefully in the light chill breeze.

While I'm not sure how I feel about religion, I know how I feel about science, and to me the understanding of how these plants death and life and the death and life of the humans around them all influence each other in nutrient cycles to keep new life going, is almost reassuring. The cyclical nature of the seasons and life in this way comforts me in it's simplistic success: it gives death a reason, maybe. I read an article a few weeks ago about renewable ways for your body to return to nature after you die, one of which included using your ashes to plant and grow a tree. I would like that, I think. To give something back.

As I round the corner by the crumbling wall of the church tower, down rows of planted beds of flowers - hyacinth, bell hyacinth, row upon row more daffodils - and my blackbird friend hops behind me, I note the lack of one thing - insects. Perhaps it is too early in the year, the frost still biting too sharp, but I miss them. The lazy butterflies of summer moving gently from flower to flower, first sighting of  a Brimstone and then the Orange Tips and Whites and Blues. But butterfly species are really suffering, at the moment, with a 76% decline of the UK's resident and migrant butterflies in abundance or occurrence over the last four decades ( Butterfly Conservation UK). It makes me sad to think we might run the risk of losing even some of their beauty, so in addition to the huge buddleia bush that flowers decadently at the back of my garden every year, I'm going to try to introduce more butterfly-friendly species into my garden this year, including Ox-Eye Daisies, Dahlia, and Marigolds, all of which will also help support bees, my personal favourite insect, despite the fact I'm allergic to them. I'm also going to try to get involved with the Garden Butterfly survey also run by Butterfly Conservation UK, to do my bit towards their conservation. It's easy, free, and encourages you to sit in the garden just enjoying the life there for a while! For more information follow the link: http://www.gardenbutterflysurvey.org

I would also encourage all of you to go and spent approx. 15 minutes in your local churchyard, like I did, not only to admire the beautiful life that has a chance to flourish in its sheltered habitat but also, as I did, to find peace.
 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Country Roads (Take Me Home)

I am not, and I don't think I ever will be, a 'city girl'. I was brought up in Hertfordshire which, as I found when I first arrived at university, is apparently a county seen as 'basically London innit?' No. For the most part, no, it is not. My Hertfordshire has very little to do with London, or any other city for that matter. My Hertfordshire is a small town with a street of shops and a street of restaurants, a wide town park, and beyond it fields on fields of crops, spattered here and there with tiny villages of increasingly ridiculous names (my favourite is 'Loudwater', because it truly belongs to a Tolkien novel). It's home to narrow country lanes and wide open spaces and the occasional forest. Not well known (9/10 people assume that I said 'Herefordshire' when they ask where I come from), nor very large, and certainly not a 'city' place, it has put deep roots in me that long to be surrounded by skies and grass, not buildings. ...

Species Guide: Your Blogger

As a newbie blogger, I find the idea of any of you reading my (hopefully interesting) future ramblings without any context of who I am pretty strange, so to start, here's a simple, non-eloquent, possibly slightly awkward sounding introduction of your friendly naturalist, conservationist, and first class nature addict: Annabel. Physical characteristics:  long brown hair, good length for being thoroughly tangled by the wind when any considerable amount of time is spent outside. Has been known to contain leaves, mud and/or dried grass, much to disappointment of peers. clothes often (always) comprised of those which can be made muddy at any moment, frequently already muddy not in fact normally covered in meerkats, as above photo illustrates, however if it were an option, I wouldn't be wholly against it. as a general rule, smiling, regardless of weather :) Habitat: Small countryside town in Hertfordshire, England. Most often found extremely stressed and hence hiding ...

The Epic Ballad of Springtime

It begins with the whispering of a wind which speaks of warmth and Winter's ending. The soft sprinkling of dew on grass that isn't frozen to tiny ice castles. It begins with a sun whose rays are nourishing, slanting through trees whose leaves are buds of green, waiting to burst forward.  It begins with blossom on a cherry tree, the lining of a street with radiant blooms and the slow hum of pollinating insects; the unhurried waltz of a bumblebee whose legs are stained with pollen. Listen. The insects sing of a Spring awakening as the slim, delicate form of an Orange-Tip Butterfly settles on a newly budded wild mustard plant somewhere by your toes.  'I want to do to you what Spring does to cherry trees': you read the creased words by Neruda and look up from the book as a blossom falls beside you, its petals a tiny perfection of pink, winking the sun towards you with all the hope of new beginnings. Feel.  It spreads from the cherry trees to the woodland, where...