at rest

There are no insights at a hut that are not brought about by silence and solitude aided by the creatures and plants who live here too.

Woken in the night by a gnawing noise, slowly to recognise the sound of a mouse setting up house in the hut wall, is simply to be aware of a most basic shared need – shelter – and the commonality of that necessity.

And we’re all at it. I should be mending the roof. The wren is flitting to and from her small troglodyte home in the stone dyke, her egg hatched and half the shell laid at our doorstep, the way a cat might leave a rabbit there for approval. The damselflies have just burst from their own homely nymphal skins to flitter from the pond skirts here. The geese are sitting on their thrown-together nests, while the magpies look out from under their thatched roof in the big thickening leafing oak.

The woman with her son and the two dogs all intently peering into the lizards’ stones. She had noticed their habitation last year and returned to reconnect with that spot another time: lizards, dogs, mother, son – at home.

The garden plants too are dwelling, rooting down into our leaf-mould loam, down into that soil that is probably not silent, teeming with microfauna and microflora, cities and nations of co-habiting creatures. Our final home is the one we’re walking on.