Lunch break

I went out, intending just to buy a sandwich in the Orangery (Kew's main restaurant) and got seduced into taking a little walk. It's milder than a couple of days ago, though it drizzled on me pretty steadily; but there were birds singing in the bare trees, and odd wafts of scent from winter-flowering shrubs, and masses of snowdrops are now out. The first Crocus thomasinianus are appearing, too, like crowds of little mauve ghosts in the ragged grass. The air was cool and misty, a mistle thrush made drilling alarm calls at me from the lilac garden, and under the big cedar of Lebanon where I hid for a while from the rain the ground was warm rust-orange with fallen cone scales. It's a beautiful, damp, be-here-now spring day, when one can see the very earliest peepings-forth of the energy of growth, of life recreating itself endlessly, all around. Blessed be; and (since it's Mahashivratri today) om namyo Shivayai...