I’m driving to work on Tuesday morning, a ten mile drive along narrow country roads through lush, rolling Galloway countryside.
The sun is shining, softly.
The earth is still damp from rain, and the hills and the fields are green, so green with this heady mixture of sunshine and rain it is a green you would deem implausible were an artist to paint it.
It is a green that says green hills of Galloway, home.
The hedgerows are teeming.
High with yarrow, orange amber red with the redshank, splashes of white where the oxeye daisies wave and it is all I can do to keep driving past the hedgerows waving and dripping with colour. I long to stop and walk in them, take a photograph from the ground’s eye up, grasses waving, all the colours inter-woven, my favourite point of view.
I turn the last bend in the road and –
Oh but the mist is gently draped on the top of Lotus Hill and there is something about the shape of this hill, so smooth and rounded, so darkly green, so hinting of the highlands with the mist draped over it and the buildings of the farm dotted white at the bottom, and
There is nothing beyond this.
There is nothing to understand, no truths to be learned, no meaning to be swallowed.
There is nothing beyond this, the way the oxeye daisies wave from the hedgerows, the way the green exaggerates its colour and calls you home, the way the mist drapes on Lotus and breaks your heart, as you take that last bend in the road.
I do not have a camera. I cannot take a photograph. But I can write this moment, I will tell you this moment, I will write this moment, this brief ten minutes of knowing.
There is nothing beyond this.
