Being contrary now and then

 

Usually when I walk or run in the woods that I love close to my home, I am on nature alert and love to spot a lapwing of hear a woodpecker drilling at a tree, rather than pop ear buds in, but every now and then I do just that, if I am deliberately trying to get my mind off something that has been bugging me. Sometimes when my hubby is away and I go for a run on my own, I may use the ear buds for an intervals workout as I run ; Maybe walk the intro, then run the main song and start walking again at the fade out point. That works for me and gives varied interval timings too. I like to be on my own sometimes. I like to be quiet sometimes and sometimes a distraction works for me. It does seem wrong somehow to listen to music when the music of nature is available but now and again I will break with convention and do just the thing that I frown upon in others. My own contrary rules on that day. 

 

 

Blakehurst III - Meandering with Muses 

The sight of somebody walking the countryside

Seems odd when they have music in their ears playing

Maybe one walk in five, I too the country sounds denied

Pretty songs well sung and sweet words of love saying. 

This different beauty helps to think in altered ways

To calm and sooth away the pressures in my life

Bombarded with visions for eyes and ears as music plays

Alone, I’m free to sing along and so melt off all strife. 

 

Ghostly haunting images as ‘She moves through the fair,

The swan in the evening moves over the lake’

Lifting this spirit to a peaceful place with clear thoughts where

Kindness bears aggression away for dear heavens sake. 

I walk on this real world beneath a steep slope pressed

By millions of sheep hooves into slipped hillside steps

‘I didn’t mean to hurt you’, dead John sadly stressed

‘I didn’t mean to make you cry’, in only his, well timed reps. 

 

 

My own voice tremors with each brisk fast walkers stride

My playlist echo’s my life, ‘I can hear the wind change’

‘I can tell when something’s not right’, he and I sing with pride

Leaves fall, a shadow cast by a circling Kite seems strange. 

Climb toward the trig point I pass through a gate and sing

Two unnoticed blackberry gatherer’s turn sharply at the sound

The dog and me equally unembarrassed by that chance thing

A string of racehorses gallop past and this time we turn around. 

 

 

Asked by a jeep-ed gamekeeper to stick to the path, me and dog

Thirty thousand young pheasants have been put out for the shoot

Ear buds placed, notebook and pen in hand, I sit to write by a log

Beauty and violence even here, shown hand in glove and welly boot. 

‘Cry me a river’, Lulled back to my soooo preferred day dreams

Turn back through the woods to come face to awesome face

With a stag, bold as brass, raised to full dignified height it seems

As in life, ‘If it wasn’t for bad, you’d be good’, he holds his space. 

 

The stand off lasts, I face him, he faces me, both still as still could be

He in majesty, dog statued in the moment,  ‘Tremulous and tender’.

Then he is suddenly gone, I am left with lead, bags and whistle to see

Such a fleeting joy for me, the end of my jaunt today thus to render. 

 

These are better days than those when stuck at home deep in work

But for the notice, warning of ‘Forest Operations’, and that word,

‘Obey, all signs’, interrupt my reverie, as I, drenched in pleasure, shirk

Wearing no watch, carrying no phone, into the car, the dog I herd.