On Time and Cycles.

I went for my now-customary evening walk this evening, along Church Lane as far as the Copper Beech tree this time (it’s a place which holds a fond memory.) It was warm but damp with a heavy cloud cover and a little light rain in the air, conditions which I find ideal for engagement with the musing habit.

I was struck most strongly by the sense of time flowing endlessly, of how countless people have lived and loved and laughed and cried and fought and worked and raised families and, ultimately, died here for at least a thousand years and probably longer. They would have tramped the same lanes and footpaths, seen pretty much the same fields even before the Enclosure Acts, gathered on the same spot where the modern 14^th century church now stands (the current church is the third to occupy the site, there having been an earlier Norman building and a Saxon one before that), and watched the sun set over the same range of hills on the far side of the river valley. And with it came that familiar sense of life’s conveyor belt which runs on and on, seemingly for ever, picking us up for a ride and then pushing us off again a little way along the line.

(At such times I prefer not to ask where it came from, where it’s going, and why it exists at all. The moment is more poignant for being kept simple.)

And then I spent an even simpler ten minutes leaning on a farm gate, watching two tractors ploughing and raking a field a little way in the distance. I’ve always found the ploughing process particularly meaningful, being the manual labour by which we prepare the land for the production of next year’s food.

It’s also part of the rotating colour scheme of rural living, something which people in the cities sadly miss. I remember that field being brown before, and then it turned a pale green as the crops began their own little life, and then the green grew stronger as the plants developed, before turning the gold of ripened wheat and barley ready to sustain us on our journey. There followed a short spell of pale buff after the harvest, and now it’s brown again. No wonder the city dwellers think more of lifestyle than of life.

And so it’s back to the matter of time, in some ways the greatest of tyrants, but one we have no choice but to embrace if our perception of existence is to have any meaning. And what of cycles, I ask? If the seasons and the land and all things which grow in it are designed to go around and around on an ever turning wheel, why should we be any different?

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In loosely connected vein, I might mention that I did the toughest job in the garden today. It was a tough job when I first did it, when I was sixteen years younger, fitter and stronger. It gets tougher with every year that time allows me.