Venturing forth into the great outdoors in early Spring is an ecstatic sensory overload of growth and greenness. Whatever else may unfortunately be going on in the world, this new explosion of Life restores faith; nature’s resilience and cyclical rhythms are balm to the soul. 

Walking along the path that I’m on, I’m present and grounded, alive to the glorious unfolding of this new season. The path stretches out in front of me towards the horizon and into the rising sun. 

I’m eager to experience the coming of Spring in one of my regular haunts: these edgeland marshes on the outskirts of East London; big vistas and wide Thames river estuary, amidst the industrial jumble of breakers’ yards, landfill and recycling sites. 

Yet it is a wild place and supports a surprisingly wide mix of species in its marshy channels, scrubland, reedbeds and foreshore mudflats. The creatures and plants don’t have such a limiting aesthetic view of partly brownfield habitat as we humans tend to have.

Gossamer strands of spider web carried on the breeze, caress my bare arms. Bathed in a symphony of birdsong, blossom petals grace the earth like confetti and everywhere green shoots burst out 

I’ve walked this path through the seasons for many years and this is one of my home places. I know all the bushes and the streams, each clump of wild rose and gnarled hawthorn tree.

I know them winter bare, in Spring blossom as they are now, and festooned with berries later in the year. The brambles are resuming fresh green growth and I am still eating last summer’s blackberries gratefully gathered here and frozen last year.

My sense of time is grounded in the earth’s seasons. I am intimate with flowering times and the changing migrant bird songs, which are my clock. Now in Spring there are the songs of Reed warblers, Whitethroat, Blackcap and Chiff chaff, all warblers newly arrived back from warmer southern climes, and providing a wonderful soundscape. 

The May blossom is appearing although it’s barely mid April, an earlier flowering trend I notice over the years. I know the ditches, ponds and streams here and the water levels through the years, with the  summers becoming ever drier and the winters ever wetter, as climate chaos accelerates. 

As Dylan said, You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

 Perhaps aided by the strong sense of being fully present now in this plenitude, I’m also aware that in a way, I’m simultaneously travelling in and through time. It feels that past and future meet here in the overwhelming fullness of the present. 

Stepping forward along this long straight path, I sense I’m walking into the future, into where sky kisses land at the horizon, visible far across the marshes; towards that which hasn’t yet come into being. The horizon is shimmering in the Spring sunshine, beckoning, with whatever will be revealed.

At the same time, I tread this stony path, firmly crunching underfoot and I feel a sense of walking through the past, underneath; this land below with all it has experienced over millennia and still holds through time; and this includes the out of view, the within, as well as the underground. 

In this way, space and time are revealed as never having been sundered in the richness of the presence of the present.

I know this is all getting to sound rather too wordy, but what I’m trying to point to, is just the simple experience of presence and its associated feelings, but perhaps viewed differently, without the baggage of conventional concepts and interpretations.

I often return to the words of Chinese Buddhists from antiquity for their clarity and freshness, and especially how their views are imbued with the daoist inseparability of humans from nature. Huineng, the illiterate Sixth Patriarch of Zen gave this advice on how to free the mind, many centuries ago, 

 If you get lost on the outside, you are attached to forms. If you get lost on the inside, you are attached to emptiness. To be free of forms amid forms and free of emptiness amid emptiness, this is when you don’t get lost on the inside or on the outside

Huineng