Hum for your life

Hello friends. At last I have written to you. I missed writing to you. I am not going to explain why my writing stopped again. I think I have explained before. Enough of explanation. I’d rather enjoy connecting again, get on with the present and let the past go.

My story this week is

Hum for your life.

Rucksack at my feet, I pause on my walk and choose a large flat-topped boulder for my coffee table; except I have brought ginger tea.

I stare at the vines trundling down slope; there’s not a leaf in sight. The landscape is stripy and tinged pink from the play of soft morning light on the red earth. The entire view facing the hilltops and the forest, is, utterly still; except it’s buzzing with life, I know because I can hear songs all around.

Maybe it isn’t just the birds who sing to rejoice in spring. Maybe the soil and the empty vines are humming deep down. Maybe my heart is as well, except it isn’t audible to me.

Mother Earth hears it all though. She knows the world is too full of aggression, so she reminds me, that there’s calm out here at the same time.

It’s been so long since I sat in the wild here to write. I sigh unexpectedly in appreciation. Out on my walks, I have learned that sipping tea means I sit down and actually stay still. It’s a very welcome pause in my life. Gradually the tiny details of nature around me start to pop especially, of course, in the sunshine that disappeared for what felt like weeks. I notice the more delicate details and nature seems more beautiful than ever; like this miniature daffodil*, its stem is no higher than my little finger. It’s tiny and grows wild here. Its entire flower head is smaller than a paperclip, spanning just 4 millimetres across? It appears in spring for just a few days, on this north facing slope, near the top of this wintry hill.

THE FLOWERS OF LATE WINTER AND EARLY SPRING OCCUPY PLACES IN OUR HEARTS WELL OUT OF PROPORTION TO THEIR SIZE’. _Gertrude S. Wister

I sip my tea and the vapour snakes away towards the trees. So I am considering humming on my walk, except I might look a bit mad! You see, I have only just found out that humming is incredibly good for you. It turns out, there is singing and there is humming, and they are vastly different. Humming is more vibrational and it activates the Vagus nerve at the back of your head just above your neck, meaning that humming calms the nervous system, reducing stress and lowering the heart rate. It even increases nitric oxide production (by eight times!) which can help the immune system, making it good for the sinuses too.

I can’t understand why I have never heard the medical profession recommending the innate benefits of humming, like they might walking and exercising. I suppose the pharmaceutical industry is never going to promote the free things in life, so maybe that is why the value of humming is vastly unrecognised. Who would finance a trial test with a control group if there is no money in it!?

What if you started a humming choir! I mean, you’d hardly need any resources. We could meet once a week, outdoors, in the central square. In only 2 to 10 minutes, they say you start to reap the benefit. People meet on the beach in this town to do Chi Kung, at 8am all year round, and it is also, absolutely free, and it benefits community health. In Chinese communities outdoor Tai Chi and Qigong practice at dawn is the norm.

If I got a humming choir together, I’d call it of course ‘The Humming Birds’, except those birds aren’t humming the way we do, they create thermal harmonics with their wings because they beat ridiculously fast while reaching for nectar mid-air.

While pondering the possibilities of being a humming consultant, I finish my tea. I close the thermos. The birds sing; a green woodpecker strikes a few notes, a woodlark slides down the scales and a cloud passes over, throwing me into the shade. A sudden gust of wind barks at me,

‘You see?! We are still closer to winter than summer!’ I pack away my things into the rucksack with a shiver.

Finches cross the sky right above my head, chatting while flying in a squiggly line. They’re singing,

‘Pippit, pipit, pipit!’ or in other words,

‘Thank goodness for spring!’.

‘It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.’_Charles Dickens

Taken in February, before the farmer ploughed through. I was trying to photograph the birds at dawn but I found stars instead.

~ ~ ~ ~ Meanwhile, on Sub Stack this week: ~ ~ ~ ~

Susie mirrors my thoughts exactly…

Writing has felt like an unnecessary luxury, picking up my camera, taking photographs a guilty pleasure. There is a constant whispering in the wind, ‘how can you smile when everything is wrong, when sorrow is painted across every headline?’

And here is her whole story, straight from the shelf..

excuse me while I pull on my wellies!

And inspiration from Emily:

‘There is a magic in this world. But it is not the magic of wizards and wands, of spells and sorcery.

It is wild and powerful. Without it there would be no stories, no art or music. We would not dance or sing or make things.

It is a magic created in the space where pencil lines transform into art, where air vibrates into music, where movement becomes dance, where words gather into stories’.

This is from Emily’s shelves…

From the wild place

And from Kendal,

who asks existencial questions in a conversation, not dissimilar to Winnie the Pooh talking with a tree in an ecology lesson.

Of course.

‘What would it be like, to be so steady a thing? To let go of comparison, to feel no inadequacy or self-judgement ….. What would it be like to have entirely non-human awareness, to exist free of ego and existential dread?’

Here is her whole story..

There, Among the Pines

And Michela in Scotland feels the weight of the world too,

I ponder why I can still photograph when art and words resist. It is an act of witnessing; it calms my mind. While the others require openness to begin, the camera only asks me to look. Abstraction not accumulation. Sometimes that is all we have energy for.

This is her latest piece from her library...

To Witness, Not to Form

And from Laura Pashby,

‘The cool touch of fog on my face soothes me — surrendering to it is the closest thing I know to prayer’.

Here is the whole piece

spring fog in the New York Times...

* from the narcissus family