Colours of the Day.....

Yellow gorse, daffodils and cloud dappled sky - suitable for runners

      It was a bit of a lean week last week. Three days of thick fog meant it never came properly daylight so that I'd to have lights on in the house, all day. With visibility down to 30 metres I couldn't even see across the field so felt pretty much marooned in my little cottage that peered out into grey nothingness. Mind you, encroaching cataracts don't help either. It was all very depressing.  Not that I know what depression is though someone said I'd certainly recognize it if I had it. So far as I'm concerned it's the state you get into when you can't run.  

       On the opposite side of the coin, when the sun

Flowering currant brightening my garden...

comes out to highlight all the colours of the day my sense of well-being can border on euphoria, as it did for a little while at the beginning of last week, before the days of doom and gloom.  Spring was everywhere, hawthorn hedges bursting into leaf, blackthorn and wood anemones forming a white haze, flowering currant red against the vivid blue sky, splashes of yellow from daffodils, gorse, forsythia and a myriad celandines worshipping the sun beneath waving catkins. Ducks dabbled, spindly legged lambs were being born even as we ran past whilst back in the village a happy thrush sang his morning matins from the topmost branch of the tallest tree.

      

Forsythia at Low Common....

  And I got to singing too last week. I recall flinging the bedclothes back and springing out of bed one
morning singing Land of Hope and Glory. It's not often I do that. Especially if there's anyone around!  But it isn't just me.  Spring invokes this marvellous, uplifting and life-giving phenomena in the whole of creation, birds, beasts, flowers and trees. As a runner flowing through this rich landscape I'm acutely aware of the pageant that unfolds all around me, from the flowers around my feet to the skylark's notes showering from above.
      

Blackthorn by the Wharfe....

 
Somewhere on my wild travels, and I hope someone will tell me where, I recall seeing a plaque tacked to a boulder and inscribed with words from Psalm 150: "Let everything that has breath praise the Lord".  Surrounded by such beauty in the flush of Spring I hear Earth's Amens in a thousand different voices, mingling with my own as I run in ceaseless wonder through all the marvels of His wonderful creation...