A beautiful spring equinox

20th March 2014

    I left for Coldrum Longbarrow at 2.15am and the silence was conspicuous. The street lamps in the village are switched off at around midnight now, so Robins have no light to sing by. There was a little light cloud, but  Máni's face looked down through the haze. Into Oxen Hoath, the perfume of the Balsam Poplars came to me in the breeze, and a vixen gave a strangled cry in the darkness over the Bourne way. Even in the woods all was eerily silent; only my footfall and the head torch beam enlivened the senses. But at Wrotham Heath, the sound of the motorways carried across, and there were two lorries at the service station as I crossed the A20. On the footpath which follows the M20 east, two great overturned Beech trees were blocking my way. With some clambering and climbing, and searching for a route with my lamp, I pushed my way through the maze of branches and emerged the other side slightly dishevelled. Then under the M20 and across a field of rape. Up high, a Skylark sang in the emerging light. On to Ryarsh Wood, where the dawn chorus seemed to suddenly spring into life, and finally, alone at Coldrum, I sat against a sarsen stone and poured a cup of tea and ate some soup for breakfast and waited in the half-light.
    There was a mist in the valley below. Máni was in the southern sky looking east expectantly, and Venus sparkled above the vague horizon. Ribbons, which were tied to the branches of the tree next to me as tokens, fluttered in the rising wind. The light gained intensity, then suddenly, there she was: Sól, just glancing; peeping over the mist. And then slowly, irrevocably whole, red and fierce, and Máni bathed in her light and I drank her health with a tot of mead.
    I left the Primrose encrusted burial mound along a different route back, to avoid the scramble through the fallen Beeches. I took the western path by the ancient Trottiscliffe Church and the lanes south to Wrotham Heath, back onto the Weald Way, to make my way wearily home. This was a special morning, a perfect morning. And now a time to dream.