23 May 2025

My mother was full of her own sayings. When a task needed to be accomplished immediately and without fuss, she would say, ‘Onwards and upwards!’

When she had experienced a good day in the company of family and friends or in some extraordinary location by loch or on hill, she would say, ‘It was a day stolen!’ By this she meant, it was a day stolen from heaven.

On a perfect summer’s day, walking in the heat of the sun with the gentle breezes of a West coast wind, she would stand for a moment, enjoying the pleasure of it all and say, ‘You can hear the grass grow.’

This was a blissful experience, a peace which passes all understanding. Of course, you cannot hear the grass grow but you know it is growing. Sharpened sensitivity to the outdoor environment makes it appear possible.

Summer has invited us in to share its secrets and the natural world is alive with gifts to be savoured by all the senses – the campion growing wild by the roadside, the smell of the honey-suckle, fledgling sparrows  playing in the garden, cherries forming on the tree, ducklings on the river, surfers on the sea.

In the celebrated, ‘Song of Songs’, the lover  extends her invitation to the beloved to enjoy the natural environment and all its exuberant vitality:

 ‘Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the fields

and lodge in the villages;

let us go out early in the vineyards

and see whether the vines have budded,

whether the grape blossoms have opened

and the pomegranates are in bloom.

There I will give you my love.’