Pigeons of the patient mind swirl over roofs of the post office and a Wetherspoon’s named after Wilfred Owen, the Oswestry-born poet. All the birds have been shaken by this recent brood of storms, which deepen the answering violence of the oceans. Through the physics of vulnerability, all the molecules of bird and wind rush in the same direction, casting hollow bones through the forward motion of primary feathers into the aerodynamics of trust.
The trees are shaken too. An old beech, with all its grand architecture and generations of carved graffiti like runic script, was downed in Cae Glas Park. Out in the fields up Penylan Lane, jackdaws settle in an oak. In its dark hollow is an imprisoned King Lear, who raged against the storm, daring it to “crack its cheeks” and send the “oak-cleaving thunderbolt”. It’s quiet now. Rain returns, clouds wrap the skyline, and the crazy old oaks, instead of raging in their own heads, have withdrawn into themselves. “No,” Lear says, “I will be the pattern of all patience. I will say nothing.”
These days around the winter solstice are not saying much. A leaf across the water of a ditch that chunters into a culvert under the lane is floating towards an elegant strangeness. The waters, like the winds, travel to some fixed tension between the swirling of birds and the longing of trees, the solstice moment that is both light and dark, air and water, above ground and below. This darkest day and its lightening is a leaf carried through subterranean ways: leaking into cellars, flushing down drains and flooding springs.
The one that surfaces in St Oswald’s Well is breaking out of jail. Its trickle, escaping under iron bars, seeps through storm debris then vanishes. It searches for a different future from the myth of how the spring was created when Oswald’s arm – dismembered after the battle with King Penda, the last pagan king – was dropped by a “great bird”. Such stories wind through centuries of solstices, the twists of unspoken moments between chaos that belong to liverworts in the well, fungal rot in trees, trackless movements of birds in the air, Lear’s pattern of all patience.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
