Ancient and young

The rain comes and goes. The world is chill and silver.

Around my feet a forest grows: tiny trees, gnarled and stunted by the endless wind. They cluster in hollows, growing almost shoulder-high in the barest hint of shelter, but on the open slopes they are sparse and hunched, their branches streaming to leeward like windblown hair. Those branches twist and curl like clenched fingers, like loops of calligraphy, stark against the brightness of the sea.

They feel old to me, but not like the ancient rock above me; their oldness is of a kinder sort. They are old with years of struggling and surviving, of suffering and fighting and holding on. And there might not be many of those years, before they finally give way to the wind, but they tell a better tale of oldness than the rock ever can.

Flowers of a subtle sort

Close to, the rock is mottled with colour. In the cracks are little puffs of grassy stuff. Spindly stalks bear dry flower-heads: pink thrift gone to seed. In smaller cracks, copper-green lichen grows like lace, its intricate fronds like something made, not grown.

In the grass below me are flowers of a subtle sort: purple tufts of thistles, raggy clouds of meadowsweet and, crouched at the roots of the grass, tiny tapestry-flowers of tormentil. The grass itself is laden with flower-heads of many shapes: rough rabbit-paws and velvet tails and fragile forms of trees. You can’t see any of these right away: it takes some lowering of the eyes and some slowing of the stride, and some humbling of the heart, to see the fine stitching that makes up the world.