Friday 21st February - seize the moment!

 I checked the weather forecast for Friday yesterday. It's been reasonably accurate recently, and was promising (!) rain until about 9am, dry and cloudy until 11am, a brief glimpse of sun and rain again all afternoon. The temperature was set to feel like about 9°C, which by comparison to the last week or so is warm!

We set off promptly at 10am as the skies cleared to visit Nymans Gardens nearby.

Warm it wasn't, but then neither was it as perishing cold as it has been. The gardens ard in that 'not yet spring' state; snowdrops,  bedraggled crocuses, the occasional camellia bloom. And sudden bursts of colour;

I was not expecting these bright oranges and reds from a stand of bamboo as we came round a corner!

It takes quite a bit of imagination to turn this stretch of brown earth and stitcks into the famous long Summer border.

Never fear, it will be an astonishing feast of colour, over 6 feet tall at the vacuum come July.

The gardens were full of young children charging around everywhere, their bright clothes and wellies covered in mud from playing in the play glade, leaping in and out of the puddles and chasing each other up and down the paths.

I watched one small boy travelling along a path, jumping carefully into the centre of each of the four large puddles along the way, and held my breath to see if he would make a final jump into the pond around the fountain... fortunately he stopped...

.....

'Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear'

God's voice when he was talking to Moses on the mountain, and again at Jesus's baptism, sounded like thunder; this line could be describing the kind of prayer where we thunder at God, until our desperation and fury pierces Christ like the spear...

Here's some thunderous piano playing, but with some kind of tenderness within...

I do hope you are enjoying this experiment; I'm finding this to be quite an amazing way of interpreting and understanding the poem.