happiness is

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Happiness is..A wet day on a hill with the volunteers.

debbie in the field

The lovely Debbie enjoying a wet day with the gang. 

I love being out with the volunteers. Even on a day when the heavens open and it rains solidly. I walk across the site in muddy trousers and the rain is lashing down and still I’m happy. Why is that?

I think because this is life. Out here, in the elements, being rained on, with every other living creature. Not separate but part of it, the earth, and the woods and the season.

Life is here, slipping in the mud, using your muscles to chop and haul and climb, laughing with your mates as you hole up in the back of the Land rover for lunch with soup and sandwiches and hot cups of tea passed through the windows to you.

This is life, this doing and being and loving the moment. The thing we all did for millennia before urban life and technology separated us from the world, the moment and each other.

Something in this, something essential in this, feels like the very thing you were put on this earth to do.

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Happiness is…the arrival of swallows.

 

These swallows and sand martins were an unexpected delight on a day of deep murk and fog. Spring felt far away but they were here, freshly arrived from Africa and hawking for flies above the delights of the sewage farm outside of Faversham. Sometimes happiness can be found in the most unlikely of locations.