A short blog this week. After a much needed break of 4 days away on a retreat, where I was well nurtured and am now feeling deliciously restored by healthy food, lovely people and multiple sessions of pilates, yoga, mediation and various healing sessions. What a blissful treat for which I am very grateful and feeling incredibly lucky. However, I am always pleased to return home to the family and to the familiar sights and sounds that I love from around the farm.

The brief time away has brought me home with renewed eyes and I have since relished the variety and mass of colour that is springing up everywhere, providing a glorious sense of awe and wonder and it has helped to continue my sense of calm that I carried with me from the retreat. The birdsongs of home has also been a delight to return to: skylarks and nightingales are particularly wonderful and the cuckoo has, excitingly, returned for another year. I await, hopeful, for the swifts and swallows to make their return next. We began supplementary feeding turtle doves this week so are hopeful to attract those as well, if we are lucky – how lovely that would be! In fact, the more the merrier, may as many come as the land can host and what fun we can all have enjoying this magical, healing space!

The beautiful warm early spring has been gorgeous on the one hand but concerning on the other. Another year where the crops are likely to fail and all the masses of hedges planted this winter are in desperate need of some rain or the will soon wither and die. This erratic weather is making farming very difficult. Thank goodness I am feeling relaxed enough to cope; worrying about it wouldn’t change it anyway so I will continue to do what I can and hope it will turn out ok. Then I will do some more yoga and breathe deeply until I feel as relaxed as I did last week.