Change

“The Times They Are a changing” a song by Bob Dylan released in 1964. In 1965 Dylan left the stage of the Newport festival where he was booed while playing electric guitar. The was a lot written in the music press about him being untrue to his roots in folk music when he incorporated electrical guitar, a major sin. (I should note there is an alternative explanation for the crowd reaction, It happened after the Emcee announced that there was only time for three songs from Dylan-Take your pick).

Our debate on the weather is similar, in that we feel cheated when we don’t have our summers when they should be, or at least when we want them.

If we listen to our inner self and some of our media commentators, it should be sunshine from April to the end of August. Trees should have a golden rustic hue in September, at least the leaves should.

Of course, we also complain about this aspect of natures beauty being on the ground and posing some danger, particularly when it rains.

Snow is welcome on Christmas day and right through to March. That is until it happens and interrupts our travel.  The cheek of snow to close our airports, cause our buses to stop or go slow. In fact, fall in areas where it has fallen for centuries before man arrived.

We fail to appreciate the beauty of our stark bare trees and bushes. The shapes, varied and many, revealed in winter, hidden all summer behind leaves and other foliage. Hidden in summer, nature plays a trick on us.                                                                                                           

Winter gives us the opportunity to admire nature at its barest. As we turn from summer to Autumn, to winter through the transitional month of September, we see nature turn its leaves slowly from green to a golden rustic red, as it sheds its clothes.                                                                                               

A slow striptease, promising us as much as our imagination can facilitate.

Trees are like natures bare bodies, with many curves and shapes, both sensual and ugly, often at the same time.

A bare tree against a frosty sky with its orange hue as a background to this barren shape is one of nature’s gifts to the admiring and receptive mind.

Of course, we need to slow down, give nature quality time and take in all it has to offer.

Often we have this naked growth covered with snow, dripping water against the greyness, only presented before or just after a presentation of this crystallised gift from Mother Nature.

It is interesting to note that in this week of our annual Indian summer, we are told that ‘The Salmon’ has reappeared in the Tolka River (Dublin, Ireland) after being missing for one hundred years.

Presumably, stating the obvious, if it has returned, it was there previously.

In a sense, this shows us how independent Mother Nature can be and no matter what we expect or our commentator's demand, nature will do as nature does.

Could we learn from this?