Wild Moment: Philip Hills
Philip Hills shares a lovely description of what happened when he spent 21 minutes in nature to celebrate John Muir Day 2026.
Down a light folded valley in Cornwall, I step on to the underlayer of a beech wood called the Reens. I know my log that I now sit on, it is a faithful friend of moss groves, fungi and russeting dried leaves since last autumn and years before.
As I sit my ears become more acute to - not only joyful blackbirds and robins that sounds of April beginnings of spring - a whole symphony of song. As well as the quick drumming of the great spotted woodpecker, lucky they have special muscles to act as a shock absorber, I am delighted to hear a mixture of coal tits, long tailed tits, nuthatches, blackcaps, chiffchaffs and wrens. One wren, so small and yet so near, piercing my ears so loud beyond his small delicate body.
From piercing beech branches with fresh new lemon green leaves threading the cold blue sky, I look down to the misty blues of English bluebells - a different name in Scotland there called wild hyacinth and here called Cornish bluebells - spreading along the visual horizon in foreverness of painterly genius of nature.
Yet the seemingly expanding bowl of visual colour presence does not end there. Looking down across and then nearer to my feet are hundreds of nodding wildwood friends that also come in whiteness like clockwork for a brief period each year. The pungent whorl of deeply cut green narrow gentle leaves and wiry stems entwine with the nearby stout bluebells somehow to perfection. Through their contrasting white fragile nodding, perianth of sepals, I feel the late cold wind of April spring that the gentleness of these ethereal wind anemones survive so well.
Where else could you find so much perfection between the fragility of life and the living giving endurance? I am tranced by the seemingly feelings of tenderness to such beauty of heart and perception.
Here the synchrony of response in time dances between the shadows and light of season like eternity. I am so pulled in by my presence in this fruition of becoming aware through relaxed attention I cannot say more. Silence whispers pass me too.
These ancient wood sinuous renewals evolving give me hope despite the chill. Twenty one minutes seems like one in such magic. I must go and tread a light touch of being away from my friends, forward to another interweaving day.