Meadowland: the private life of an English field

you rise at dawn in May you can savour the world before the pandemonium din of the Industrial Revolution and 24/7 shopping.

To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.

Almost all the things I love are to do with grass. Geese, sheep, cows, horses. Even dogs eat grass.

They killed farming a year or so later. And they killed it by putting cabs on tractors. No longer was the farmer alive to the elements, or even close to the earth.

I have decided to sleep under the stars... Tonight heaven is my roof, and the hedges my walls... The field folds me in soft wings.

And nothing in nature is wasted. The bodies of the dead meadow ants will go to nourish the soil of the meadow. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Flesh to flesh.

High summer and one can hear the universe; so overwhelming is e accumulated sound of growing in the meadow and in hedges, of pollen being released, of particles moving in the heat, that all the minute motions together create a continuous him: the sound of summer.