I chose a different walk this morning, across the fields and far away from civilisation.
It started out by a village hall which seemed extremely busy with folk, dressed up in colourful robes, smart suits and singing what sounded like Gospel music.
What caught my attention more than anything though was the bouncy castle which was outside the back door, I used to love these as a kid and for a moment I forgot my age, it was only the thought of getting arrested that stopped me taking my footwear off and going for a bounce. 
I wandered off down the path that led into the fields and was met with a magical stillness, no wind, no noise and not much happening accept for 2 Bee’s, 1 butterfly and a pigeon sat on a dead branch of an isolated tree.
These are conditions I am thankful for in the meditating kind of way, you don’t need to focus on reaching a meditating state, it’s all done for you.
I’m not one for following paths so I went off peak, the main path is not easy to see as it’s all extremely overgrown, but you can see it slightly if you focus, as its walked quite often in the winter months, the Summer months it’s not walked as grass, stinging nettles, teasel, giant hogweed etc., grow as high as your head.
I noticed trails off this path where foxes, badgers, deer had pushed the grass down to gain access to the stream, only after following these did I find the stream, and a species of 8ft high grass that I had never seen in the UK before, it was in a circular ring formation about 2 meters wide, with stems 30mm wide and extremely strong.
This is where I noticed a bramble bush which had totally engulfed a small tree over the stream, from inside the bush I could hear a serious amount of birds, I sat down about 30 footsteps away and listened to what sounded like a serious discussion, I could pick out one bird which had the loudest and deepest voice, the more noise the others made (and at a guess I would calculate at least 50) this one bird would squawk louder and they would go quiet temporarily.
I decided to move further away and watch from a distance, after a while 2 magpies flew out of the brambles and landed in the long grass, followed by around 100 starlings which took to the air and started flying in a murmuration.
As I walked back to where I had started out, the pigeon was still sat on the old dead branch, it hadn’t moved, this got me thinking about the Buddha and how he contemplated on spreading his message after coming through his own suffering and finding enlightenment.
I wondered how long he contemplated for, before approaching the first people.
I’d like to say that was the end of my walk, but as I got closer to the building where all these people were, I could hear this chap shouting some kind of preaching to the congregation, I’m not talking like a nice shouting either, it was more like a telling off, and the people (around 30 of them) were dead quiet.
My mind went straight back to the Magpies in that bush!
The pigeon is the star of my Sunday morning walk though!
Still some weeks more of these to go, I’d say (many still red or yet to come out). I usually pick a few bags of these for the freezer to put in my porridge and yoghurt for the next 12 months.
