Country diary: sit down and let the wildlife come to you

Welburn, North Yorkshire: You’d be surprised what turns up if you just settle a while in your own back garden

I say it a lot, but don’t take my own advice enough. Experiencing nature is about slowing down – stopping, in fact. The stiller you stay, the more you see. Nature confides when you’re not blundering through it. But that’s only half the story. The rest is attention. It takes mental effort to stand, orient, step and not fall on your face. Backroom brainwork for sure, but it still absorbs neural capacity, and so the best way to see is to sit.

The bench under the kitchen window is as good a place for this as I know. Three metres from the bird feeder, a bed of overgrown lavender and rosemary, a backdrop of grass too scruffy to be called a lawn and a wooded slope that limits the horizon to less than 100 metres. We’re lucky, I know it. In this space, if need be, we can exercise the dog and ourselves. We can feel the sun, listen to the birds, sniff the wind without fearing what the air might contain.

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