Freedom in Isolation Journal:

#2 'Deer

through trees'

Hannah Green

17:51 23/03/20

Silver, like pale ghosts. Then when you look closer, dappled, shades of soft brown and grey. I pause whatever nonsense music is on my running playlist (so totally unsuitable for communing with nature) because I literally cannot run up this hill any more, so I stop, hands on knees, mouth thick and tasting of metal and a strange ringing in the absence of music. Cool air into a raw throat, face tangy with sweat now cooled by the woodland shade. Everything hushed, soothed tones of brown, deep greens, with flashes of paler fresh foliage and above the naked branches the sky is blue, bluest I’ve ever seen, no clouds for days not even a airplane trail, nothing but space and slanting sunlight. The wild garlic so lush beneath the trees, thick as a fur coat, everything soft with the smell of it rising up in the evening.

There are small white wood anemones like open-eyed stars against their dark leaves and the rush of bird song - shrill high notes, the piercing intricacies of a blackbird, smaller songs from smaller birds, the throb of wood pigeons, the harsh call of a crow, all mixing and blending so that it becomes impossible to pull one stand out of the mesh of it. It is like coming up for air.

The deer watch me, picking their way through scrub

and saplings on the slope above.

We have our eyes on each other.