To the end of the garden

Leaving behind the comfort of the house, my cosy chair, the soft lights and the warm radiator; putting down my mobile phone, my laptop and with them the internet, that great web of connectivity that traps us and keeps us bound within its sticky strands; I escape to the garden. To the rain washed stones and crumpled grass. The grey skies and the brown earth and the cold.

               I follow the path past freshly worked flower beds and the tree chopped down last year. I spot a lost clothes peg, an ancient tennis ball and a plastic lizard that looks so realistic it makes me jump. I duck under the low branches of a pine tree, maybe as old as me, and as the path fades to nothing I have to crouch to the ground to climb past a bush and down a hidden corridor of ivy and evergreen branches until I reach the end of the garden.

               Here, in what some might consider a secret wasteland, there are broken bricks and crisp packets, piles of unwanted branches and rotten fence posts, and quiet. A sacred silence, a breathing space, an intimate moment. And it’s here that I find what I’m looking for. The pilgrimage is complete. This is no rubbish pile, it is the fuel source. Life is often found in unusual places.

               I gather up the old wood, the twigs, the branches and the fractured trellising and I return to the garden. In a small pit I arrange my fuel, my power source and then I set it alight. Flames dance. Heat and light spill out into the evening air. The damp wood hisses, while pops and cracks echo off the walls of the house. Embers shoot upwards and sideways, energy has been released. Pine wood scents the smoke rising to a clearing sky and a crescent moon.