Nicola Pitchford

Oh, I’m sorry not to have seen you! I had so much fun.

GOAT either way

Uh ok it’s a goat dreaming it’s a dog dreaming of summer.

Woman kneeling on paddleboard with her dog, in life jacket, before her. Blue sea under blue sky.

Dreaming of summer.

😊

🙏🏻

…& a ladybird landed on my hand, wandered about a bit, flew off. I genuinely take it as a visitation.

I’m doing it, I’m wailing. And the creek is tinkling below, birds are singing, bees are buzzing past. We do what we do here in this landscape.

Small purple wildflowers in the grass.

Mornings like this I really feel my mother’s spirit walking alongside me, calling out all the small beauties as she would have done. Want to loose a great wail of grief from my chest, even as I’m grateful.

Now I always hear poet Liz Berry’s children shouting ecstatically TADPOLES! — thanks to The Stubborn Light of Things podcast.

Adding this morning the extraordinary inner-lit blue of the wild larkspur.

The tadpole puddle!

Been regularly running & walking this trail for more than a dozen years, & its small annual cycles give me acute joy. In spring the tadpole puddle, the shady bank where wild larkspur grows, soon that one spot full of wild scarlet columbine…

Checks out.

It really is. 💚

I’ve just finished re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia, & I’d forgotten that in the last one Lewis does a version of his argument in The Problem of Pain that heaven isn’t so much a place or external condition, it’s about the ability & the desire to see what’s already there.

Marin County, just north of SF. A place I’ve fallen in love with in a way I never imagined I could, as an immigrant.

🥰

The western meadowlark is the closest we have to a song thrush here — & this is just about the only spot where I’ve heard it. But I hear it reliably here, all through the spring.

Thirty seconds of this morning’s great loveliness on my favourite hill — with bursts of western meadowlark song.

Having heard on @wfmu.bsky.social the excellent version of Talk Talk’s “Life’s What You Make It” by Graham Lewis (Wire etc), I have unfortunately also realised it’s one of those songs where you can easily make up infinite variations on the lyrics.

Guess what my brain’s going to be doing all day.

Or maybe this is a relative or syndicate associate of the horse from The Godfather, specifying the revenge it wishes to enact on humans.

Screenshot of exchange under the heading “your AI slop bores me”: “you asked for an image.” “Please draw a horse on the telephone.” Primitive drawing shows a horse on the telephone with a speech bubble enclosing the image of a bottle marked “glue.”

Things got a bit dark sorry

☹️ hope you feel better very soon

Oh thank you; you’ve just reminded me to borrow the audiobook from the library. Been meaning to do that for ages.

Awwwwwww

Congratulations. I hope you didn’t feel too keenly the wrenching away. xx

Two purple wildflowers (wild hyacinth or blue dicks) on a green grassy hill under cloudless blue sky.

Cluster of deep blue Pacific hounds-tongue flowers in sun-dappled woodland grass. Each has a neat white circlet near the centre.

Emerald green hill with scattered trees under a flawless blue sky.

What a morning it was for blue. For periwinkle, violet, hyacinth…

I am 100% scurvy-free!

In the foreground, my feet in running shoes resting on a rock. Beyond, a steep grass hillside stretching down to a wooded valley and pale blue water shining in the distance under blue sky and low white morning sun.

Quick second breakfast & #SitClub — carefully avoiding that clump of fresh poison oak at my feet 👀

Shiny green disks of miner’s lettuce with tiny white flowers at their centre, in sun-dappled shade.

Since I left home this morning, an hour & several miles & several hillsides ago, I’ve been looking forward to filling my mouth with the fresh bitterness of winter purslane by the creek. That is what I am now doing.

To be clear, I am a guest here.