Ascending
Dew and cloud and distant dark river, Selsley Common, 02/04/26
Wake at four.
Full moon is up in a clear sky, filtered by leafless branches. A photo taken at 4.24. The time our firstborn arrived. It reminds me of our children every time I see it - often, but almost always in the afternoon.
I briefly contemplate a solo river dip but opt instead for the Common, and I am up there by five, too dark to make out the paths, and wearing my most porous shoes, dew immediately soaking my feet. The distant Severn is dark too - I’d hoped to see her lit silver by the moon. The ground, wet with condensation, is all cloud kisses of a kind, and river benedictions, promises of returning.
No humans on this wide upland. Occasional scufflings and squealings - probably birds, startled by my footsteps - but I can’t see. The air cold, the blackness studded with our clumsy human light - streetlights below and satellites above; and beyond, the greater lights - stars everywhere, and holding audience, the stark, full circle of the moon.
I am up there an hour.
What else can I do but stand still, silently, and open my hands to it all?
Over some minutes I watch a bank of cloud surge towards, and then cover over the moon - she ascends slowly into it, blurs, and disappears, seemingly caught up in a vessel suspended water, merging and pulsing; the cloud carries her a while and she seems to roll towards the edge of it. And then, as she reaches the end of the cloud, her light intensifies and she is revealed full again…
…and after nearly an hour of silence, and the long night,
a single skylark begins to sing.
A signal has been given, and suddenly the whole common wakes,
a swelling crescendo of skylark dawn-songs - it might be dozens but it sounds like thousands, and I am somewhere inside the circle of them, surrounded as they grow louder and louder, singing the new day in. I have no idea whether the false sunrise of the reappearing moon in her wild brightness triggers the larks, or if this is their singing time, but I am enveloped, enraptured by them. I briefly think about singing with them, but all I do is be quiet and let the thousand voices pour into and through my body, a smile growing on me.
They’ll be up, and up, and up, before long - barely visible until you get your eye in, audible long before that, their ascending singing tumbling over the dogwalkers and the Cotswold Way pilgrims. I stay a while. The faintest strip of sunrise is rising over the Painswick valley as I head back across the still-dark crest of the Common.
To think, I might have slept.
