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| The top of the right hand tree. Heavy with leaves. 7th August 2020. |
I'm feeling overwhelmed by the trees I'm following. Initially, it felt fairly simple. These two trees are sycamores. They are immediately outside my front door. All I had to do was look at them, photograph them, post about them. So why overwhelmed?
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| 7th August 2020. |
To some degree we can blame it on the Coronovirus. It is overwhelming - so everything is overwhelming. Even small things. I can smell gas in the cellar and am waiting for someone to find if there is a leak. One thing after another! At one point the bath, the shower and the handbasin in the bathroom were all out of action: broken or leaking. Shielding etc. have made it harder to get things mended. A train is on fire in Scotland. Floods in Scotland have floated cars in a hospital car-park overnight and when the water receded they landed on each other's roofs. I am not in Scotland. It is sunny here in Halifax this morning. But there hasn't been much sun. The skies have been almost constantly over-cast even though it's summer. Then there's Beirut - and all the calm and sensible people who live there somehow coping while I am overwhelmed by trees.
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| Trunks of the right hand sycamore (?) tree. August 7th 2020. Trees can seem so BIG! Their canopies another world. A world we can peer into but hardly touch. |
Last month I took photographs so I could post about them - then didn't. I couldn't stop finding more and more to see in these trees, and more to think about. I was heading the same way in August. I peer through the branches and see what appear to be millions of creatures living there. Ladybirds, lacewings, little black flies. Between them they are a whole universe of beings. Then there's the way the two trees muddle their branches. Which tree is which? And are they even sycamores? Maybe one is some kind of maple? I'm sinking in the shapes of the seeds, the texture of the bark, the colour of the leaves, their possible names in Latin!
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| The winged seeds of sycamore and maples are called 'Samaras'. (I call them 'keys' or 'helicopters'.) |
Are you finding this too? That there are so many big things wrong with the world that even simple things seem difficult? I find I can only do things if I do them in small bites - and then celebrate. Hurray! I just swept the floor! Hurray! I just walked upstairs and back down again! Hurray! I am managing to post daily on my other blog Message in a Milk Bottle. (I really enjoy taking these simple and unconnected pictures.) Hurray! I've just written a Tree Following post for August!
ARE YOU? Click the tree design to find out more.
16 comments:
The layers of news do get overwhelming.
Are you back in lockdown?
I have sorted two piles of books for the thrift shop of our local animal shelter. Hurray! Next, deliver them ...
Yes. You have stated it so clearly. I didn't post for several days because we were really busy and then the overload of news just made me feel swamped with things to think about and try to sort out in my mind to some level of understanding. I'm trying to focus on small things to blog about, gardens and glass and such. And not let those big black things just over my shoulder have any space in my mind. It's not easy.
Yes, my daughter is a therapist and describes us as frozen and just overwhelmed. She suggests this exercise to do every day to record in a journal. It is mindfulness. GLAD technique. One thing you are GLAD about. One thing you LEARNED today. One thing you ACCOMPLISHED today and one thing that DELIGHTED you today.. G.L.A.D. ..Michelle
I like the photo of the tree trunks. They looks so shiny and polished.
For me the corona pandemic has not been overwhelming, it's been a mix of good and bad consequences. But I'm sadly all too familiar with the sense of being so mentally overwhelmed that the brain stops working properly and the mind becomes unreliable due to various bad things that has happened both in my own life and in my family over the years. It can be very scary when you suddenly feel and react in ways that you normally wouldn't. Thankfully, although time doesn't heal all wounds it does perform wonders when it comes to calming down an overheated brain.
It all feels unreal at the moment to be honest, I keep thinking it must be a dream and one day we'll wake up
Your trees are beautiful
All very well put, as usual - and lovely images. I don't find sycamores too overwhelming, even though they always have so much other life piggybacked on to them. But as for other maples, I can never satisfactorily identify the species.
Yes, this is a surreal time - the thing I am slacking on most is the blogging, as I am working so hard from home I seem to have less time to spare, despite not needing to commute.
Caring for hubby doesn't help - five months on from his cancelled (urgent) hip replacement operation...
Sometimes I almost forget about the coronavirus! When will we wake up?
All the best :)
Lucy, I've had the same feelings. I think all the bad news makes me not care about getting little things done. Then I feel worse as "things I need to do" accumulate. So I remind myself: keep moving, one task at a time. That sometimes works ;) Thanks for the discussion, and best wishes!
Hello Everyone. Sorry to take so long before replying to your very welcome comments.
Hello Diana. Yes. Hurray for taking things to the animal shelter thrift shop!
We are not in a complete lockdown but our area does have more restrictions than most of the rest of the country and no-one is allowed to visit anyone whether in their house or their garden. In other parts of the country people can . . . the rules keep changing but the new version elsewhere is that you can meet indoors or outdoors in groups up to six people. (As from Monday 11th September 2020.) We are allowed to meet people from beyond our households in parks so a couple of weeks ago a couple of friends visited briefly from London and we sat far apart on the grass and spoke loudly - weird in a way but so lovely to see them it felt far more natural than not being able to invite a neighbour in for a cup of tea. Not that I'm certain whether I would do that at present because the anti-cancer medication I am on has an immunosuppressant side effect so I'm still being very careful.
How are you?
What kind of restrictions are you having to cope with at present?
Hello Granny Sue. I shall have to pop over to your blog soon and do some catching up. You always have such good things to talk about. But as well as not writing much I've not been reading much either (except for detective novels!). I hope you are more cheered than when you left the comment.
Hello Rambling Woods. Your daughter's prescription is almost one for keeping up with one's blogging. Today I was glad to find toadstools in the grass. Autumn is my favourite time of year and they tell me it is arriving. I have learned that they may be Amanita rubescens (though I am not yet certain that they are because they don't seem to be turning red where they are bruised - perhaps I should go and examine more closely but I'm not sure I should have been where I was when I photographed them!) . . . so maybe yesterday's learning will count - when I came across a Fox Moth caterpillar for the first time.
(Both are in my latest post - https://looseandleafyinhalifax.blogspot.com/2020/09/urban-toadstools-and-pennine-moth.html )
Accomplished . . . I wrote a blog post for the first time in ages and am feeling very pleased about it and hope it has broken the 'block'.
Delighted . . . um . . . not sure how to separate out the 'glad' and the 'delighted'. I suppose 'delighted' comes more as a surprise, a gift. I'm still waiting for that but it's only lunchtime so there are several more hours to go.
Hope you are well.
Hello Erika. Thank you for your wise words. It seems we are in for the long slog with this virus so there is plenty of time for us to learn to live differently and for us to calm down.
Hello Crafty Green Poet. I think, when I wrote this post, I was feeling that too - that maybe we'd wake up one day. A month later that feeling is departing somewhat. Trying not to get into the frame of mind in which one copes by anticipating the inevitable awfulness. It's a bit like that already I admit. A sort of dull drudge. In a way this is reassuring. If one had spent one's life thinking friends and music and 'doing things' is the way to be happy and then found one was perfectly content without them - perhaps that would be even more de-moralising!
Hello Pat at Squirrelbasket. Has your husband had his hip replacement operation yet? If not, I hope he (and you) are coping with the pain and he is not too immobile. Looks as if it will be a long time yet before we 'wake up'! I'm pleased you still have work. Along with Rambling Woods suggestion - that would be an important thing to be glad about. So many jobs are going. (Hope, a month later, you do still have work!)
Hello Hollis. Still trudging on with this celebrating doing every small thing . . . one thing at a time . . . lark. It's like slurping around in treacle. We haven't even had a sunshiny summer despite odd and welcome and memorable bursts of brightness. I'm very glad not to be flooded or burned though. Seeing pictures of the fires in some parts of USA makes me very grateful to be in a temperate climate. I hope they have not been affecting you. (Nor riots or any other dangerous things.) Best wishes.
Thank you Tanza. It's nice to be agreed with!
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