Wytham Woods

Walking and tree-talking on a bitterly cold day.

These woods are where Oxford biologists studied great tits - research that showed evidence of culture - and where they still study badgers. The badger book is a huge tome and I find it frustrating. Although evolution explains what happens, I don't think it can explain why things happen. I think why things happen is randomness, chance and personal decisions. Look, the finches' beaks are a great example of what happened. But it was purely random that some finches initially had better beaks for certain things and they still had to learn what their beaks were better for. They don't go round making decisions in order to get a better beak. We use evolution like a Just So story. All that zoning down into hormones and bacteria. What's cool about the badgers in these Woods is that they confound all the theories. They just seem to do what they want.

What makes the most difference is that no one except the scientists and cars on the nearby roads disturbs them. No dogs. No hunts. Few members of the public. So there are a lot of them living peacefully.

Anyway.

There are amazing beech trees in the woodland. Some fusing parts together to make weird and wonderful shapes.

One tree had a branch reaching out to the ground and someone had stacked broken limbs against it to make a shelter where I had my coffee.

I had a conversation with a big oak on a slope, looking out across the valley. The message was again that transcendence lies in the immanent. That the stories of earth-beings are themselves, not the stories we tell about them. They simple are all that they are.

And the message was that a person does not take into themselves, own, grasp, that which they focus upon. No, the person spreads out into it all. The person becomes thinner, as it were, and truer. I find this hard to explain. The stories we tell ourselves are sticky molasses to wade through. To be is light as air.

Part of the wood is called the Woods of Hazel. Not because there is hazel, but because it was given to the university by a woman called Hazel. My mother's name.

I would like to return when the leaves are out. To walk for longer. To be, perhaps, a little less cold.

Below the woods, in the city, the parks and roads were flooded.

The badgers were smarter in their choice of domicile than the city folk.