Sudden Awareness

It is April 1, but this is no April Fool stunt.

Earlier today, I received an e-mail from Australia. From someone that I have briefly corresponded with, and that has been kind enough to read my blog on a few occasions.

Perhaps just when I needed it, my new friend sent me a note to say how much she appreciated a poem I had included in a recent blog.

It was written about a year ago now, at about the time when bluebells appear in English woodland, which occurs some time in April/May. At the beginning of summer days, while when the woodland begins to come back to life after a long Winter.

What I have suddenly realized is that the appearance of bluebells in an English woodland is something unique. My correspondent has never seen bluebells in reality, although she has seen pictures of bluebells in an English wood.

In Australia, I hadn’t realized that this thing that I take for granted as the symbol of the start of a new year doesn’t happen everywhere. And certainly not in the Australian bush.

I suppose I have just assumed that this beautiful thing that I look forward to seeing every year is something common to everybody. Perhaps it is, in the sense that there is something about life returning after the Winter, whatever the climate of the country concerned.

It is a reminder that we take so much for granted, and that it is too easy to assume that what we experience ourselves is what everybody will experience, can experience, and does experience.

But of course, this is a cultural fallacy, perhaps an example in a fairly benign way of what in more extreme circumstances has been the cause of so much disharmony in the world, over centuries.

Perhaps it is also a reminder of the potential for the Internet to make us aware of so much more than the small world in which we live out our lives.

Bluebells in an English wood is a very special experience for me, and this year I will certainly ensure that once again I seek out this special moment, when the fragrance of the English bluebell becomes overpoweringly evocative of Spring, and in the woodland that it occurs that subtle moment of new green shoots on ancient trees reminds even the hardest heart of how life is returning to the world after Winter.

Moments of sudden awareness like this are incredibly rare, and this one has struck me all the more powerfully thanks to the existence at this moment in time of the potential to be reminded by strangers that the world is not quite the same for everybody.

Perhaps this year, it will not simply be the bluebells about which I will write, but about that special feeling that is given to the English by the Bluebell, but which I am sure must be experienced in a uniquely individual way by everybody everywhere. In every culture and climate.