Time Rings Blue

I walk across the field to the edge of the wood, and already I can see them…a thin, dusky blue, gathering itself in the distance, low to the ground.

You only find bluebells in the oldest woodland. The ones that have been left.

Folded away and forgotten. Left to grow. To layer. To dream themselves deeper into the earth.

At the threshold, the trees close in around me. Above, the canopy has not quite sealed, and the light falls in fragments, soft, shifting, refracted like something seen through water.

And beneath it, an ocean.

Bluebells, endless, tide upon tide of them.

Their heads bowed, lifting, bowing again,as if the whole wood were breathing.

I step into it, slowly, carefully. The further I go, the less certain the path becomes. It does not feel like walking forward. It feels like sinking. Like moving through something that has been waiting a long, long time. Layer upon layer.

Who planted them, the first ones? Whose hands pressed those small, tender bulbs into the dark? Or did they arrive some other way, carried on older currents, seeded by something that does not keep time as we do?

They have been returning ever since.

Faithful. Unbroken.

And their devotion is written here into the soil.

But there is something else here, too. Folklore tells that they ring, and though we cannot hear them, maybe we feel them instead? And they do call to us, don’t they? these bluebell woods, when the time comes, we are drawn to them, the ancient ringing of the bluebells, where time slips, where magic persists.

And I believe it, standing here, I feel it.

Because the woods feel altered, alive. Sound moves differently. Light acts strangely. I move slowly, carefully.  I am no longer entirely sure how long I have been here.

I stand very still. Breathe them in.

The bluebells move in their slow, tidal way around me. The light shifts. The woods breathe with me. And for a moment I am in another realm entirely…if I were to keep walking, if I were to follow that soft blue current deeper, I might step clean out of this time altogether.

But, carefully, quietly, I turn back. I leave the sacred hush of the bluebell woods.

But even as I cross the threshold of the trees, back into the open field, into the ordinary light, I can feel its pull, somewhere behind me, just out of sight, the tide is still turning.

And part of me

is still left standing there…