Wildness and Wet....

This morning four intrepid souls from Crick Road House adventured their way to Port Meadow to see the sunrise. Kate, Nick, Jay, and I woke up at 5:30, stumbled our way to the kitchen for coffee, and set out in the dark to see the sun rise over the fields, leaving the others blissfully asleep and blissfully unaware of the mad adventures they were missing. It was gloriously dripping, muddy, marshy, wild, and - when the sun came out - all glittering. We came home three hours later with soaking feet, covered in mud, flushed, and exuberant.

This poem, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, could not more perfectly describe this morning (especially the last stanza):

Inversnaid

THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,

Are the groins of the braes that the brook tread through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.