Project 365 day 200: Summer Colours

It's been gloriously hot and sunny again today, and I wanted to record our landscape in its summer colours. The grass in the orchard is very long at present - P just cut paths through it the last time he mowed, and he's been too busy with the vegetable garden to do a lot of mowing anywhere, so we have more grasses and wildflowers than usual. I've rather liked it, though I guess the fruit may not be so keen. 

This afternoon I knelt down to try some low shots and found the grass alive with the movement and noise of grasshoppers.  I didn't get a close-up view, but they were jumping all around me. Mary Oliver's The Summer Day was the first of her poems I read and is perhaps the best known; this is the second half of the poem, after she has examined the delicate intricacy of the grasshopper, and expresses something of how I try to look at what is around me.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down 
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 
which is what I have been doing all day. 
Tell me, what else should I have done? 
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? 
Tell me, what is it you plan to do 
with your one wild and precious life?

I'm not very good at being idle and blessed: I love it, but am far too afflicted with busyness and to-do lists to feel I can allow myself much time for it. However, I began my Blip journey on New Year's Day by quoting Mary Oliver and the value of paying attention, and although I don't - can't - stroll all day, Blip does encourage me to take twenty minutes to go outside and look. Many months of shielding, and even now our sense that we still need to limit contacts to protect our highly vulnerable daughter, mean that almost all my 200 photos to date have been taken within walking distance of home and the majority in or from the garden and orchard. I'm eager to return in due course  to town and cityscapes, architecture and travel, but these months have shown me how much I can find to observe, record and delight in without leaving home.

I'm grateful to everyone who finds time to look, comment and show appreciation, and to those who invest the time to organise creative challenges. I enjoy your friendliness and interaction, and your many wonderful photos. I wish I could manage to follow and comment more consistently and widely, but very much value the glimpses into other lives, landscapes and perspectives as well as the encouragement to record and share something of my own.