A Sunset in C Major.

If you want to know peace (and I mean a deep sense of solemn calm, the way that listening to soft, slow rain on a summer day, with all the windows and doors open will) then do this; find your nearest meadow or field, the longer the grass the better, and lie there and listen to the sun go down.

And I do mean listen. On Gibbet Hill you can just about hear the traffic from the road as a lower, quiet thrum, and the A road on the other side of campus is a cool rush at this kind of distance. All that’s left are the birds; blackbirds quarrelling with each other, robins singing call and response, and the harsher muted crackle of a magpie.

Where I lay, I could hear the birds singing in the dell behind Cryfield Cottages. The dell itself is amazing; this steep sided scoop, filled with trees still the fresh green of new leaves, and almost carpeted with bluebells thanks to the cold winter. The baby rabbits grazing on the footpath to Heronbank live here, and their warren shows sign of life; new bedding dragged into the burrows and old pushed out to the bottom of the bank. Were it not for the little trails the kids in the Cottages run through the trees, you’d think you were a million miles away. Out in the fields, the footpath runs along the side of the hill. Newly mowed, the grassy banks either side of it are bursting with thick, juicy stems. Come high summer, they’ll be like the grasses in the hay meadow near my house; tall and pale against the deeper green of mature grass. Now though, they cushion my head in spiky green tussocks, and I stare at a delicately pale azure sky, shielded from the warmer colours of the sunset by the light cloud cover leaving us to the South. The blades point skywards, made longer by my viewpoint down in the grass.

The amazing visual texture offered by all of this is nothing, however, compared to what happens when you close your eyes; let the sounds of the day winding down around you wash over your ears, and enjoy the light sensation of the grass brushing against your neck, the cool ground just chilling your body out… It feels like all of your anxieties just sap out of your body and into the earth. Peace.

Then there’s the amazement something like a simple walk to church can bring. The shortcut over the fields on Sunday yielded yellow fields of Oilseed breaking up the rolling green wheat, and greater treats in the ancient hedgerows by another footpath. Tiny white stitchwort flowers I had never laid eyes on before, flowering oaks, buttercups and daisies all over the place. All in the blazing sunshine.

It feels amazingly rural out here to a city boy like me. I simply can’t get over it.

Further Adventures have happened this last week with future housemates, but I’m so chilled from the meadow that I don’t want to spend ages writing about them.

Have an awesome, God-filled week. Every little thing, every worry, every stress; it'll all be alright.

Ed.