I didn’t write last week, partly because I didn’t have much to report, and partly because this month I’m aiming to walk 21,000 steps a day and I was exhausted. That means I also didn’t have a huge amount of energy to read books, because I couldn’t manage to concentrate on the words.
As I mentioned in the last post, I was going to focus on study of non-books. When walking the required steps for my challenge I’ve spent a lot of time observing things around me.
One of the places I went was a local pond. I walked a lot and watched the way the water fowl interacted. I saw ducklings at different stages of their development. Small ducklings stick close to mother duck, slightly older ducklings want to explore, and adolescent ducklings sleep a lot…
Geese are a little temperamental. If you feed them, they want more food. If you don’t feed them, they hiss at you… If they’re bored they honk at each other and without warning, they might suddenly decide they don’t like their neighbour and chase them away. (Watching geese from a distance is actually quite amusing!)
Swans are much quieter and keep to themselves more. This may in part have been because one was sitting on a nest. In my last visit they were swimming around with 5 cygnets which was really uplifting to watch.
The robins in the trees posed for photos, but the blue tit was very jumpy. Squirrels would run around, pause on a tree until I got my phone camera out, then run to the opposite side of the tree.
It was fun to make up stories about the residents of the pond, having spent a number of hours over a couple of weeks observing them.
So, turns out the discipline of study and the bible did not come very easy to me. I think there are seasons where I can engage with this discipline, but walking 21,000 steps is not the correct season…a
Ah well, next week is a new discipline. Meanwhile, enjoy the picture of the ducklings from the pond!
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