Blog
Mother earth tilts to kiss the face of brother sun.
Saturday 4th April 2026
Mike Mullins
Early April and its Maundy Thursday, a warm sun is setting in the east above the London skyline. The northern face of mother earth tilts to kiss the face of brother sun. A toddler’s cries of playful joy carry across gardens mingling with the song of robin and blackcap. I sit atop the steps of our victorian flat leading down into our little garden and survey the scene around me.
The wisteria I planted over twenty years ago now clings 30 foot high and 40 wide to the wall of our flat and our neighbours. Its buds bare of purple flowers save one branch close up against a warm London brick wall. I grow excited anticipating the summer smell of wisteria blossom lingering around our kitchen door. While the wisteria lags behind in the race to greet spring its young sister, an apple tree we planted just two years ago, is already beleaved.
Libby our black and white cat now a wise old sixteen years lies on the steps sunbathing. Her thick black fur lapping up the suns heat. She hobbles, crippled by arthritic pain in her rear legs, up the steps and into the kitchen for a quick cat snack between sunbathes.
Dear friend Libby she’s been here all her cat life and this garden and our neighbours and the wild alley that grows beyond is her cat kingdom. She knows it in ways we can only guess. Homage to Libby and her cat wisdom and all she’s taught us.
As I lean into nature over the seasons I find myself trying to live on the margins of things. Moving from either / or to both / and. Finding my own synthesis not some inherited path. Trying to live from gratitude and presence. Trying to move from consuming ideas to embodying them. From theory to lived experience. Direct awareness and daily practice. Reducing external and internal noise and staying with stillness, contentment. I’ve stopped listening to, or reading the news which had become a daily addiction. Suddenly the beauty of the everyday has grabbed me. I’m finding a softening perspective, gratitude for the present moment, seeing with increasing with warmth rather than analysis. From figuring it out to living it in with a faltering attempt at humility, presence and awareness.
The sun on the brick wall of our flat is warm to the touch and golden to the eye. Nature’s colours this time of year are still pastel muted before the full blast of fresh colour in late spring, summer. What was spring on earth like when the first flowering plants opened just 140 million years ago? Suddenly spring bathed mother earth in a garland of colour. Was that truly Eden? If the 4.6 billion year life of the earth were a 24 hour clock, flowers would have appeared very late in the day at 11.16pm 44 minutes to midnight. We just six seconds before midnight at 11.59:54 pm.
Around eighty percent of green plants alive today, from oak trees to grass, are flowering plants. 130 million years ago, flowering plants were still scarce. Most plants reproduced with spores, found today on ferns, or with seeds and cones, found today on pine trees.
Meanwhile back in south London a lone bumblebee navigates skillfully through the bare branches of the wisteria above me. Bees and pollinators are rare this time of year. Emerging only on warm days to hunt out flowers and their nectar.
A blue tit, robin and black cap all sing across the gardens to each other and Libby and I let out a great sigh and relax. Lime trees along the alley at the back of our garden are still bare and so is a huge oak that sits on the edge of Tooting common towering over our gardens. No leaves yet but … not long now. Not long now … I’m coming in all my great glory he seems to be saying… just you wait. Whilst next to him an old horse chestnut has pipped him at the post. Its leaves budbursting in a glorious light green. Below in our garden forget me nots, alkanet, dandelion and fleabane have all flowered in their blue and yellow glory.
This morning through my open window I heard the dawn chorus at 5am nearing its peak. Robins blackbirds and thrushes all so energised and active. Everything in this world is now pairing, building or growing.
Tonight was the night the Galilean Druid prepared for sacrifice put love, truth and service first before status and the easy way and gave the great “mandatum” – love one another.
The earth, the solar system, the mystery of our cosmos, today seem girded by that same irrepressible love and joy. Try to crush it, repress it, drive it out and it just reappears somewhere else singing. Nothing in the heights or in the depths or in the long ages can separate us from this. Fecund spring and the growing tidal wave of light and warmth after equinox just one of its many joy filled manifestations.
A beautiful clear blue sky domes above Libby and I. And, as if in sympathy for the pain, horror and the grief that tomorrow holds, the contrails of two passenger jets cross silently somewhere over Chelsea.
As evening wanes a single blackbird sitting in the bare branches of a lime tree turns his face to the west and sings the sun to bed as he dips slowly beneath the London horizon. “Good night dear brother sun … thank you for returning” she seems to sing. A wren, despite its diminutive size ,the king of birds, then joins in and Libby and I get a birdsong duet... an avian sing off. A great calm descends on us both…. we drop down into ourselves relaxed, content.