The birds are flitting from branch to branch in the trees, but they have a selfish look about them. They aren’t building nests, nor feeding young, nor even taking much interest in each other. Just making sure they get enough to eat.

‘John, we aren’t meant to decide the day of our own death. It would never come. There’d always be something to hang on for, if we were in good health.’

‘You told me one of the ladies here decided to die.’

‘She had a vision of heaven. You met her, remember? She’d been to heaven, she said. And her husband and her daughter were there. Not that she saw them. She knew they’d be there, somewhere. And she wanted to be with them.’

‘What about you? You don’t believe that, do you?’

‘No. I don’t know. Not really.’

We sit watching the life in the garden. I let my thoughts quieten down, and all my attention goes to the scene before me. I watch without interpreting now, seeing what’s going on, and letting whatever meaning it might have reveal itself. The spider’s web has gone. Its builder must have been eaten, and the parasitoid wasps flown off to find new hosts for the next generation.

I feel calm, and my mind is still. I’m part of the garden. There’s life here, visible above the earth, and deep within it, hidden from view. There are organisms I can’t see, without which the entire web of life would fail. And some are coming into being, while others depart. Life is permanent, but individual lives are not. The flow of life runs through each being, each organism, plant or animal. It seems different in each case, but it isn’t. The superficial differences between a bacterium and a bee matter less than what they share, and what each also gives to the other. And to the whole. And when they have given, and received, life passes on, and leaves them, and what’s left is taken back into the earth, and forms something new.

Life stays longer in some places than in others. The trees are older than anyone in the care home. On their bark are insects that will not survive the winter. Short, busy lives and long, slow lives. All together, here on this sphere of earth and water and air.

Humans have already changed everything they can to suit themselves. This garden is a human creation. It’s also natural. Humans gave it shape, but life flows through it, and makes it a whole thing.

We are life. But we are not all life. We are part of it.

And Winifred, for all her seeming youth and beauty, is not.

John

What on earth has happened here?