super natural happenings

I’m so late again with posting for Blogtober – I am determined to complete the month of blogging though so here I am.

I was at Charleston today for my midweek volunteering session, and I am going to cheat slightly by cross-posting my Substack newsletter as I received some excellent spooky gossip from the Visitor Managers about how the house at Firle was definitely home to some haunting manifestations.

While I wouldn’t exactly call myself a spiritual person, I’m constantly fascinated by nature, and am deeply respectful of all the facets of life on this planet to which we have no access as we don’t have the sensory capacity to make use of it. I watched a pair of Mistle Thrushes fly out of a hawthorn shrub this morning, and remember there were two here last year that hung around in the same area. I’m guessing they’re from Scandinavia, as are the Redwings and Fieldfares, and while I look forward to them returning here each year, I’m always reminding myself that nobody really understands the process of migration, and which part of the bird’s brain or physiology dictates the move to the same place each year, or even how they navigate. Of course there are theories about the Earth’s magnetic field, and polarised light, but we as humans don’t know what that feels like and can’t interpret what it does, so it’s a bit like an elephant trying to understand a mortgage or a bus timetable.

I remember when I kept bees that I used to stand outside the hive and watch the workers come and go, and I found it so humbling to acknowledge that they were experiencing exactly the same conditions as me but in a completely different way. They couldn’t understand my world and I couldn’t understand theirs, yet there we were, standing next to each other. Bees see in UV and polarised light, taste and smell in chemical signals, and hear and feel via sensory hairs. Thousands of individuals live as one organism, with many of their “bodily functions” similar to that of mammals. They utilise a whole set of earthly features and functionality that human beings simply can’t assimilate.

So as we near the time of year where the spirit world is deemed at its closest to the physical world, it’s interesting to ponder that there are so many incredible, mind-blowing, super-natural interactions and activities happening right before our eyes, every minute of every day.