The light fell a certain way this morning.
You know the kind — when it doesn’t land on things so much as slip between them.
Soft and slanted. Not warm, but gentle. Like a silence with weight to it.
I sat beneath the buckthorn tree and didn’t move for a long time. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. I wasn’t planning. Or writing. Or doing.
I was simply being.
Which, I’ve come to realise, is not as simple as it sounds.
There’s something grounding about this tree.
It’s nothing majestic — not towering or ancient or wi se-looking in the way storybooks describe. But it suits me. It's slightly crooked, stubborn in the wind, and full of things living quietly in its cracks. The roots are gnarled and disobedient. The branches don’t match. It drops leaves when it’s not supposed to and blooms when it feels like it.
I understand this tree.
I don’t sit beneath it for wisdom.
I sit because I don’t have to explain myself here.
Because it doesn’t ask me questions I don’t have answers for.
It doesn’t mind that I haven’t written anything worth keeping in weeks.
It doesn’t care that my fur’s gone grey in places.
It doesn’t flinch when I sigh too heavily or stare at nothing for a bit too long.
It lets me be a badger. Full stop.
Sometimes I think the world was built for louder creatures. The ones who stride. Who dazzle. Who fill space without thinking. They are celebrated, encouraged. Given titles and followers and approval.
The rest of us — the quiet ones, the watchers — are often mistaken for being unfinished. Like we're waiting to bloom into something more palatable.
But I have no desire to bloom.
I’d rather root.
I watched a beetle crawl across the bark for twenty-six minutes. It paused, reversed, then turned around and carried on like it had just remembered something important.
I nodded at it. Seemed fair.
Everything feels important under a tree.
Even doing nothing.
There are days when I feel brittle. Worn thin by invisible things — the weight of words unsaid, the small failures that stick, the expectation to contribute. On those days, I sit here and let the wind rearrange me.
Today wasn’t heavy. Just hollow.
A day made of tea and staring.
A day without conversation.
A day the world didn’t need me — and I didn’t need it either.
I don’t know what this post is, really.
A field note. A passing thought. A pawprint left in wet soil.
But if you’ve made it this far, then maybe you needed the stillness too.
We don’t always have to grow.
We don’t always have to produce or progress or prove.
Sometimes, being beneath a tree is enough.
Sometimes, existing quietly is the bravest thing we do.
— Ramson C. Badger
Sitting still | Thinking too much | Home
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