I feel as if I have fallen into a trap.

A trap where I see a blue scene before me, laid out like a carpet in a forest. The ground is soft underfoot and all about me there is birdsong and the noise of leaves jostled by the wind.

The sun dances among the clouds and I am trapped between the real and the fake. 

The bluebells I am here to see have long been on my mind, I’ve seen photos a plenty online, but it’s through working in gardens where my wandering curiosities first started. Their delicacy and almost ‘Alice in Wonderland’ characteristics have drawn me to their woodland homes. I’m always a bit late to the party when it’s bluebell season and arrive only to find they are again lost for another year. Today, it happened, we took two hours out of our ‘day off’ and headed for Norsey Wood, Essex. A very small and free car park found us unbelievably lucky when someone left and we claimed their parking spot. Even more so lucky that it is bank holiday Monday.

The sun joined us for 30 minutes and laughed while I darted from copse to thicket trying to get the perfect image to capture what this moment meant to me. It was only when I sat down, that I realised my camera was the intruder today. That the feeling of wonder I had couldn’t be captured in one single photo. The bench I sat on was dedicated to a man who the world had lost, it looked out over a vast network of fallen trees, fresh ferns and the springing blues. My eyes picked up movement in the trees, a grey squirrel, perched on a log. Watching me, the intruder. I raised my camera and in a flash it was gone. I cursed myself for missing the shot, but what I really found myself frustrated with is using my lense to capture what my eyes could have done for me. 

It is hard to keep parts of your life offline when you are running social media pages and even more so when current trends dictate how well your sites can do. Bluebells are the joie de vivre right now, as they should be, but sometimes I wish it was me on a bench, camera away, enjoying the moment. The real vs the fake. I, myself, would find it hard to believe that I put these photos of bluebells out into the online world to share my experience rather than some feeble attempt to gain new followers. And yet here we are, talking to you, a blog reader, who may or may not decide to come back based on this one piece of writing. 

Ultimately should I choose to follow the interest of the day, you’ll get a marvellous view of the world seen a million times over and I’ll be another carbon copy blogger who has no real personality of her own.

So, from now on, not taking the picture will be just as important as taking it. To live in the moment I’m in rather than heading to the next one to please the ‘gram’ and asking myself do I like this? With clarity, the trap springs open, so I can watch the squirrels and wait for the sun to come back to me. Camera away. Memories intact.

The bluebells are wonderful.