online: 1 june 2006
modified: 31 may, 1 june 2006

31 may 2006 within constructed order


18:42 ...i'm sitting by a pathway between thickly planted trees and shrubs... to my right there are scores of flying insects gleaming in the sunshine between me and the sun... and voices of women from somewhere beyond the bushes to my left... above me is misty blue sky and the new (crescent) moon quite faint - and now it's hidden for a few seconds by a wispy cloudlet moving quickly south east... and the leaves and branches nearby are motionless...

(i'm always amazed that such still air can coexist with winds and storms elsewhere in the atmosphere)...



19:05 ...and now i'm sitting beside a lawn beneath rhododendrons and other shrubs and looking at a wide skyscape of pale misty blue below which are the fluffy remains of vapour trails and a line of elongated cumulus clouds... a crow hops about the lawn on the far side of a long and shallow rectangular pond... a man sits in the sun on a seat by the pond and a woman lies down on another seat...and now the man lies down also...

the whole garden (with its elevated stone walks beneath wooden pergolas and its brick walls and arches in the style of greek or roman architecture, and planted trees, and views) seems to me to be an ever-present outdoor theatre (peopled or not) in which there is always a visible play of nature and artifice, a re-enactment of natural growth and constructed order, an earthly heaven, an ordered wilderness... a transformation of nature into something tamer and safer and more comfortable than freely growing forest but far less diverse and in constant decay, needing gardeners...

...i came to this garden today (after a picnic among freely growing trees and views over many miles) hoping to write something of a different order - a way of resolving or dissolving global problems by transforming our ways of organising ourselves and each other, of acting collectively in new forms, not in hierarchies nor as specialists, but as people of extending perceptions and abilities who are about to transform our inherited organisations into others no longer incapable of resolving the problems that their presence creates...

...and now here, in this ornamental garden, i am watching the people disappear as the sun goes down behind the ... curve of the earth, leaving the garden in shadow and in silence, and i wait for this solitude to end...

...and now a duck appears from nowhere and swims across the pool... it walks towards me across the lawn... then it stops to look about as it walks, turns round ... and two crows appear and walk along the side of the pond... a second duck appears above the trees and descends to join the first duck and now they swim together...

...and when i looked up again the ducks were gone...




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