Warm afternoon, sunny, air temperature about 10C, little or no wind. Sitting outdoors looking at pine trees and listening to aeroplanes which are louder than usual as they are taking off over London today (the wind being from the east).
A church clock strikes four. I sigh contentedly in this spring-like moment. Earlier I was feeling fatigued and pessimistic - but no longer. The calm, the sudden change to warm weather, the sounds of birds, the scene, the sight of a reddish beetle about three centimetres long crawling on my sleeve - all these, and more, change my mood for the better. The world is coming alive - me also.
I am sitting near to a small circular hut built of brick and tiles - it always reminds me of the miniature castle-like house that Carl Jung got built by a lake in Switzerland*. He said it was visited by ghosts of soldiers from another age. He was not frightened of things supernatural. I feel no such influences here - or anywhere. To me the world of nature is supernatural enough - let alone the world of mind, which includes all else, or brings it into existence (if you can believe that).
And yes, if what I'm writing is true (a word I now feel free to use again, despite modernism) if all this is true there is no place for boredom - only risk and marvel at the vulnerability of everything to 'the unknown', the mind.
People keep passing here, many with dogs, a bird keeps singing (is it a blue tit?), and a man pushes a bicycle along my horizon... Another man follows him - he is speaking by phone to someone far away. That miracle is suddenly commonplace.
And now the sun is obscured by a distant tree trunk and I am suddenly cold, in shadow. And, believe it or not, I can hear the rattle of a woodpecker drilling into some other tree trunk, even in February!
It's now four twenty-seven - I decide to continue walking.
When I reached the station the sun had gone down and that brief spring was over. The air became cold, even freezing, as heat radiated into the cloudless sky.
*You can see a photograph of the house, at Bollingen, and read of Carl Jung's supernatural experiences there, in C G Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1963 (There have been several other editions by various publishers since then), Chapter viii 'The Tower'.
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