I'm looking at the moving patterns of ripples where the wind disturbs the water surface and the angle of the light causes whiteish reflections to appear, or to subside, as gusts of wind come and go... now the wind is very slight and i can see only small patches of ripple, each composed of hundreds of little waves and i wonder how it is that air, moving over water, gets enough of a grip to cause a wavelet and why the wave shapes are so regular?... And now some ducks swim across the pond and create vee-shaped patterns in their wake.

Each time i come to the Vale of Health i imagine living in one of the houses backing onto the pond. This is one of the only places where waterside houses exist near a pond on the heath... I can see geese sitting still in one of the gardens and i wonder if they are nesting... and there are some ducks sitting still amidst shrubs and reeds on the floating island.

This is utopia.

This evening (after a day of attempts to turn unbounded worries into feasible actions) i am enjoying this familiar process of writing out of doors amidst trees and beside water and beneath sky... two ducks come walking by ... and now one straightens up and flies off and then the other does the same.

Here nothing seems difficult, all that is happening seems spontaneous and in accord with all else.

And now i'm going to put this digital writing pad back in my pocket and return to my desktop computer through which these words can be made visible anywhere, this evening or thereafter.

(these pages are designed to be read with the window set to two-thirds of the screen width)

atlas

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