18:18 viaduct seat.A summery evening. Everywhere is green, light green... the sun appears to move behind the taller trees that are still leafless... three people, speaking Italian, enthusiastically photograph each other while posing on a fallen tree trunk... one of them nods and smiles at me as they walk away... small birds are chirping in the trees and bushes nearby... a large man (who was running) stops - he looks around... then he turns to me and says 'happily lost'.... five ducks fly directly above me in formation... the sky is mostly pale blue except for a thin layer of fluffy cloud at medium height...

I got up and looked around. Behind where i sat were patches of new nettles already about 20 cm high - and clumps of bluebell leaves. I entered a piece of forest and climbed a stairway of tree roots up a steep slope. At the top I had to squeeze through a holly bush. Short new grass was growing on the ground before the leaves above cut out the light. I meandered between saplings that are growing among older trees... idyllic feeling in slanting sunlight, shining almost horizontally... and suddenly my shadow, a 15 metre silhouette of a human, was visible on the ground.

None of these incidents is of any worldly importance yet i write of each as if it were the essential of existence - which i suppose any and everything is, once anyone pays attention to it. Looking up now amidst bird songs and utterly still trees beneath blue sky over dry earth i think yes this is perfect in its way - perhaps because it's not made with worldly purpose or motive... yet it continues to grow...

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atlas

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