online:28 june 2008 modified: 13 may 2008 12 may 2008 creative inaction
...picnic by the Vale of Health pond... wispy cloud... air still very dry after days of east wind from Russia (not the Atlantic)... I've seen no one here this evening and I even feel a little lonely... a bird sings and sings about 20 metres away... the wind ruffles the water in long strips of whiteness (reflecting cloud) against the prevailing dark green (of reflected trees)... and now there are circular wavelets from a point where a duck has dived below the surface...
...four ducks, as one, suddenly rise from the grass into the air and descend onto the water surface and after a second, or less, rise again into the air and fly away... is it one duck, or all of them, who decided when to move... so simultaneously...?
...the gorse flowers have already turned from yellow to brown, after being in bloom for months, perhaps all winter...
...i'm sitting now on a large log which the forest gardener's have placed before an iron fence beyond which is a newly made water garden, a piece of contrived wilderness of rushes in a small pond with log bridge and semi-cleared ground on which grow young birches, nettles, and a pile of cut-down tree-trunks now left as habitats for insects and mushrooms, etc... i suppose i approve... it's a pleasant place to sit... but i wonder how far they will go in turning this wild forest into a garden or a park?... the water garden is fenced off by dead branches (what they call dry fencing - more and more of the heath is being enclosed in this way) to encourage butterflies and other small creatures... but to me the city forest is for people who seek wildness, not cultivation...
...the people who decide these things seem incapable of creative inaction, or of 'doing nothing'... as in zen... as in simply being... without prescribed purpose...
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