online: 5 april 2012 modified: 11, 15 march, 5, 6 april 2012 11 march 2012 early spring
cityforest
...a warm and sunny afternoon... no cloud... just haze above the horizon... a field of daffodils and crocuses... and people sitting on the ground... no wind... trees still bare... a large bumble bee is visiting the fallen leaves and bracken...
...an ancient leaning fir tree has snapped about 4 metres above the ground where its upper branches now rest... while the broken trunk still connects the now grounded pine needles to their roots...
...and a small bird sings intermittently somewhere in the surrounding trees... a wood pigeon and a magpie alight on branches a few metres from this seat... beneath the trees a plastic water bottle lies on the fallen bracken and decaying leaves... looking to me as different from these surroundings as might an object left by creatures from another part of the universe... shiny and smooth and cylindrical... among the bent irregular forms of trees and fallen leaves... though as i write two smooth-backed pigeons come pecking something on the ground quite close to the bottle... which they resemble more than they resemble the fallen vegetation...
...i pause to think while watching bare-armed children walking in sunshine with their parents... and i am aware of how much simpler and easier it is to write of these more complex natural things than to think about the cruder design and debris of our so-called civilization...
...but as i write those words i realise that everything is both natural in its origins and unnatural in how we perceive and describe it... not you and i as individuals but as a unity that recently i've been calling by the strange name iwe... ('we are self/other or we are nothing'...as Edwin Schlossberg wrote in a letter to me some years ago)...
...and now, as the sun begins to set, i walk to two randomly selected points upon the heath... and perhaps i will be as surprised as if this were 'another planet'... (which i suppose it is... from everywhere else)...
...the battery charge has fallen to 40% so i may not stop to write again today...
...but now i do stop... at a seat by the Seven Sisters Ponds... where i watch a rat (or a vole or some such animal) moving under fallen vegetation on the opposite bank... across absolutely still water... amazed that such stillness is possible on a windy planet that is rotating and circling and otherwise moving at enormous velocities relative to the sun or moon or other planets or other parts of this one... let alone the stars and galaxies...
...the resident robin is singing continuously in a tree to my left... and some other creature has disturbed the flat surface of the pond... but the wavelets are already subsiding and the reflected image of the trees opposite is gradually becoming still... but now a dog jumps in and then shakes itself dry... while the larger waves it sets up take a minute or two to subside...
...as i walk to the end of the heath i pass a picnic of about 20 people most of whom are sitting on the grass... this early...
later:
...i passed an elderly woman who was slowly kicking a tennis ball along the pavement in the garden suburb... and in doing so she was perhaps breaking a taboo... and reforming a part of the culture!
...and as i re-open the handheld i am reminded of the resolutions that i sent as greetings for the new year:
looking back without regrets
or false hopes of the unknown
may our presence in the new
be a sign and a de-sign
that the future can be changed
and human life can be constructive
...now appearing here in new colours
selected by chance...
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