online: 5 january 2016
modified: 5 january 2016
5 january 2016 hill garden peace
...no seeming presence here but that of the moving clouds... and a tall man
and short woman walking beside the ornamental pond towards the south by
south west...
...everything here is damp... or visibly wet... and the air is not
moving... the grass is growing vertically between decaying leaves... two
young men walk by... each with a young woman much shorter than
themselves... and now they'v gone... leaving me alone in this garden of
shrubs and bare trees... none moving more than a few millimetres in the
stillness...
...(at last i have a new handheld after the loss of the last one)...
...and now a tall old man in a cowboy hat is accompanying a much shorter
woman... and now several other couples... one pair embracing as they
walk... and now silence and peace again as two birds fly unhurriedly
towards the sun which has just appeared through the clouds... that no longer seem to be moving...
... theatrical garden is as if closed for the winter... i like to
imagine it peopled by ourselves as actors... who are performing the play
that we perform in all our lives... both here in an imagined outdoor
theatre... and elsewhere on the streets and inside buildings... as if
all life's a play or a movie or even words... as is this story of
imagined life in the actual garden...
...before the garden closes i await the next event... the apparent movement of the sun
behind the horizon of bare trees against sky...
...events almost indiscernible... yet cosmic... as is the whole of reality (except
perhaps for the words themselves)...
...i prepare to walk home as a large
solitary bird flies to the east along the centre line of this
symmetrical garden...
...reading over this text i enjoy the apparent stillness in movement... of this
writing... of trees... of bushes... and of the landscape architecture...
...a woman wearing the uniform of a heath gardener walks across the lawn
to tell me that she is about to lock the gate...
...she and i are the last ones to leave this stage today...
but there are billions of us in other parts of the theatre...
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