After over a week here, just sometimes, I notice what I wasn’t noticing before. The background. The texture of winter. And what I couldn’t have noticed before. Repetitions. Rhythms.
I am aware of how my endless filters, thinking, expectation, agendas, intentions, previous experiences, cut me off from simply sensing everything around me. Yet my hope is always to escape those things and be tutored by the land alone.
How hard it is proving to “let the winter be”. To be fully aware of the wetness and wet-darkness of everything. Gloomy, dank winter ponds lying everywhere. Rain darkened trees standing in those cold, black pools. Water lying puddled on the paths. And mosses and lichens, fat with rain on the tree trunks, vivid in green and grey. And, everywhere, mud, yellow mud, brown mud, grey mud. Mixed slurry of soil and rock and water. And the water lying beneath the sward that every footstep squelches into. And the deep, brown stream that moves like a huge smooth snake through the woodland beyond the fence behind the hut. And the rushing streams, running clear over stony beds, by the ancient woodland paths.
And the cold. The crisp, clear, singing chill of the winter air. The coldness is the air. And the air lays the coldness on everything. The cold is so clean, so sharp. My skin can see it, glinting like diamonds to the touch.
And it’s in the crunch of the grass. The frost on the branches. The lattice slabs on the frozen lake. The frozen water pump. The air lays her icy breath where she goes.
And the air is the dampness too. And the air lays the dampness on everything.
And the air is the colours. Shrouding everything in grey. Then lightening everything in diamond light, with whitened blue, with strong cobalt and every shade between. And with the darkness of night.
And this is the place of our dwelling. If indeed we dwell. The land is the rocks and the soil giving shape to every living thing. And the air brings life and colour and warmth and cool and movement to every moment of the life of every living thing. And everything has presence, has being, and mirrors everything else in itself, in a dance that is the whole. And this presencing we once called the gods, long before they grew to become abstract beings of the imagination, and maybe now, it is best just to note their coming to us out of the whole.
And we are in this dance too. In no special way. Just animals drawing life from the land and the air, moving and being in the wide place of the land. But also (not more than, just other than) our awareness has taken a path that is different from the others (but with great loss of other powers). And this gifts us in the unique way that everything arises in our experience.
So, maybe, the twist in the web of nature that is called humanness beckons us to do no more than live humbly, in common neighbourliness with the wild community of beings we live amongst. Yet more than this, to bring, as an offering to the whole, the uncommon gift that our quirk of consciousness has bestowed on us.
Not to master but to serve.
Photo by Fabrice Villard on Unsplash
