On Nature

Nature is beautiful, but it is without sentiment.  When I walk my dog, Duke, I can marvel at how the light is filtered through the trees, how the fields of grass look like a shimmering sea ahead of me and then watch a fox chase down a rabbit. I don’t bear witness to the inevitable, but I can make an educated guess as to the outcome.

It’s all beautiful and it’s all awful at the same time. Perhaps that, above all else, is what makes it all so beautiful to experience. 

Sometimes I think of all the terrible things that people do to one another, and how it’s all governed by a positive intention, the need for love, for companionship, for recognition. The only solution is be compassionate to all living things and accept that you will still suffer. Your ecstasy will be in fleeting moments like stars in a black, endless sky. It will be all the more profound for it’s brevity because an unending loop of joy would be it’s own hell. 

The sun is shining even as it wanes, and it’s at times like this that I love England. Not as a nation, but as a place, a state of being although there’s beauty everywhere if you know how to attune yourself to it. My dog is appreciating it all on an entirely different level than I am, and he’s nowhere near as elegaic about such things as I am.  He’s not worried about anything, he’s fed, he’s loved and he’s my reason to go out and be alone. He doesn’t interrupt my contemplation of the world, he’s a guide and a motive to go out into the quiet places and to think. 

That’s my church out there, no prayers but the breeze and the sun falling on my face, the scent of nature and the irrepressible wild energy that it gives me. It’s feminine in nature, all that wildness and sometimes it hums in my bones like something electric. My thoughts out there have a different flavour and timbre to them, I seldom come home empty of inspiration and I am driven to create something, anything, to capture something of what I experience out there.