A hare raising experience

It was the day before the heavens opened and misfortune befell me.

It was a day of heat and sunshine and the light shining green through leaves. A day of birdsong and insect sounds. Of a world almost too alive for a human person to appreciate. A world in which strangeness bloomed - in giant fungi, in a tawny owl calling in the middle of the day, in a hare coming to sleep by a woman. Magic and mystery misted at the edge of vision.

I had finished my tour around the Reserve and was heading back when I saw a hare hope through the hedge and away into the fields. The same brown shape haunted a glade and departed.

I went in. Sat on the grass and stilled.

In the heat, sound was subdued and the light flickered between branches.

Rooted in earth, I sat; enclosed by the air, I sat; feeling the water around me, I sat; aware of sun's fire above, I sat.

And the hare came down the path and turned into the glade toward me. Breath held, I couldn't turn. He came toward me and then, just ten or twelve feet away, he lay to sleep.

I could not see; the grass was tall between me and the sleeping hare.

I sat.

And then I stopped believing.

Of course, he had passed me by, gone on his way. I moved and twigs cracked. A midge buzzed toward my face and I moved my arm to bat it away.

There, ten or twelve feet away, the hare roused himself. Sat up. Looked at me with one auburn eye, ears up. I stilled... but the midge... just my smallest movement and the hare turned and ran. Not at full pelt, but he ran, and the spell broke.

You must believe in miracles.

A Father's day hare to go with the Birthday one for my dad.