A series of surprises

I set off with the plan of doing yoga under some trees. Instead of stopping by the trees, I walked on. I knew there were many hares around here, and the hope of seeing them drew me onward.

Indeed, I flushed out a young one after about forty minutes of walking.

As I went down the track, a 4x4 went past. It stopped at the top of the hill and I saw a man walking around with a black labrador and a furled flag. Odd, I thought. He was sending the dog into the hedges.

It turned out that his birds had escaped. It further turns out that as the pheasants have an open enclosure, they always escape. As they are not trapped. And, thus, the man said that many times during the day he comes along with the dog, and the flag (which, strangely, when snapped out, sounds like a gun) to keep the birds (pheasants) together.

Ah, I said, so you're a pheasant shepherd?

Gamekeeper, he said, looking at me oddly.

I realised my humour wasn't working. I also realised that he was a bit deaf. Perhaps from the repeated report of shotguns and rifles. And flags.

I said I was sorry to bother him, then he said he was sorry to have disturbed my walk. Then, for some reason, I came out with the whole thing about planning to do yoga and walking on and I'd just end up walking back the same way.

He was looking at me even more oddly. The yoga? The deafness?

Then he asked where I was parked and gave me directions to get back to my car without retracing my steps.

I told him I'd never known there was a footpath there and he told me that they don't advertise it, because otherwise they get walkers.

He also told me there were lots of hares - and I saw two more along the way. Also two or three buzzards, flushed from their perches above me.

I would never have found the route without his directions and it led right past this....

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I was thrilled to meet this oak (guided by hares and buzzards... and a gamekeeper. I sat by it to have my snack.

Here, somehow, a centre. How wandering brings me to wondering.

I thought of how similar the words "soil" and "soul" are. They are not, I think, connected as human and humus are, in their origins. But this was key from the tree.

What would you say to me?

Maybe the way the world is demands that parts of you die.

Such as?

Whatever you can get by without. And consider which absences would be openings. There is a grace in saying: look, I am not ashamed to have to let this die. I honour it; I respect it; but I can no longer sustain it.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW?

How did we humans go wrong?

By looking for answers from above, not below. By looking for answers made from ideas, not earth. By not realising that what you can touch, now, and what touches you, now, is the most important thing.

I left the tree to continue back to my car. The view looking back down to the tree...

The view looking up the hill...

And just above the horizon, I saw three kites playing. Two play-fighting, the third wheeling around them. As I watched, they all three flew over. I turned my face to the sky and spread my wings, wheeling in circles beneath them, as they wheeled above me; looking up at them as they looked down at me; one then another hanging in the air above my head.

When my neck felt sore, I looked ahead and started walking, moments later, I turned, and all three, somehow, had disappeared. How could they have flown away far enough across this vast sky to be invisible?

But now, as I write, I think of the tree saying that the answers don't come from looking up, and yet I felt as blessed by the kites as by the tree.

The kites, of course, were looking down.