Fallen angel

Another walk. It's becoming obsessive. I wanted to visit Kairos, but the road was closed so my plans changed. Nor was I at my kingfisher place. Though I did go here: no sign of kingfishers!!

That feather should have warned me. The swan was up in the tree just above. Someone had mentioned the swan a few days ago, but, shockingly, I had seen the feathers the last two times I walked this way - stretching back a month - and I hadn't seen the swan. The man thinks it crashed into the tree in bad light. Maybe. In fact, I can't think how else a swan could have got up there except by their own wing power.

I had hoped to see badgers and hares, but I did not. Nor bats. This was the same walk as when I saw the bats.

I sat with an oak and asked questions. The tree said, it's just THIS. So I let the world in.

And, as it happens, isn't that the start of the Goethean method? Here's that man Bortoft again:

In the essay “Significant Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase,” Goethe refers to a favorable comment which had been made on his work by Dr. Heinroth, professor of psychiatry at Leipzig. Heinroth said that Goethe's approach was unique in that his thinking works objectively. Goethe comments that: Here he means that my thinking is not separate from objects: that the elements of the object, the perceptions of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it; that my perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception.There is an epistemological reversal in Goethe's objective thinking which is the key to his phenomenological science of nature. In this case the organizing idea in cognition comes from the phenomenon itself, instead of from the self-assertive thinking of the investigating scientist. It is not imposed on nature but received from nature. The organizing idea in cognition is no longer an idea which is external to the phenomenon and which frameworks it, but is now the intrinsic organizing principle of the phenomenon itself which appears as idea when it is active in the mind. Goethe called this “higher nature within nature.” It does not appear to the senses, but is discovered within the sensory. It appears to the sensory imagination, when this is developed into an organ of perception, but not to the intellectual mind which tries to go behind the sensory. The organizing principle of the phenomenon itself, which is its intrinsic necessity, comes into expression in the activity of thinking when this consists in trying to think the phenomenon concretely. What is experienced is not a representation of the organizing principle, a copy of it “in the mind,” but the organizing principle itself acting in thinking. Referring back to what was said in chapter 2 about the organizing idea as “acting organizing,” we see that here it is the acting of the intrinsic necessity of the phenomenon which produces the idea in thinking, as it is the acting of this necessity in outer nature which produces the phenomenon revealed to the senses.

[T]he researcher, in directing attention exclusively to the phenomenon, is in fact surrendering to the phenomenon, making a space for it to appear as itself. This provides the condition for the reversal of will to happen, from active to receptive will, whereupon it is the organizing principle (which is the necessity) of the phenomenon itself which can come to expression in the researcher's thinking. This is the condition for the remarkable coalescence of the researcher with the phenomenon, which is objective thinking. When the will becomes receptive, then consciousness becomes participative. It is when the will is assertive that the scientist is separated thereby from the phenomenon, and consciousness becomes onlooker consciousness. Participative consciousness means conscious participation in the phenomenon. Goethean scientists do not project their thoughts onto nature, but offer their thinking to nature so that nature can think in them and the phenomenon disclose itself as idea. In this way it is the being of the phenomenon itself which appears as idea. It is not a question of a correspondence between an idea produced by the mind and the phenomenon in nature—which would be the way that our modern epistemological dualism would try to understand it. On the contrary, it is an ontological participation of thinking in the phenomenon, so that the phenomenon can dwell in thinking. It is the phenomenon itself which appears as idea, just as, in a different way, it is the phenomenon which appears to the senses.