Hollow return

In the Reserve, it struck me how the Goddess Oak lives on an edge.

She is stable despite the steep side of the ditch. She is calibrated to asymmetry. There is something quietly profound in that.

Then I sat with Kairos and was thinking about my opacity paper. I wrote about that and then leaned against the tree and realised something that's been there all along.

Going into the hollow places is not about finding an undiscovered truth of the reality of who I am, or discovering some lost treasure. No: it is to be content to inhabit the darkness. It is negative capability.

It meant what it was; it was not a symbol of how I should be empty, nor was it the start of a journey. It was what it was: dark and hollow.

Yet it's not nihilism because I was there - life and thought. It's just I can't expect the world to say 'Yep, that's it!' or 'Here, have this important secret.'

The world is not a symbol for me to interpret. The world is.

At that point, a raptor flew through the trees. Its wings were angled so acutely that it flew sideways to get between closely growing saplings. It perched about 30 yards away. Then, it left. I could not tell the size accurately so I was unsure whether is was a buzzard or a sparrowhawk.

So, what I saw was either a buzzard or a sparrowhawk... But what it was, was not, as it were, the Schrodinger's cat one or other that I would have determined by observing it properly. No, it was one or the other completely irrespective of me... all the impact I had was, maybe, to persuade it not to roost in that space for long.

There's no indeterminacy-as-cleverness, quantum mystique, but specificity without possession. It mattered which bird it was — but not in any sense that is organised around me. My presence registered only as a minor disturbance.