Sweetness

My trip for today was a visit to the yard where I first kept my horse Jet and where Jabi went on the vibrating thing to ease his arthritis. My reason was that I had promised to take Leanne a tub of peanut butter.

I wanted to walk around the fields to see if I could find an amenable tree. There were many fine horse chestnuts and limes and a very stunning sycamore, but I was taken with the sweet chestnut.

I put my hands on the tree and a strange thing happened... it wasn't words, far from it. It was like my senses shifted. I could hear the birds on either side far into the distance... like you might see birds, some 20 feet away, some 100, some 300 feet away as specks... but I felt as though I were tapping into the air envelope that surrounds the earth... like it spread all around the globe in every direction... which it does... but It were as though I was on the verge of experiencing it. Simultaneously, I felt time cease to be the kind of arrow that it seems to be when you think about it but as if it were instead a deep present or a present eternal. Kairotic, the experience was.

I sat down. It was a shame that a road runs by this place. Even so it was lovely to escape from a lot of what constrains us.

In that post I quoted Hallé with the idea of animals having this freedom through mobility and acquiring autonomy. He says elsewhere that plants, for various reasons, have this almost-immortality and that animals lose that through becoming individual, autonomous selves. It is the collectivism of plants that confers or enables such longevity. But he suggests they are so constrained by having to be with their environment. I think that's true and also untrue. I think there is another freedom in the way they shift time and, as it were, receive space.