I went for a run and then decided I'd rather crawl into the overgrown mini-plantation to see what I could see.
Maybe ten years ago they cut down the old trees and planted hazel, oak, hawthorn and maybe some others. In the Spring, it's loud with birds but is too leafy and brambly to get into. This time of year, I could manage.
I found a lot of empty acorn cups - I guess the acorns are in someone's larder.
Mutant acorns are rejected. Though it looks like something came out of this one.
Hips and haws make a tasty snack.
The seeds are everywhere.
And sometimes, you just have to get rid of what you've consumed...
At last, I found what I was looking for.
Why won't my iPhone focus where I want it to? So annoying. Anyway, wood mouse evidence.
As is this one - same focus issues.
I crawled out and went up to the other copse and saw that the hedges have been cut. Actually, this was done ten days or two weeks ago. It's such a shame as so many hips, haws and sloes are lost to the residents of this land.
I had worried that the drought might have stopped the fruit production - but every fruit and nut producer seems to have gone into overdrive. As the Reserve, I saw an apple tree with more fruit than it could have had leaves.
There was an apple tree in the copse too.
I was following a mammal rack on what I believe to be a very old hedgeline.
And here I found evidence of someone finding acorns distasteful.
When I came upon my veteran oak, I was pleased as at last I could stand up - there is a mini clearing around it and I had been ducking under hawthorns.
The wind had picked up and all around I could here acorns dropping...
So many! But these had all hosted boring insects.
Talking of insects...
An ichneumonid wasp... and...
...the caterpillar of the pale tussock moth... which I hope will not become host to wasp larvae.
The oak seemed to have some large growths on its buttress...
Perhaps some kind of bracket now decomposing? The other fungi I found was rather more attractive.
All this time I was absorbed... just seeking... my mind did wander to my childhood when I used to do the same kind of thing and to playing 'tracking and trailing' with my nephews and niece. But on the whole, I was just looking, smelling, listening, sensing.
I was reminded of a book I'm listening to - Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Here he describes his experience of taking mescaline. He talks of seeing things as they are, rather than distorted by our concepts of them of limited by linguistic terms.
He writes:
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours, the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
I think that is akin to what I was experiencing in the woods. What makes is... special... as an experience... is that I was nit trying to prove anything or find out anything - I was not gathering data... I was just experiencing curiosity in a world of wonders. It's so simple, so easy... just looking at what is there and appreciating it for what it is.
Huxley continues:
If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly world transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up the next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution—then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.
What is so tragic is that we can. We can observe with curiosity and compassion. But we don't know it.
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