Wind whistle

A sound. Music? Ghosts or ghouls? Haunting. Eerie. Unheimlich. I stopped running. Paused. Realised it was the sound of the wind whistling in this pipe.

***

My new strategy for meditation: I listen. You know when you think you've heard something and you pause. Listen. Almost stop breathing. The attention is exhausting. Nothing else is in your mind but the listening.

When I do this, usually, I can get into the calm state. It's exhausting. But there is something it feels like to be listening. To have nothing else in my mind.

***

Eerie.

Last night I dreamed of hares.

Well, I dreamed I had an animal sanctuary.

There was a goose and she had a chick. Not a gosling, a chick. The beak of a songbird, not a goose. Then there were two, then three. They were progressively smaller, scruffier. But so alive. So fast. Perhaps a little like the moorhen chicks.

Then a hare. It became covered in some toxic powder. I think it was my fault. I was implicated. I feared for the hare's eyes. Like rabbits in lab tests, having stuff put in to burn their eyes. I took the hare to a sink and washed her. She clung to me, like my cat Buji. I felt her trust and her distress.

She too had babies. Two. But they were like inside-out gloves. I pushed them the right way round. It was the opposite of skinning a mink. I put them back in their skins and they became baby hares. Leverets. And I said, 'It is such a privilege to help the hare become a hare.'

***

Today, in the field, I saw a hare. He ran. He ran and then he RAN. Like he was delighting in the run. And I feared he'd run to the road. But he stopped. Saw I was not behind him and turned tail to go through a gateway he'd passed, away from the road and into the fields.

***

Music. the larks ahead and, yes, the cawing crows. Heimlich. You bring me back home.