Just going out walking today was… my vocabulary fails… It was like I was seeing everything for the first time… and the last time… at the same time. The depth of my felt relation with everything that my path came across… was so much more poignant, deeper. Perhaps I was simply more awake. I was certainly more aware that … I couldn’t take it for granted. None of it. Not one step, one breath, one encounter. The sky. The atmosphere. Every tree or plant, animal or situation.

All of it seemed rare and delicate. Alive, and yet… momentary. The sounds and activities of the animals. The roads and sidewalks mostly empty. A slower pace, time to contact and reflect on all the life I walked with/in. It’s origins and character… it’s ancientness.

From what we know of space, if you make a sphere 50 light years from earth, there will be nothing like the unimaginably profuse symphony of life and living places that our world comprises.

That I live in a time when there are still trees and animals… seems an unimaginable luxury. The more so because the fictions with which we supposed otherwise have been torn; and the chaos that swarms behind them is inchoate yet familiar.