online: 26 june 2013 modified: 25, 26 june 2013 25 june 2013 profusion
of vegetation
... so much has grown in several weeks since i was last at this spot (the Heath Extension)... looking north over playing fields surrounded by tall trees and by undergrowth mostly between one and two metres high... mostly nettle and tall grass and some flowering plants that are taller than people... that's what made me sit here today... the wish to look at this growth and to note it...
...as i write i am conscious of many minute insects already stinging my hands neck and even ankles... some are less than a millimetre across and there seem to be more of them than i remember (so soon after sitting down... and so pervasive)...
...now a seagull (or other gliding bird) sails overhead without wing motion for the length of a playing field... while the nettles and associated tall plants lean north towards the open sky and away from the forest trees behind me...
on Sandy Heath
...sitting down in the still silent forest to note the few names that i know of the many plants growing wild here in the clearings: campion, buttercup, mare's tail, fern, foxglove... and an exceptionally large chestnut with leaves 30 cm long...
...a brief pause... no... not a pause... for this is the most complete and connected thing done in a day otherwise spent in reading some bits of Marcel Proust (the remembrance of things past as C K Scott-Moncrieff translated the title (from the 30th sonnet of William Shakespeare)) and some of George Painter's biography of Proust... and various necessities of health and survival... but sitting here just because the forest gets more interesting and enjoyable the more i experience it...and who can say that of things artificial... unless they aspire to be art of one kind or another...
...at which i change my mind: from 'artifice seen as duller than nature' to 'the two together being more interesting and enjoyable... and perhaps inseparable'...
...three young men with big sticks walk by me in the dusk... and a lone woman walks slowly onto a nearby peninsula with lone trees in the midst of a pond that is covered with algae...
...and now i return... in near darkness...
...yes... i'd forgotten how nice it is to spend a day on little things... without plan... and then to go walking in a forest...
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