Tuesday 19 April 2011

Sensing the Subtle Scent.

I think I’ve hit on the essence of why I so like living in the countryside.

Much of the time it’s pretty much the same as anywhere else. When people and traffic are going up and down the lane, or when a farmer is working his fields, or somebody in the distance has a chainsaw going, the energy of people going about their business isn’t so different than it is in the towns or suburbs. It’s a dense energy, the energy of human endeavour. But when all that stops, when everybody goes home, when the long lulls appear in the occasional bits of traffic flow, that dense energy subsides. Maybe it sinks into the earth or rises to the sky, I wouldn’t know. But what’s left isn’t just an energy vacuum; it isn’t merely silence. What’s left is that subtle but tangible buzz that I referred to in an earlier post, the thing I can only describe as the energy of peace and connectedness. And that doesn’t subside; it touches you with the light caress of a gentle breeze. It’s almost that palpable. Until, that is, a vehicle drives down the lane or somebody fires a shotgun in the distance. And then the dense energy of human endeavour descends again and buries the subtler form beneath its unwholesome obesity.

I’ve taken to wondering what it must have been like before the human animal came onto this earth. Dangerous maybe, but replete with the scent of purity.

Or maybe I’m just being fanciful. Or unduly reclusive.

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