Luxury of Thought

Yesterday, I attended a reading and talk I have long been anticipating.  David Haskell, a Sewanee biology professor, read from and talked about his experience writing The Forest Unseen, published a few weeks ago.

He shared some thoughts about being still in a natural environment, observing a small place and feeling an expanding consciousness, about the tension of cruelty and beauty in the world under our feet and over our heads.  He spoke about the inventiveness and imagination of the "apes" on this planet and their (our) kinship with all things on the planet.

It's that capacity for imagination that this ape activates with every step, alone, outside.  Every thing I see I feel I am beginning to see for the first time.  I walk down my sidewalk at the end of a long day and am struck dumb by the blue-purple un-spinning of a clematis flower, the first of a new season from an old plant, and I stand and look for a long time as if on a miniature cosmos.  

I wonder, and I feel alive.