Foragings: A Journal of Woodland Contemplation

by William Searle

From the Wayfarer Archive 2013

1^st Oct

Every morning I humbly and quietly re-introduce myself to the earth. Walking the sloping lane towards the sun kindling at the ragged heart of the wood, beneath an onward rolling blue sky, I breathe deeply enough to feel at peace with what I am and where I am in this very moment.

2^nd Oct

The contribution I make to Being is perfectly minimal, and what I gain is also perfectly minimal. I am simply here. Nothing added, nothing taken away. Or so I would like to think. Bearing no gifts other than this vaguely definable presence that I am, the earth, through grass-blade, falling autumn leaf, cloud and sky and flicking air, remembers me. Or so I would like to think.

4^th Oct

This local beam of earth transfigured into an autumn wood is a numinous realization of itself through me, and every other thing in that wood.

The holy, the ineffable, the nameless hush of light that is the supporting spine of all things earthly, grubby and rough-edged, - not God, no appellations, - is registered, first of all, on the bristling skin, upon the rounded globe of a single goose bump swelling in the coaxing breeze, upon the tongue-tip, the lip and watery eye and voluptuous lung, - those bone-encased, twin homes of blood and oxygen. Continuity between THAT what cannot be named and THIS what lends itself to be named is safeguarded by this body that I am.

6^th Oct

I love the trees, the shades and depths of light the trees create and conjure, the careless litter of crab apples, the steaming warmth of bogged-down bracken piles in the cool mists of, what seems like, a premature morning. I love the shades of water, the whole music of hapless gushing and lapping, the touch of coarse sand beneath the arched foot that curves like an ear pressed down upon secret, enormous melodies. I love it all.

I am happiest when I love the earth and not afraid to use such an overblown verb. A butterfly upon a dying flower is as awesome as the mountain that no butterfly may every alight upon.

Amidst all this passion, the golden maxim surfaces: love of life depends upon the premise of accepting things as they are. One cannot love life if one cannot accept things as they are. Passion must be worked out, without it shrinking into calculation.

9^th Oct

Autumn. There’s a lilting breeze to that word, a sinking and drifting cadence. Deer walk as quietly as leaves fall, their feet tapping away into the distance. Soft brilliance of the sun upon strong green leaves, the last bundle of them, as everywhere and elsewhere the red and orange showers, the blushed carmines and yellow crimsons.

From the darkness, with its golden glow of a spread hand, my heart, - or an organ near to my heart - is roused into equanimity. Trying to hold onto this buoyancy of calm only nudges it further away. Let it come, let it go, my will obedient to that ebb and flow.

Walked on passed elm and holly and squat oaks tangled amidst oaks, branches washed by Autumn rain, the dead leaves of my being go to the ground to be restored whilst I am more exposed to myself, to something other. I see the deer more clearly because of my breakdown into bareness, straight passed the congestion of my own self into deer and the world sharing itself between us.

Photo by Juliane Liebermann

10^th Oct

As Wallace Stevens puts it: ‘to exist in the world and yet outside any conceptions of it.’ Evasion, then, on my part, of concepts is supported by the conspiracy of things. Is it not imperative in keeping with the above strategy to be eccentric to explanations, yet central, integral to participation?

11^th Oct

Sky surrounding me, my feet embracing the mud, my lungs replete with cold autumn air, the sweetness of it making my mind laugh, - how can I not be content? Pain, yes, comes my way in no short measure but dissolves into this blessed solution of body-world rapport.

There is liberation to be found in knowing that here is the only place I can ever be.

Fresh russet sunrise, ragged cloud-rims gilt mercury and boldly embossed with watery lines. Two tacking and jolting herons flew high above and over the road at home in the wayward, boisterous infinity that tussles everywhere. And a rainbow in the slight film of passing rain! Sense of grounded and elated calm; the whole day remaining to muse upon this hour.

One more heron - dark spectre in darker dusk, - floated above the wood. Veering away she spied me then glided toward the exploded oak that was jostling in the wind.

12^th Oct

Morning breezes, between-branch cast, leaf-wide and long as the alleyway that stretched between trunks replenished by the winds blustering down from dispersed canopies above, caressed my bare arms as I held them out in front and traipsed down the warm lane through four, no, five horses tearing stubbed grass.

 Exhilarating to see the sky, monumental blue, at the same time that acorns and raindrops and crab-apples thudded in off-time with each step. Ethereal sounds. Walking on solid air. Clear clean notes of a wren in a hideaway.

A mere hour’s walk, the same round I repeat so often and find, not dullness, in the short distance and time a length and breadth of experience I have rarely encountered in other domains of the holy, the visceral hush, the barking silence. Such expansion is such autumnal minutiae.

What is this delight or joy I feel is mere existence, and the sadness or frustrated confusion that comes when I am not, by some interruption, permitted to be simply as I am, as I be. In what ways am I broken? Towards what vision shall I re-make myself, and in re-making myself what will happen to the world I have come to know? A discrete effervescence trembles within each thing eager to be sipped by lips eager to purse the shape of silence.

Photo by quentin

13^th Oct

Without this one leaf, I am not.

At what point shall the restoration of myself, and thus the renewal of the sacred undergo? It begins closer than the eye, than one’s breath. Move a tittle of thought and I miss it by aeons.

 There seems to be no end to how closely I can come into contact with things. This point of re-birth is non-other than the space in which all things from star to grass-blade tip tipsy in the frozen pulse of dew, are one and intensely different. I feel that I am nearing, through simply paying attention beyond myself into the collapsing labyrinth of this autumn wood, the source, the boundless circle of light.

14^th Oct

The thinning of autumn. The incipient fullness of spirit.