I had a walk in the park this morning. Last night the 'clocks were put forward' by one hour, and thus we 'lose an hour,. unlike when the clocks are 'changed back' in advent of winter where we 'gain an hour'.
As I walked I realized about a quarter of the way that I had been in my head. I had been thinking about things, and what I had planned for later, and then it dawned that here I was walking and was not looking at the day so I then began to.
I first started looking at the Birch trees I was walking by. I love them because of their very off white, and moon-ish trunks with the dark brown ridges that contrast with the creamy hue. I always somehow associate them with the moon for some reason because I imagine them on moonlit nights really full of moonglow on account of their silvery skin. I also love the way their very dark branches hang in sensitive exquisiteness, like a branches waterfall, as they are so delicate, and give me such a good feeling to look at them especially if the branches are hanging in front of some background that accentuates their cascading form.
I carry on walking and see a person in the distance walking, and this observation makes me think of the action of walking, how strange it is, and I feel my muscles in my legs and hips as I walk energetically. How many take walking for granted? I remember when I was a kid and was in hospital for a while, and because of being in bed quite long, I had to be taught how to walk again and it was really hard. Your legs don't do what you want them to do, and it takes lots of help and encouragement and support, but once you do you just do it naturally and don't have to consciously think about it.
Being aware of walking felt great, because it was a very visceral experience feeling all the muscles, and realizing how great it is to walk and exercise.
I past more trees, and some had this flowing pattern flowing up or down the trunk, and it reminded me of when you see a place where a river has been~~maybe even very anciently~~ and you see serpentine flowing traces of the memory of water telling you its past.
I sensed trees on this 'first day of Spring' were all budded and ready to spring, I felt the aliveness in their form and at same time heard lots of excited bird songs as if all the birds knew that Spring had at last come after a very severe winter they have had.
It was quite cold fresh, but this made walking feel good because when you breathed in you felt all this fresh air going into your body, muscles, skin, and it felt exhilarating.
The sky was grey but it wasn't flat grey, there were clouds and the light from the sun was shining through the greys creating really amazing contrasts, and making the surrounding have this stark light changing dynamic light and shade. The puddles from the night rain shone a very intense silvers with reflections of clouds, and as I walked through this wood I heard a remarkably loud sound of a Woodpecker as it drilled some tree I couldn't see. At first I had thought it must be some men somewhere with a power tool, but no, it was a Woodpecker as herald of Spring sounds.
I started remembering a recent interesting part of the TV programme I had happened to catch a couple of nights ago. The presenter was talking about time. About how years ago different places in the UK had different times. There was no set, or standardized time. So you could, for example, travel to a town different from yours and find the time there was not the same as your own!
Especially in the country there was a more sense of following of the movements of the sun and moon seasons. It has to be said, however, that one of the first institutions that acted to control time and space so as to gain more power over people was the Church. They did this by putting clocks on the churches so as to make sure the 'peasants' would adhere to the times of Church services, and other demands.
Full standardization of time though begins proper with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century when, with the growth of the railway system connecting all 'provincial' towns with each other and places with London a so-called 'London Time' was expected to be followed by first the whole of the UK and then the whole world! So now all 'time is synchronized' and 'time is money', and people are tied by time, mechanical time takes over from a more organic sense of time.
It is obvious that this mechanization of time really suited the 'time masters' who herded the 'peasants' off the land and into the cities where they were then having to toil most of the day in factories like cogs in a machine, and/or clock.
I remember my second psychedelic experience with LSD many many moons ago when I was 15 taken with some friends, when we got to be thinking about 'time'. The time was "1:40 am" or "twenty to two", and we all became aware how absurd the clocktime was and all fell about laughing hysterically at the whole clocktime tick tock absurdity, so much so that we wrote on a wall in big letters "IT IS TWENTY TO TWO" and were laughing like you can only laugh when in the midst of a very powerful LSD trip! It was a seriously powerful insight. We were seeing directly through the time prison that all of us modernized citi-zens, or cogs in a timemachine, take as reality. A 'reality' of mechanized mono-time.
As I walked thinking about this, I thought of the painter Salvidor Dali and his sur~real floppy clock. He of course was showing the same insight through his art.
I had a little bag of goodies for the Crows~~just some remains of real good bread, Cheshire cheese which had gone a little mouldy, not too much mouldy as i don't like throwing crap food scraps to wildlife, and a bit of cereal.
These Crows favourite place is this green orchard near where people hangout and therefore they can be assured of getting some nice picks of food. When they know that feast is nearing they all crow--I love that sound, and I love their black feathered body shapes against the green grass as they swoop down where the food is at. They come from the trees, and surround, and I love the sound of their feathers too.
I get this dark thought of that old Billie Holiday song Strange Fruit, about the lynchings of black people in the Deep South and how the racists would hang the black humans in trees,
' Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.'
But now was not anything so awful, and the Crows were delight to see gathering the food, full of the joys of the coming spring~~~
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