Entering

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realise I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts that have entered my head.

So 800 years ago the monk Yoshida Kenko noted in his book Essays in Idleness.
Falling short of demented, I nevertheless share Kenko's feelings. While I've been trying for years to do less and to be more - there's something very odd in the recording of states of being. Or if you like states and places of non-doing.

Although everything else is foraging for a living in the wood, including the trees in the last days of a prolonged summer almost putting on a little extra weight for winter, I'm just sitting here with my back to an old oak.

I'm looking out over flat farmland, due east at the edge of the woods. Here and there an isolated red painted wooden barn settled in a clump of sheltering trees and a big sky above all this flatness.

It's been raining off and on, drizzle mostly, not too wetting, so I'm sitting on my inside-out hat to keep arsebones dry. The great comfort of the woods eases itself into my shoulders. Muscles and bones relax. Behind me are small rustlings and silences. In the silences every now and then I can hear a leaf fall with a papery rustle catching on twigs in its slow descent. The arc of a rainbow appears in the grey sky slightly south of east, its outer edges of red and violet shimmering a little - a result either of the smirr of rain, or my own vision - I can't tell.

I stare so long at the rainbow which shifts only slightly that my eyes dance with entering colour; the woods have folded me in and I drift off into the shortest of dozes, a step beyond reverie.

With solstice right here, right now, earth turning and sun standing, nights already as long as days, this is not idleness. I'm storing up light and colour, a gathering-in of some of the energy of the sun that I'll need to last through the darker days of winter.