Toddler in the jungle

I grew up toddling through my very own jungle all of my own discovery.

I was discovering wild – literally ‘wild’ – vegetation and flora. It was chock full of strange animals. The feelings and the inner conversations I shared with this natural jungle form an important part of my earliest memories of my own communion with this planet I had been born onto.

This was the world of hay meadows, pastures filled with flowers as vulnerable, as delicate and as small in scale as I myself.

This was a world of deep peaceful mid-England summer countryside over which blue skies glowed. A world in whose numberless green corners and turns I and only I had the regal pleasure of placing my feet, and I placed my sandalled feet wheresoever I chose.

I wondered at the brilliance of the coloured insects, their astonishing sudden turns of speed. Crickets and grasshoppers of many species would observe my observation with their honeycomb eyes, and vanish in a leap.

I fell in love with the daytime moths and the way they spread their wings and revealed hidden bright coloured patternings. I chased big butterflies to see them better when they landed, even though I knew most outperformed my own best turns of speed.

Lacewings, caterpillers, daddy-longlegs, millipedes, woodlice families, red soldier beetles on cow parsley, worms, silverfish, spiders fat, and spiders pinhead red, ants and of course fearsome horseflies feasting on cowpats.

These were my study, my entertainment and the close friends I loved to spend time with.

The very few aeroplanes that passed unhuriedly overhead themselves sounded like lazy booming stag beetles, because they were all four-engine propeller driven.

The flowering mixed grasses were my fascination. Here were tall treelike beings as far my eyes could see, and I was a giant striding among them with my bare legs.

Today I still thrill to the core of my boybeing at the slightest glimpse of the graceful complex completeness of grasses displaying their waving flower panickles to the pollen-dispersing winds.

Ah, my heart breaks for those bygone days when I had the certainty of ecstatic release as I walked into the luscious rich chewy smelliness of those waiting pastures of green.

The spaces in these warm unintimidating open fields were filled with conversation. Buzzes, barks, clicks, rustles, and the cawing of rooks so high up in the majestic elm tree canopy towering by the gated entrance to the pasture.

To this chatter I added my own. All these countless beings kept coming and going in front of my eyes. I was the only human being in sight.

I think I was asking everyone what they were doing, where they were going. Above all, my mind was wanting them to explain to me, to inform me, to give up the secrets to me of who they were, of what it was like to inhabit their tiny bodies so different to mine.

I have never ceased to ask these sacred private questions of these public tiny animals.

Intensive use of pesticides have all but completely done away with the clouds of insects that the spreading picnic cloth would send scattering up and away.

I have never ceased to ask these sacred questions.

The hedgerows, so wondrously populated by the high-rise dwellers of the field edge, have become fence posts connected by galvanised barbed wire

Wheat and barley stretches out of sight and their blue indigo cornflowers and the flutter-poppies in their red frocks have been weedkiller-ed, banned, abolished, banished.

And still I do not cease to question them.

I held those exquisite magic conversations. I spoke directly to the green beings. I chatted with the six and with the eight-legged kind. I fancied I could interpret their thoughts from the attitude of their antennae. I listened and learned from the crowing of the rooks.

They answered to my innocence. They imparted their unconscious wisdoms. Every word we exchanged together found a new place of holiness in my heart.

Though I know the answers now, yet I never cease to put the question.

There is no question.

Answer is before.

There is only the answer.

See the sense of season.

Sleep naked of reason.

~ Love is present EveryNow