I don’t come away easily. I trail all kinds of bits and pieces, sphagnum moss hanging off me and tendrils of ivy. I’m too entangled to be a discrete entity.

 If you tug here, there’s roots and soil attached and it’s a messy mystery. I’m kind of through and in things – not the same as, yet not really distinct either. I’m muddy and moist with flowing streams and ponds. 

Cat lore has been absorbed, I feel sinuously, and I’m jangling with bird song and rustling branches. I’m intimate with hornwort and dragonflies and fluent in Robin. The thrice repeated call of the song thrush pierces through to the emptiness of the void, and lights my soul. Is this in here or am I out there? Pull it apart and I’m not here, merely a facsimile.

Stone, flint and limestone, is dense in my bones and the lush mud of the fens bathes my organs; the very greenness of the grass opens the heart and the wind courses in and through me at will. I contain multitudes, said Whitman, and I feel it too, though perhaps in a different way. 

The river rushes, gurgling and burbling over the rocks, always changing, ever the same, speaking in watery tongues while my blood pulses through the veins. Liquid speaks to liquid in fluid love.

The rooks busy themselves with new nests in the high trees in late February dusk, and I enter their community in spirit.

Dry stone walls and ancient stone barns add to my skeleton; shared ancestry and limestone cliffs hark back to far deeper origins. Not that any of this is about me particularly. It’s just who I am. 

The scree-strewn massif of the mountain on each side of the narrow glacier-gouged valley appears to breathe in and out; approaching nearer and then pulling further away with each breath. Respiration is in deep mountain time, and slows me way down in wonder. Dogen tells us that the blue mountains are constantly walking, and who am I to differ?

Isn’t it kind of odd to think of a human being as something other than including all that which makes up who we are? Without the all, we are merely a notion, a simulacrum, a pale separate identity with only selfie appeal.

It’s lovely to converse with fellow humans, though to me it feels strange if they insist they are truncated human entities. I want to share from our embedded nature, including foxes, ash trees, peat and saltmarsh in the conversation. Let’s not leave our kin out of our story.

Written after hiking in the limestone country of the Yorkshire Dales.