Yesterday I took a quick evening walk. The sun slipped below the horizon as I stepped onto the old railway embankment where no passenger train has run within my lifetime.
Distant clouds sailed like gold-fringed ships in a fiery sky. Their bright rims reminded me of another yesterday: far-off snow-capped mountains at dusk, white ridges illuminated even after valley dwellers have been plunged into shadow.
So much for yesterday. There is only so much personal past to hang on to.
The year's long evening has begun. There is beauty still, much of it, there to be enjoyed. I'm rushing to recover from surgery so that I may ride out and see the bare rounded hills fringed with red berry-clad hawthorn. The autumn fields roan with chalk and flint in their soil call out. The silent overgrown lanes whisper that they await travellers.
Travelling in high places accustoms one to gaze long to the horizon. A good horse will take care of where to place feet one after another. Mine was the privilege to look at the near valleys and far hills right to the rim of the world. It's a habit not easily suppressed.
The unconscious psyche has been thousands of years in the making. Looking far at the birth of the day or its death, emotionally I am at one with ancestors.
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