“Nature Girl”

“In the movement and rhythms of nature, she found an inexplicable congruence with her own inner being. Sparrows exploding up and outwards as if expelled from a cannon barrel; soughing branches of the Spanish Oak above her, rising, falling, being bent side to side by the push and pull of the winds, their spiky leaves, twice the size of her tiny hands; the stinkiness of the chestnut catkins, the odd little hairy cupules, yellowing in summer, out of which the edible nuts emerged to be taken home to mother; the night-eerie, rich-toned moans of the owls, hidden but heard; the slink of the grasses on the hillside bent by the invisible moving air; the Antarcticas in the sky of cloud, the castles and towers there, the promontories and capes, archipelagoes, and Everests; the way the sky and the clouds played tricks with her mind, inverting, such that she could not tell what was sky was and what, cloud. All these things in nature resonated within her soul like living metaphors, so that she happily spent hours and hours in timeless reverie, lost in the wonder and glory of the natural world, all the time learning something about herself, which she would never be able to explain logically but which made her deeper and richer and brought her more in tune with the flows and rhythms of life.”