Space

A few spaces had opened up to him today. The first of these yielded as he roamed around the fields surrounding the cottage he was holidaying in. He did not go far, he was not aiming for any particular goal, he was simply wandering about and taking in the aspect. Yet, the sense of the huge volume surrounding and encapsulating him combined with the lack of any plan or urgency freed him, or rather made him feel freer than he normally did.

Perhaps because of his walk in the fields his second space provided a more potent experience. He had climbed up the hill behind the cottage, through a small deciduous wood that was in its final summer glory and had emerged above the tree line near a pub perched on the edge of a punchbowl. Sat outside, with his pint of local beer filled with the scent of local flowers, he watched as the sun set. It dropped straight whilst it melted into the surrounding sky, tainting the blue and gradually colouring it red, as if spilt onto blotting paper. As it neared its end and was more than half obscured by the horizon, the tiny clouds nearby revealed a silvery edge and a dark interior. It occurred to him that they were clustered around this nucleus as organelles in a cell, and he felt like a scientist observing life from afar. The world was briefly mysterious to him, as a new phenomenon to be understood.

Later, in the early part of the night, he came to the last of his spaces. He took another stroll near his cottage, this time over to the bridge that crossed the canal. The moon was large and throwing light across the fields. He watched his shadow elongate and distort as it crawled up the side of the bridge whilst he clambered onto the lock gates. There he stood motionless, listening. He had seen a bat the night before and this is what he had come to investigate. Soon he heard the high squeak and, as his eyes accommodated, he saw them: three small mammals flying, turning sharp in the air, diving, swooping and harvesting the clumsy moths all about. They were enjoying being bats. And as he watched he knew he was an obstacle in their space, he was a part of their environment that needed to be navigated and avoided. Crucially he was not an actor, he was part of their world just as the deciduous wood and steep hill had been earlier for him. This was perhaps the most liberating part of the vacation.