Even weirder

I've said that every time I walk the same route to Kairos, I find some new glorious tree. The Form is Intelligence tree gave me pause, as you've seen, and after visiting Kairos I saw these two.

In case you couldn't make out the birdie...

The treecreeper features in this lovely slideshow, too. The audio was recorded while I sat with Kairos.

So, to the weirdness. With the tree, I sat out of the breeze, listening to the birds and trying to switch off thoughts about football and finances and the future. I remembered sitting here before, seeing the buzzard, seeing the fox. I remembered looking down into the circle made by my arms and being told that I would find what I needed there, but hearing only the urgent barking of a muntjac. I remembered being told that the muntjac had a lesson for me. And that resonated. I see the muntjacs as invasive aliens, as tree-destroying scrub-pigs, as creatures not as elegant as roe deer and not as interesting as boar, as clever as foxes, as world-changing as beavers and so on. In short, I tend to disregard them, dismiss them, devalue them. As I sat with Kairos I understood that they are creatures living in this place, turning plant into protein and poo, generating pathways, inhabiting the land.

I tried to counter, "But no flowers can grow because there are too many muntjacs eating them! They eat the saplings!" And the land said, "In time, this would be alleviated. In the right time. You can't just act or react, there's always an unexpected response. You have to let things happen."

It's the Dao. It's the DAO! We humans always try the short cuts and the immediate gratification, we go against the grain and swim against the tide.

"No, no," the land advises, just let things happen... "

"But," I say, "we don't have TIME!"

And the land says, "It's not about you. Why do you think that things should happen in a time-frame that makes sense to you in one human life, in one decade or year? That is not how it works. Your obsession with time limits is a sign of your failure to step outside the anthropocentric perspective."

And so I quieted. The muntjacs were quiet as I sat but they were around me. I had seen a mother and child and a male who had barked his warnings. Instead of my customary non-u disregard I looked at them as the new indigenous. They, like all the free-living creatures, are living in these places, not passing through and looking over. They are embedded and entangled. Each one has their territory. The bones of kin lie under these trees. the milk for newborns comes from these plants. This is the sun that warms their backs; this is the breeze that cools them.

One final question to Kairos, I had been impressed by the idea of form as intelligence and also have been thinking about form per se. By which I mean, if we embrace a non-dualistic outlook, then what is form? An illusion, surely? And yet we relate to others as forms: compassion, empathy and love are intimately connected to the materiality of form (in that there is a relationship between self and other). How do you eradicate form from your mental universe without losing the very impetus for relationship, reciprocity, love?

I was thinking about this and Kairos showed me a vision, which I painted.

Make of that what you will.