Up on the hill, after rain, there’s a pond of clear water. Go again in Summer after a dry spell and it’s a grassy hollow in the earth with duckweed in muddy patches. Or on cloudy days, some small draining pools and soggy patches between the grassy tumps. It’s mysterious: this alchemy, collecting in its alembic moisture out of the air and distilling silver in a round bowl only for the hill to take it into itself again, feeding, perhaps, a bright spring and the stream running clear down through the woodland to the valley floor. Walking from place to place across the land I sometimes get this sort of misty vision of how all the different elements in a landscape are interconnected. In theory it should be possible to make a map of it all, marking the intersecting junctions of the web of life. But it would always be an abstract representation however complete and accurate. Never a real insight into both the intercalations and interconnections between each apparently individual thing: how they are at once both separate and connected.
