Astonishment

When I walk in the woods, away from the contagion of the diseases of “globalization,” I spend time slowly, perhaps to regain a sense of living.

…..The forest was all visible, even in the interior; one would have said it was without secrets: such was the piercing and severe, yet strangely sweet, light of that December hour. The branches could be counted one by one, so they were shiny and still; the boulders were stones; the bushes and thickets with an almost inert drowsiness of their own. Everything was simple and normal. But what was extraordinary in the air of the forest, in the existence of those branches and tops and trunks, in the presence of those stones and thickets, was the wonder of light, the presence of a shining silence…..