Pure

He plucked at weeds and a millipede poured itself onto the surface. The robin darted in and snatched it up in a beak already crammed with insects for its young. The man stopped and watched with pleasure and the bird hopped and dabbed at the soil he had disturbed. He liked to see the birds. They had been wary of him at first, but now they treated him like just another part of their wood, their world. He sat back, wiping radishes on his dusty trousers and biting into the crisp fiery flesh. The robin flew away and a blackbird replaced it, cocking its head to eye a worm wriggling among the dry grains of earth.

He had been here six, or was it seven years now? Time passed strangely here. Time had passed so quickly before, that was part of the reason he had come here.

Everyone had been surprised when he had handed in his notice at the office. He had worked there eight years. He sold all his possessions. His friends and family had been alarmed. His sister had insisted he see a psychologist. He’d spent three hours in the doctor’s office. When he had emerged, and shaken the doctor’s hand, his sister had stood up, hovering nervously, awaiting the conclusion, the sentence, ‘Quite sane!’ The doctor had reassured her.

He could have just slipped away without telling anyone. Become another missing person, a half remembered friend in time. But he couldn’t do that to the people he loved, and who loved him. He wasn’t doing this to escape them.

His sister knew where he was. She brought his niece and nephew to visit once. Just once. While the kids ran through the woods collecting treasures of acorns and leaves, feathers and pine cones, His sister had argued with him. ‘You don’t think a normal life is good enough for you? You think you’re special, better than other people?’ She had accused. ‘No’, he had said. She couldn’t understand, and he couldn’t explain.

She still came by when she could to check on him. She seemed to have accepted his decision now.

He had been thirty-two when he had left. All his friends were going through their own life changes. Getting married, having children, getting promoted at work. He was happy for them. He liked being an uncle, seeing his friends and family in love, being happy. But it was not his life, would never be his life. He was not bitter; he had known it would be like this, he accepted he was different, not special, just different.

It had taken him thirty-two years to come to accept it was ok to be different. He knew how crazy it seemed to other people, but whether they accepted it in time, or not, it did not matter.

The sun danced through the trees as it rose bathing the wood in light. Birds sang and the wind stirred some of last autumns beech leaves, still piled among the roots and sent them skittering across the garden.

He had cut the small plot in a sunny glade as soon as he had arrived in in the wood and spent a little of his saved money on the seeds to plant it. It gave him great joy to watch the seedlings sprout, and grow and flourish, and then to harvest the produce.

He was happy here; happier than he had been when he lived in the city. He remembered the noise, the crammed in feeling, of people and vehicles and buildings. He remembered the roar of the traffic and the warm metallic scent of the bus exhaust as he walked to work along litter strewn pavements. He remembered how it was never dark, even in the dead of night, as if the city itself were afraid of the dark.

He thought of the people, hundred, thousands, more, going about their lives in the city. Experiencing happiness and sadness, falling in love, living and dying. They fit in, each person an essential cog in the workings of the city. He had been one of them once. But he had never quite fit in. He had gone through the motions. He had tried to find his niche there. He wondered now if everyone struggled to find where they fit, or had it just been him?

Now he had found this place, and was happy, he fit here, yet he had not found quite how, for he was still searching.

Most people had assumed he had left his life to find god. But that was not true. He had left to find life. Pure life, pure existence, that thing which humans, in all their advances and cleverness and civilisation, have forgotten how to do, how to be! Beyond money and possessions and social status and beyond all those small, tedious, but necessary things of modern living.

From time to time he walked to the nearby town. People passing by turned away, ignoring even his existence, as if he didn’t belong in any civilised place. They were right, he didn’t belong. The few that met his eye looked at him strangely. He smiled back pleasantly at them.

He went to the public library and borrowed books. He would sit and read in there in the winter because it was warm. The librarian would smile kindly at him. He read everything, from poetry to myths, from cookbooks to the history of art. He felt educated but unfulfilled.

The years passed him by he continued to read and he forgot what he had read. He watched the seasons change and the birds come and go, many generations of them. He knew he had learned the secret to the pure life he sought, whether from the books, from the wood itself, or from inside himself he did not know, but he knew it was there. He felt as if he were grasping at some essential truth, knowing it, but unable to express it. He let everything fall away.

He thought of his niece and nephew playing that time in the wood. He had watched them with the same serenity as he had watched the fox cubs playing in spring. He remembered the freedom of spirit those children, those fox cubs had possessed. Their purity of spirit was the same.

In the wood the summer heat turned delicate curls of the bracken brown before it’s time, and the smell of oak and beech and moss rose on the dew that lifted with the suns first fierce rays.

He walked down to the stream for water and saw a stoat dancing between the rocks. It flowed like water over each one, busily checking every crevice for its prey. He had seen foxes and weasels, squirrels and rabbits aplenty and even badgers before, but never a stoat.

He watched with pleasure. Of all the animals he had watched, this one seemed to have some special quality about it. Though he had not moved, the animal sensed him and stood on its hind legs and peered in his direction. Then it began to sway and leap about, tumbling and rolling on the grass beside the stream. Darting closer, and standing up, then darting away. Curious yet cautious, bold yet prudent, it seemed the embodiment of life itself. Here was a creature with such purity of self, and yet at the same time in complete harmony with the world around it.

He found himself taken with it.

The sunlight beamed down upon them both and he felt as if the light were stripping away parts of his being, felt the warm beams seeming to shine right through him, felt himself fading as the unnecessary burdens of life fell away from him.

He was no longer watching the stoat, he was the stoat.

He felt the freedom and the joy as he leapt easily around the moss covered roots of a tree. He felt elation as he saw the world in its purest form. Smelt the air with the keen senses of the animal, heard every minute sound throughout the wood, saw the world anew through the animals eyes.

Then he felt no more, he thought no more, he knew no more other than that he was a stoat and he knew what it was to live.

It was well into autumn before anyone came through the wood. They found a small tumble down hut, the tarpaulin roof flapping and torn in the breeze.

They found his garden grown to ruin and weeds. Unharvested plants bolted and seeded. A book lay open on a log worn smooth by someone sitting there. The pages crinkled by rain and yellowed by sun. The wind flipped them back and forth, golden beech leaves lay like bookmarks between the pages. The cover titled it an Encyclopaedia, yet the pages were blank.