In Pursuit of Spring

On the map I`ve traced in red the trail I followed yesterday. I followed where the logging road had been cleared of snow and arrived finally at the high point where the Southern Upland Way, the old drovers` route, intersects the foresters` way. At this point I took off my headphones and breathed in the silence and cold crisp air.

Then I turned back to north again and replacing the headphones, retraced my footprints. As I ran down the slope, I listened to an excerpt from "In Pursuit of Spring" , experienced and written by Edward Thomas exactly 100 hundred years ago:

"The road was visible most dimly, and was like a pale mist at an uncertain distance. When I reached the green all was still and silent. The cottages on the opposite side of the road all lay back, and they were merely blacker stains on the darkness. The pollard willows fringing the green, which in the sunlight resemble mops, were now very much like a procession of men, strange primeval beings, pausing to meditate in the darkness.."

"...I walked more slowly, and at a gateway stopped. While I leaned looking over it at nothing, there was a long silence that could be felt, so that a train whistling two miles away seemed as remote as the stars. The noise could not overlap the boundaries of that silence. And yet I presently moved away, back towards the village, with slow steps."

"I was tasting the quiet and the safety without a thought. Night had no evil in it. Though a stranger, I believed that no one wished harm to me. The first man I saw, fitfully revealed by a swinging lantern as he crossed his garden, seemed to me to have the same feeling, to be utterly free of any trouble or care. A man slightly drunk deviated towards me, halted muttering, and deviated away again. I heard his gate shut and he was absorbed."

"...I felt that I could walk on thus, sipping the evening silence and solitude, endlessly. But at the house where I was staying I stopped as usual. I entered, blinked at the light, and by laughing at something, said with the intention of being laughed at, I swiftly again naturalized myself."