More often than not now, I’d go off through the fields on my own. There were fields that I loved. Fields with a sward of natural, wild herbs. In the Hill Meadow I saw hints of Paradise. It was the only name I had for the flowers that grew there, primroses and cowslips in the dry parts of it and in the more marshy parts, buttercups and orchids.
And I wondered. How could something so yellow as a buttercup come up out of brown soil? How could something so purple as an orchid come up out of it? How could something so perfect as a cowslip come up out of it? Where did the colour and the perfection come from? And what else was down there? What else was I walking on? To me to inhale the fragrance of a primrose was a Eucharist. A Eucharist without suggestion of bloodshed or blood. Sometimes I’d inhale the fragrance down to the very soles of my feet. Then I could walk the earth without hurting it. Then I could walk in Paradise. Right here, in our Hill Meadow, I could walk in Paradise.
(Nostos 13-14) John Moriarity
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
Margaret Atwood
The Moment
Prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always might miss out on something.
“Rather do anything than nothing” this principle is merely a string to throttle all culture and good taste. One no longer has time or energy for ceremonies, for being obliging in an indirect way, for esprit in conversation, and for any leisure at all.
Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching.
Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time than someone else.
Nietzsche
THIRTYARDS 
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