FINGERS OFF BUTTONS

We are animals.

The shiver between the shoulder blades crawls up my neck. The pounding of my heart echoes in my ears and resonates down to my fingertips as I stop to haul in air. Am I pushing my weakened body too far, too fast?

The going is getting tricky, and the zigzag climb up through the Priorat tangle of leaf and branch of the escarpment disorientates me. I grip the stem of a broom, turn and dig my heels into the slope of holmoak leaf loam and pine needles, wedging my bum onto a lip of rock. Acorns tumble away. It appears far steeper looking down. Descent is always trickier. The red sandstone, mottled with the firework lichens of cream green and ochre, stains my hands.

I sink into the detail.

Lichens garland the necks and limbs of the oaks. They cloak dead branches, pattern every rock. They colour not just this place but our world. Yet these starbursts of hues, one of the greatest symbiotic successes on the planet, are typical of so much of the detail of creation I almost lost sight of for such a lump of my life. My first memories were of going wild, feeding my senses, living in the moment. Then the human condition grew like a Triffid, the preoccupations with innovation, self, species and the opinions of others, and the arrogance to consider ourselves non-animals.

To my back, above the rock, is a cushion of emerald moss with tiny ferns springing from it, both flourishing in the dampness of the north facing shadow. I look up again, wondering whether to press on, but the undergrowth shields the secrets.

Veering off the narrow trail to aim for what might be a cave opening in the limestone higher up the face of the escarpment, a sliver of blackness I can no longer see, may have been a mistake. I look around and glance back down into the shadows and tangle. I am in deep and the growth and rock breathe with biodiversity, the faintest kiss of the elements. I am alone, and yet anything but. I am out of my comfort zone and back in touch with my animal senses. It once was and has again, finally, become a habit, a need. Here I can unplug my brain and let the rest of me come alive. Yet it is still merely another toe dip. The umbilical cord, the wiggly, narrow path back down to the river, beyond to shelter, ease, familiarities and noise, may be out of sight but I know it is there, somewhere below me. Heading out as I love to do, I am taking precious moments (and perhaps the odd risk) to be selfish, to look long at a lichen, to gently press my palm into moss, to bristle and rely on the feeble radars of my eyes and ears; to make contact with nature and a part of me that is instinctive - yes, animal.

It breaks my heart that in the name of war some contemplate Armageddon, that we have created such an ability: to wipe away the genius of existence, to have no thought of that which created us and how wondrous our world is. Our Mother Earth.

We have become a virus.