Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (literature books to read .txt) 📗

and grateful for the drier weather too. Great clusters of stars swirled above me and the fire cracked and whistled away and I fell asleep next to it in my sleeping bag. I woke up briefly, and the fire was still burning and the stars still above me.

Chapter 58

T he rain fell flush against my face. The charred remains of the fire was smoking away under its dowsing, and up the hill a light wind was fluttering the tent. I brushed myself down and took my damp sleeping bag inside.

I finished the bag of the porridge, leaving only rice left to eat, and I had a green tea to drink made from pine needles I had gathered.

I put on warm clothes and my jacket and walked slowly down the hill to the road. The rain came down softly from the dark, atmospheric sky. Little waves rolled across the loch in the breeze, which swelled up parts of it like there was a giant fish beneath. At the other side of the water, Harry was nowhere to be seen.

If he doesn’t come back, I will be fine, I thought. I’ve adapted. I’m stronger. Both physically and mentally.

I crossed over the bridge and decided to keep going this time, instead of turning right up the river. The wet trees had all turned black. I kept my hood down and let the rain wash through me, tilting my head back to catch some drops in my mouth. The wet gravel slid and crunched beneath my boots. My arms swung at my sides. As the blood flowed through my fresh young veins, I felt imbued with good health and the simplicity of my surroundings. The key to happiness is the ability to let go, I remembered.

I felt relaxed. Lots of other little thoughts popped into my head. Embrace your emotions. Wisdom doesn’t come from age, it comes from experience. Environment determines consciousness. There is no such thing as death. And they came so promptly, and seemingly randomly, that I didn’t think it was really me that was thinking them, they were only entering into me. You’re a vacuum, I thought. And then something made me think of Bob Dylan, and all of the other songwriters I loved so much, and I thought, if this stuff isn’t coming from me, if it’s coming from the collective unconscious or higher dimension, didn’t so many artists say that too?

Bob Dylan said he didn’t know where the stuff he wrote came from, and Neil Young too, and Leonard Cohen was always singing about secret cords and being told what to say instead of getting to choose what to say. And Mozart, said he didn’t know where his ideas came from, he was just in a good mood and in a bit of peace and didn’t practice at originality. None of them knew where it came from. And they said you can’t control it, it just flows through you, when it chooses. And I’m not as smart or as talented as them, I’m just dumb as fuck and know nothing, but maybe they are all just vessels. In fact, we are all just vessels! I’ve seen a ghost. I’m sure that death doesn’t exist. These are just bodies and brains that we are filling. This thing I am moving in, trapped inside, is just a shell.

I stopped to watch some ducks on the water as they bobbed around then dived under in search of fish. I kept walking. The mountains on the other side were black and ominous. It looked like a heavy rain was readying, I thought I could feel it coming too.

My size eights stomped through the gravel. But so many of those writers and poets have been inspired by nature. Keats, Byron, Burns, Kerouac, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, all of them were inspired by it. By this. But if their art has been, had been, coming through them from the trees, or other forms of nature, can they claim credit for originality? If it’s come from a collective unconscious, can anyone be said to be an individual? Who talked about collective unconscious anyway, was that Jung? I don’t know.

But ninety-nine percent of these writers and poets, and scientists too, believed in God. Einstein was a mystic, and said that imagination was the true sign of intelligence, and he sought everything out in nature and the universe. So even if this has all been in my imagination, does that mean it’s any less real?

Up ahead was another little stone bridge. I crossed it over a smaller river and continued, the furthest up I’d been along that side of the glen.

The bridge reminded me of the one in the meditation, and I pictured the joy of the people in that garden, next to that giant beanstalk. Why a giant beanstalk? Was it the oak I had been sitting under, creating that impression in me? Or was it supposed to be a biblical tree, like the one in the garden of Eden? Maybe it was a sort of garden of Eden? Was there not a quote in the bible, my father’s house has many rooms, or something like that? That mansion next to the garden could have been it?

But that tree, in the garden. And look at the two trees you spoke to, and felt that energy from. The trees that inspired you so much and took you somewhere higher in your mind. But- there’s been loads of people who have received inspiration from sitting under trees! Buddha became enlightened sitting under one. Newton realized gravity sitting under one. Didn’t Moses talk to a bush that was on fire? Maybe Newton and Buddha were actually in communion with their trees too? And Darwin had a route he walked every day through the trees in his garden. And Jesus at the garden of Gethsemane. And he also went up a mountain. Mohamed went to the desert. Just