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There was a field I used to go to at the end of a hard day when the light was doing that thing it does just before it gives out turning everything the color of old honey. One evening I was sitting in the grass with my knees pulled up, watching rabbits. I didn't know when they had appeared exactly. I never really noticed them arriving, just one moment they appeared. Five of them, maybe six, going about whatever it is rabbits go about doing. I didn't dare move and caught myself subconsciously holding my breath for fear of breathing too loud. I knew, without having been told, that this was the kind of thing that ends the moment you reach for it. I experienced a profound melancholy watching them that I couldn't explain. Not sadness exactly, more like a feeling of missing somewhere you'd never been. After much time had passed. Dusk having given way to night, long after the rabbits had returned to the safety of their boroughs, I understood. Sitting there in the wet grass with my staff forgotten at my side, I had found a kindred spirit. Not because I was meek or easily startled, as most people see rabbits, but because I had always lived the way those rabbits lived. Fully present in the open field, ears up, heart loud, and yet always half-turned toward some other horizon, some other world just beyond this one. Other warriors claimed bears, wolves, great hunting birds. I never denied them their ferocity. But the rabbit knows of things beyond strength. How to be utterly alive in the middle of everything that could destroy them, and to remain just beyond what the darkness can catch. I had done that my whole life without knowing the name for it. That night in the field, watching them dissolve one by one back into the mist, I finally did. | |