Heather

Looking up at the blue sky and white clouds again after so many days, I remember doing so lying amid pink heady summer-smelling heather while playing hide and seek in the long evenings of childhood. If you lay very very still amid long stretches of sun-burnt grass in that hilly place we lived, the chances were that you could lie there until sunset and no one would find you. And the warmth of the dark rocks and the insects moving quietly among the grass and the changing colours of the sky and the distant sounds of temple drums and the gentle evening breeze would all make it very difficult to finally get up and go back to the group. But go back I did or I would not be part of the next game.

Long days. Yes, TV-less, computer-less long days of childhood spent outside in the sun and rain. If I had known then that the world I would someday grow up to would be so unimaginably different, so full of distractions, so full of gadgets in spite of which haste and worry would still reign, I would have spent more evenings lying forgotten in the heather, on the warm lap of the gently breathing earth, unmindful of games going on without me, alone, yet not alone...

Oct 23, 2003