From the moment of rousing the day beneath the shimmering white moon hanging in the dark and clear morning sky, what followed was impossibly delicious! A superbly sumputous day! It was a day when manifestly everyone retired their anxiety and confessed the bounty and beauty of Nature. The scene was the matchless landscape of autumn in its array of colours and windblown varnish. And we saw it to advantage on a sunny day amid cool, dry air; a pastoral setting upon the shaded county roads wobbling between the villages.

The munificence began with an early morning glance upriver towards the quaint Village of Appleton. The balladry was in motion! A bicycle and tricycle ride were in order. But first the rustic breakfast of steel cut oats and prunes. Afterwards when we learned that there were still Empire apples for sale at MacLaren Orchards, Renfrew on the Burnstown Road, it was but a jiffy before we dressed and made ready to go! Just as the squirrels in autumn instinctively gather and burrow, we creatures too accommodated a seasonal prescription for sunshine. The day was far too generous to ignore.

It isn’t often I comb my personal conduct to reveal an inarguable feature of positivity.  But today was such a day, a day blessed with so much well being and fortuity that to engage with anything but the most moral conduct would have been an utter travesty, an implacable greed. My relief at having done so is the small complement of equilibrium stabilizing what otherwise would have been both incongruous and pitiful.

The reward of this day is a familiarity with a zone hitherto clouded by the fog arising from my own distorted tracks through the sometimes dusty and muddy realm of everyday thinking. Clarity as with so many other things is an inevitability we ignore at our peril. Clarity is the preferred mental attribute equivalent to the visceral attribute of instinct. Clarity and instinct are what ultimately drive our being.  But as is so commonly said, “I knew I shouldn’t have done that!”  We fail to listen to those base messages of clarity and instinct from within mind and body.