A day like this

Outside the air was delicious. 

She could feel it stroking her face as she moved through it, 

but there was no sensation of either warmth or chill...

she wondered why she found this particular temperature
 so charming; and decided it was because, 

on a day like this, 

she came nearer than usual to losing her sense of separate identity.

Extremes of heat and cold she enjoyed too, 

but it was with a tense, belligerent enjoyment.

When they beat against the irregular frontiers of the skin, 

with all its weak angles and vulnerable salients, 

they made her acutely conscious of her own boundaries in space.

Here, she would find herself thinking, 

is where I end and the outside world begins.

It was exciting, but divisive: it made for loneliness.

But on certain days, and this was one of them,

the barriers were down.

She felt as though she and the outside world 

could mingle and interpenetrate;

as though she was not entirely contained in her own body 

but was part also of every other person on the street;

and, for that matter, of the thrush singing on a tree in Eaton Square,

the roan dray-horse straining to take up the load at Grosvenor Place,

the cat stepping delicately across Buckingham Palace Road.

This was the real meaning of peace - not mere absence of division,

but an active consciousness of unity,

of being one of the mountain peak islands on a submerged continent.

from Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther.

Pictures from my walk in the park today.