How Little Can I Realize All the Life

 After a hard fall run, I sometimes am able to slide into a different state of awareness.  That sounds trippy, and is probably aided by some happy chemical that's in my blood because of the hard run, but it's true: I have an altered amount of awareness of what's around me.  Sometimes I can get transfixed by mulch.  How rich it is!  How varied!  How infinitely interesting!  Typically, after five minutes, the feeling fades.  At other times, instead of being transfixed by a sight.  I am aware of the fact that a number of things are happening around me at once, like my awareness, usually a small circle, enclosed a larger and larger circle of events that are occurring.  Birds are swooping! The train is clanging! And still the kids are shouting while swinging on the playground!  

I'm using so many exclamation marks because there's this sense of more than contentment.  There's no judging; it's like the ability to judge is short circuited because so much information is coming in and being apprehended.   There's a sense of the ecstatic realness of things that is always happening right beneath our self-absorbed noses.  

I noticed something similar to this while reading this quote from Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) in The Daily Henry David Thoreau: A Year of Quotes.  Thoreau wrote in his journal on September 27, 1852

As I look northwestward to that summit from a Concord cornfield, how little can I realize all the life that is passing between me and it, -- the retired upcountry farmhouses, the lonely mills, wooded vales, wild rocky pastures, and new clearing on stark mountain-sides, and rivers gurgling through primitive woods!  All these, and how much more, I overlook.  I see the very peak, -- there can be no mistake, -- but how much I do not see, that is between me and it!

Both the concreteness of the description, the ecstatic punctuation, and the line "how little can I realize all the life that is passing between me and it" all suggest to me that Thoreau is enraptured in a similar trippy way.  The sense that there is so much going on... all the time, and it's all alive.  

I like this passage and the temporary low grade ecstatic thrum.  It makes me think about some of my favorite poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins (1844-1889), like "God's Granduer," or "Pied Beauty." 

 Image from The New Republic