An odd thought struck me today as I watched the squirrels traipse through the forest.

Am I looking at the ancient ancestors of the next (comparably) intelligent life?

The odd thought took a more radical and revolutionary turn as I contemplated the scope of time, and just what may be, as farcical as it may sound.

Am I looking at just a squirrel? Or perhaps the evolutionary herald of an entirely new intelligent species, so many millions of years from now... Of course the chances that it would be the squirrel and not something else entirely different are infinitely small, but the thought requires some traction in a specific model, so I shall think of squirrels.

Whatever it may be, if it may be, represents the joys of natural contemplation. The ability or at least the attempt to transcend all habitual perspective and don a radically different one. Brain-bending, you know.

At the end, at the very least, Nature becomes infinitely more valuable. In Nature, one is surrounded by time. A process so terribly slow that notions of patience don't quite capture its progression. Life is so ephemeral and passing. Tiny little bundles of excited energy, more active than anything, soon passing into nothing. You can almost conceive of every moving thing, from the drift of continents to a passing deer as the same fundamental orchestra of passing matter, though perhaps along different scales.

They say peace is a matter of mental tranquility. I tend to view it as more the mental arrest that occurs when attempting to conceive of it all in a thought. You're not inactive, you're just caught up in a mental embrace and you can only reach so far or stretch so much. It is the height of mental exertion, not its nadir. The moment where you have taken as big and as deep a breath as you can possibly take, and your whole body is caught up in the effort, stalled at the limit, brought up and consumed in that slight pause before the tremendous exhalation.