When you first get to the location, it may as well be sterile. Some rustling leaves at most. A few stars visible through the canopy and their light seems louder than the life in the surround. You sit quiet, though - you know better. Duration has a flavor if you know how to taste it. Slowly before you is conjured an alchemical process of ‘vivification’: soon, the landscape is lit up and bustling with life.
Localism: the crazy potency that unfolds with attentive observation to that which is closest, rather than that which is farthest away. In the darkness you pull out a notebook and set to marking the loci, two dozen points in constellation, one for each peripheral movement heard. After you’ve connected the dots, memorized the pathways, you drop the notebook, close your eyes and set out walking into the brush. All you hear is the shuffle of bracken… And the suspense: Will the points stay vivified, now that you’ve walked out? Are you local?
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