Sensory Overload

I ate my supper late,and so it was 9.20 by the time I set off for my evening walk. Gosh, it was balmy, still and settled after the day's winds, warm, light and quiet, apart from the unusual sounds of machinery. I walked until I came to the fields being harvested, one completely bereft of its barley and instead sprinkled with golden rectangles of straw, the other being gradually swept clear by a massive combine harvester, lights blazing, support vehicle at the ready to take the ripe ears. It really is an amazing sight in the growing dusk, and you can't help thinking of all those harvests, through time immemorial, which may have taken an awful lot longer but were essentially the same. An identical prayer for good weather and good yield, a race to get everything safely in and stowed away. The fields may be much bigger now too, ten times as large as the ones our ancestors worked, but the scents of dust and earth and the rich malty smells of the crop must have been the same. I breathed it all in and felt light-headed as I strode down a bridle path and back home on a circular route. A tiny sliver of moon gleamed in the sky, and as it grew darker there were suddenly stars, millions of them above me. It's hard not to feel something when you are under such a sky, the endless spaces above you filled with pricks of light that must have some significance. I felt it anyway, and sent up a silent prayer of thanks for being alive on such a day, witnessing the scenes unfolding around me.