Free Beast by Paul Kingsnorth

focused on my task. I felt the muscles in my legs move as I walked across the heather and I felt the still hot air passing my ears. I walked at a medium pace. My left leg still spasmed with every step. The ground was springy and the heather was woody and dry. There was nothing but peat and heather not a stream bed or a combe or a stunted tree. This square mile of moor wasa great rounded shoulder of heather and in the middle of it was the giant’s grave.
    The giant’s grave was my goal. I was going to walk in complete stillness and silence until I reached it. According to my map it would be about three miles of walking until I got there. Three miles of sameness three miles of heather. I picked up the pace after a while. I was getting bored. There were no signs of anything up here. No big animal would be up here surely it was too exposed there was nothing for it. There were no holes in the ground nowhere to hide nothing to eat. If it had walked here I would not have seen any tracks beneath the heather anyway. But I kept going. At any moment things could change and I had a system and I was going to stay with it. I had seen something and it must be somewhere. I would find it.
    I reached the giant’s grave after what must have been an hour or so. It consisted of three great old slabs of granite one lying horizontal and the other two resting at angles on top of it. All three stones sat on top of a slight mound. I took off my pack and put it on the ground. I took out the water bottle and climbed up to the highest point on the stones and sat down. I surveyed the landscape. I was at the highest point on the dome of heather which sloped down towards the edgeof the moor. There was a kind of heat haze around the edges. I could see the tower of the church beneath the trees where the lane was. I couldn’t see the town. It was silent. No bird sang. I drank some water.
    It was the heather that brought the falling man back into my mind. The smell of the heather the roughness of the purple buds the texture all of it spread around me and seemed to raise something and I remembered a man who fell over a man who had some meaning to me. I felt it was a memory. I was young perhaps. He fell and he didn’t rise. Or perhaps he didn’t fall perhaps he jumped but he went down and didn’t come up and that was everything then there was nothing after. I don’t know what this is. Perhaps when we die the world just ends. Perhaps everything stops when we do which means that we are everything. I wondered: what if each of us is everything? What if everything is concentrated in every part of us? All of the essence of everything is in every tiny cell and every particle. So nothing can survive without anything else which means that when one thing dies everything dies and then it is all instantly reborn again in a new form.
    What if we are not all sharing this one world but instead every one of us creates their own world and that is true of everything that is? It is true of you andme and every other human and it is true of every other living animal and every bird and every fish and every tree and every mollusc and every bivalve and every arthropod and every virus and every fungus and every germ floating in the air and all of the rocks too all of the grains within them everything constantly dying and the universe ending with every single death and starting again at precisely the same moment so that there is no time as we think we know time there is only this constant ending and this constant birth?
    Or what if it is all about kindness? What if that is the secret? What if everything is about kindness what if that is the great kō an that the world offers up to us? What if this is the big secret what if this is the answer that once everyone is kind to everyone else and to themselves and to everything that lives even the rocks and the rivers then the world will end and we will be done? Or what if everyone is given just one tiny task in this life what if we come