Not zero. Not one.

I felt close to her. I felt a sense of purpose.

I do not understand consciousness. If I did, or if anyone on this planet did and could explain it to me, I might then understand the nature of that purpose.

I like it when I make others laugh. Something happens which I find an essential, possibly the quintessential human experience. Everything else feels inordinately flawed, although the flaws themselves are so myriad, so entwined, each one so obfuscated that it is hard to begin to perceive, untangle, identify and express them in an environment characterised by data obesity and shrivelled attention spans.

I don’t know that I feel species shame. I think rather what I feel is a complete lack of expectation regarding human culture. I expect nothing of it nor from it. I expect far more of atmospheric processes and climate, which may programme in human beings new capacity, the transformation they simply aren’t capable of by themselves.

But a tree still stands. And does it arrest me on passing? It does. And can I tell you all the reasons why? Of course I cannot. Something about its shape, its benign magnitude, the majesty it performs above ground, the symmetry it conceals below. The history it has participated in that I have not known. The detail of that history, I have not seen. The changing colours of the fire it lights just as summer turns away, and keeps lit for the museum of emotion that is autumn.

The honesty in a cat’s tail. The tightening in a woman before orgasm. The fleeting blue of morning glory against a white pebbledash wall. Are these astonishingly beautiful things not enough for me? If they are not, incommensurable others are. And each time I forget this, I have only to prize my eyelids apart and learn to focus again.

Not zero. Not one. We start again with colour, with shape, with vibrations sensed by eyes and by ears. And with the air’s gentle currents on our fingertips.