Trains don’t sound the way they did, but the pleasure remains of watching the countryside unscroll before my eyes. A private viewing, for one day only. A hand-mixed palette of white-blue-yellow-green. Unrepeatable and already drying. Fading.
Flat-bottomed clouds rest on that mythical ceiling, and the Ley Lines of ancient hedgerows hem the fields, even as they are crossed by paths from cot to distant spire, both of flint and brick, and sitting in this landscape as if they had been born to be a witness to it.
Cloud shadows play hide and seek among the cabbages, and the Rowan reminds me that I still owe a white-berried tree, in lieu of a headstone.
Gulls flock on a new-ploughed field, and pheasants skitter.
A sentinel stands, a blasted trunk bark-naked and proud, while beside it fallen comrades lie, the felled trunks and amputated branches awaiting pall bearers.
~ / ~
I’m learning to step outside of time, beyond the clocks and calendars. I have no need to rush from City to Sea. I take half a day and more. I find / create / steal / borrow time, to spend on a different part of this shore. I have a hut, a shack, a shed. Not beautiful yet, but one day maybe. For now it serves as a baggage hold, so I can walk free in the late afternoon sun, down by the waves that catch the last of the light before the cliffs steal it away.
I come back with a handful of pebbles. If I had pockets, I might not make it home, weighed down by abstract beauty. I have no idea what I gather. Perhaps I should add geology to the list of things I need to study. Instead, I am drawn to collect randomly by colour and shape and texture.
The worry stones invite the rubbing of my thumb, consciously putting my joint-pain into them. Then I cast them back to the waters to be washed clean again.
The yellow Jupiter stones speak of storms on distant planets and the rune stones keep their secrets.
I love most, though, the tumble-stones, the perfectly polished gems, translucent moonstones, and the magic beans: today’s looks like a cannellini dipped in chocolate.
I pick up stones. And I put some down. Some I throw across the mirror sands or into the waters. Others I set down gently. I can only take the few that I can hold in one hand. Nine. Nine is a magic number.
I bring my hands together and tumble the stones within the prayer. Or is that what they are doing to me?
~ / ~
I take time to sit, with pen and notebook and camera, but mostly just with time. A rainbow pours its shifting colours on the pier and as it fades I watch the shower that brought it drift out to sea to be lost over the horizon. Cloud-watching and lamenting yet again my lack of words for colours, and textures. Candyfloss clouds catch the brilliance, shining like fairground joy, surrounded by smudges of grey, dispersing vapour trails, paling as they sink towards night. This time next week it will be dark.
Next week I will need to think about torches and candles. Lanterns. There is something soothingly old-world about the word 'lantern'. It feels as though it must, almost by definition, cast a softer yellower glow than anything we would call a light.
I wonder what I have that I could leave up here, and whether it would withstand the weather. I don't want to be chased away by the dark, I want to enter into it. I want to listen to the weather and waters. I want to know how this place feels as autumn moves on towards winter.
~ / ~
Up early the next day to gather in a co-writing space, I open a door to the morning darkness, and scent the salt in the air. I am not well. My neighbour must wonder at the repeated flushing, my body purging itself of whatever it is, that it often feels the need to do, and no cause found. I am melancholy. Not sad, exactly…but downbeat. Perhaps because of the purging. Perhaps because of everything the world is feeling and even I can't avoid.
I wonder if I'm willing to take this feeling into Cley into that writing group.
I'm surprised by daylight. Lifting my eyes from the page, the clear black sky has greyed, and from my sprawling position on the bed I see only flint walls and tile roof and the sky above it. It's not a view I would choose to wake up to.
As the on-line meeting draws towards the end of its quiet-time, I wander, away from the page having said all I could find worth saying…and go to the open window. Full day now, bright blue sky, and a skein of geese flying below the moon. If anything can lift my mood, surely that is it.
The mood flutters up, hovers briefly, but like the lapwings startled into fright by a harrier, it soon settles back.
Sitting outside the centre at Cley, a few hours later, enjoying the autumn sun, and each other's words, listening and learning and sharing…the first feedback echoes that word 'melancholy'. Whether I wanted to bring it along or not, here it is.
There is truth it seems in the saying: wherever you go,there you are. Or perhaps Dolly Parton said it best when she said: if you want rainbows, you have to put up with the rain.
