It is a ‘writing outside’ day, one of those workshop days where I allow myself to be pulled outside whatever the weather, with the intention of writing in response to whatever I find. The brief is flexible: use the prompts or ignore them. See what you find out there or inside, today. Write freely, write raw, write wildly. Maybe write in a way you haven’t written before.
Sometimes I stay close to the instructions.
Sometimes I stray far away from them.
Sometimes I want to talk to people and not write at all.
Sometimes I wish I was alone, so I could do nothing but write.
Sometimes I wish I could do nothing at all. Not even look or listen or notice.
Sometimes I wish I could sit down and simply be absorbed, cease to exist in this form, become something ‘other’ than what I am.
Sometimes.
Today - a January day in 2025 - I’m drawn to solitude, away from the mill race and all that noise and turbulence, all those reminders of life’s eddies and upsets and rushes. My life is too full of eddying turbulence right now.
Today I’m drawn away from people to where the river quietens and starts its slow meander through and around the trees, the fallen branches, the drunken lurches of swamped alder and willow, the drapery of ivy.
I walk the mud-squelch path until I reach the second bridge. Its rails are at ‘leaning’ height, precisely measured to allow elbows and notebooks to be sat squarely, to take the weight of the thinking mind.
We think bridges are meant to be crossing points, but I’ve discovered that a lot of them are really intended to be stopping places. I rarely cross a bridge without stopping mid-way, not necessarily to play Pooh Sticks, but always to look at the water from both sides, upstream and downstream... usually in that order, now that I come to think of it.
There is some kind of chimerical effect of water passing under a bridge: it is never the same on emergence as it is on entrance.
Perhaps there trolls under there after all. Or naiads. Or other mystical creatures crying out for us to look at bridges from the other side...the underside. We think of what it means to build a bridge, to cross over a bridge, but I suddenly wonder what it means to pass under one.
From the perspective of the river, what is a bridge? A brief shadow, but also a constrainment of its flow, a redirection of its eddies and whirls.
We look to build bridges, to cross bridges when we come to them...how often do we think of the ones we must flow beneath?
I never have done. I think of things happening in my life right now, and wonder if any of them might not be bridges that I need to cross, but ones that I need to flow under.
Back in the material world of the Blickling Estate, this particular bridge is simply a pathway over a drainage ditch that carries flood-water from the lane into the river.
I stop and focus on the river and her trees.
Actually, that’s a lie. I don’t focus. I do the opposite. I gaze, and do so at neither the river nor the trees, but the reflection of the one in the other. I look at the smudged, impressionist rendition of trees and ivy and reeds. When I get home I will invert the photograph to see the world the better-way-up.
In the moment, I simply rest my notebook on the black-painted wood of the bridge-rail, and write the word “reflection”.
I have been asked so many times in this last week to reflect on the last year…as if I hadn’t already journalled it all out…as if I had anything left to say. But here I am on another January day, still a ‘new year’ day in some contexts and the word reflection comes up again.
Fortunately, I have been given a day in which the river reflects. One in which the lane is part-filled with water, not quite passable beyond a certain point. One in which I succumb to the temptation to photograph puddles. I am enamoured of reflections.
I am in love with steel and glass buildings because of the way they break up the streetscape and represent it as a cubist / abstract work of art.
I am enthralled by rivers and puddles on blue-sky days, when they re-present the world to me as paintings by Monet or Renoir.
On other days I stop by the beach chalets to catch the image of the sea under-lain with blinds and ornaments, the fractal tractors cut by surfboards.
Today, all my reflection images are trees and reeds, softly rendered. "Reflect, softly" might be their message. Let go of who you think you are meant to be. The colours in the water are never the same as the colours against the sky.
I was asked again what kind of tree I would be. Depends on your use of that word “would”. If I were to choose, I would be a blue weeping willow on a delicate plate, captured forever shading the arched bridge and the scholar with his brushes. I would be a graceful silver birch high in the Appalachians, a scratching post for bears. I would be lithe, and sinuous.
In truth, I was not born to be either. I am solid English oak. Sturdy. Creaky in my old age. All broken branches, and scars…but I have weathered the storms and am deep-rooted enough to weather a few more.
And maybe someone will make something of the thing of me that I leave behind, eventually.
