I went up to Derbyshire on a whim: a very few days between the idea and arriving in Buxton. I had a vague notion of walking, of getting on trains and getting off at unknown stations, unfamiliar places, exploring around and about. It didn’t turn out that way.
Instead I spent a lot of my time just enjoying the local parks and woodland, looking at the buildings, sitting still, people watching, bird watching, water watching, cloud watching.
The last thing I did as I was heading out the door was to pick up Fiona Parashar’s new book A Beautiful Way to Coach and that led me to taking time out to visit my “vision” for this next chapter of my life.
It’s a grandiose word: vision. But hopes,dreams, aspirations are all too wishy-washy, and plan is too concrete. What else, then, to call it?
I have felt recently that I was getting too caught up in someone-else’s vision, and by caught up I do mean caught: ensnared, trapped, stalled. I have felt that by focussing on how I can support someone else, I may have been losing sight of what I want for myself, especially given the degree to which they are not moving forward. Their stuckness, to use their own word, had started to become contagious.
So I had been feeling the need to go away, but without any clear idea of where I wanted to go. In retrospect the ‘where’ didn’treally matter, given that being in a beautiful space, where I could regroup was all that was really required: a simple change of scene, to change how I looked
at things.
My intention for the week was to allow intuition, serendipity, synchronicity and kairomancy to lead the way. That looks like a contradiction on the page: being intentionally serendipitous. It isn’t. It simply means being open to what arises. It means holding whatever plans there are lightly enough to be let go in favour of other things.
It means noticing what is and then figuring out if it means anything to you. If not, simply let it go. If so, then harvest it – for immediate use or to be stored away for later.
So: I just let each day unfold slowly, and looked to see what I might learn.
~ / ~
I learned that I still love travelling on trains
I wrote a lot on the train. I remembered things and noticed things and scribbled notes – not all of which will turn into anything.
The route from Norwich to Peterborough is so familiar from decades of travelling back to my birthplace in the North East or over to my workplace in the Midlands. It is a stretch that I have mostly found uninspiring, except in the depths of winter, when the shadows are longer and there are mists and frosts.
Past Ely and there is more to catch the eye, the light on the washes, again more dramatic in the depths of the dark end of the year, frozen at their best, but even in high summer, under the right kind of sky they can dance and delight.
By the river at Peterborough, the willows have been mutilated into mop-top imitations of palm trees, like playful poodles coiffured in the French style and looking just as uncomfortable.
There are more embankments and cuttings. Swathes of summer flowers remind me how little I’ve retained from two years ago when I set about learning names.
A sign states Electric Trains Stop. It’s unclear whether it’s an instruction or just an observation.
At Grantham, young people dressed in black wear back-packs and pony-tails, and seem to be happy.
Someone else starts to talk about “…all the people we don’t know. The people we see every day, who have a whole life that we know nothing about – don’t you ever think about them? We look at an aeroplane and we think about all those people going on holiday…and they might not be. We don’t know where they’re going, or why…people on the tube…in the cars that pass us at the bus stop. Whole lives swirling around us, without touching us…”
It made me think. I am one of them. One of the lives about which they know nothing, assuming they even noticed me, sitting on a train, with a notebook. It made me wonder if any of the strangers I pass regularly, or only once, ever give me a second thought. Of course, most of them don’t just as I don’t register the hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that cross my airspace every year, but sometimes I do stop and look at an individual and wonder about their life: what is it like? Are they happy? Are they stressed? Are they in love, in work, in dire straits – or maybe all three at once? Do they ever dance barefoot on the beach? Are they going to die tonight?
When we were teenagers, we used to play a game on the bus – we’d pick two people and make up a life story for them. We had no idea if they were together or just ended up sitting together, randomly, as you do on a bus, but we’d decide upon their characters, and where they were going,
where they were coming from. Snapshots of made-up lives, because when we were teenagers we were never on a bus for very long.
North of Peterborough the land begins to rise after the flatlands. Field edges snake across waves of rising ground or are hidden in the hollows. There are hedges, dark edges blanket-stitching man-sized fields of ripening grasses. At train speed I cannot tell wheat from barley from oats. Probably not oats in these parts, but I couldn’t be sure.
Likewise I ponder the spikes of purple that I first think are foxgloves, blurred by speed of passing, but eventually I come down in favour of toadflax. Feverfew I do recognise in the cuttings, and ragwort. Elderflowers.
Then the sudden ear-pressing blackness of the first tunnel. I feel that I am heading home – by which I mean anywhere beyond the flatlands – anywhere into the hills. When I reach those places where the railway engineers deemed it more economical to build up from the flats, cut into the hills, and (eventually) bore right through them, than it was to follow the lie of the land and go around, then I feel I’m being welcomed back by the land itself. That sudden rush of density, air compressed, and darkness, and of course, the burst out back into daylight. Reborn. And still on track.
I learned that the flatlands also welcome me back, when I do the same journey in reverse. Over the washes, looking forthe other line coming in that signals Ely, the ship of the fens rising above the town, the dead-zone beyond it where there are no telephone signals, and lots of trees. I look forward to first sight of “my” marsh, the first ‘welcome back’, today full of walkers and surprisingly
green – it might have been a hot few weeks, but it’s been a wet summer clearly – and then the racketing over the bridge which is my real “welcome” back into the City. Always has been. For the last three and half decades, over half my life, that racketing over the bridge into the station has always made me smile: I’m back.
I learned that I no longer like staying in hotels
Choosing a prestigious (for which read pretentious) hotel, I thought I wanted to be “looked after” for a while. Their covid-precautions meant that wasn’t really going to happen. Never mind room service (as in food delivered to your door) they’d stopped servicing the room (as in cleaning it) during your
stay. But I realised I didn’t mind. I didn’t want ‘housekeeping’ knocking on the door. I wanted the privacy, the freedom of not feeling I was being judged for my ability to make complete chaos inside
a room overnight, for how many empty wine bottles might accrue during a week, for the fact that there is still a child in me that finds something illicitly delicious about picnicking in bed.
I didn’t mind having to put my bin outside the door if I wanted it emptied, my towels likewise if I wanted them to be replaced. It felt a bit like a student dorm I lived in during my year in Karlsruhe back in the eighties.
To begin with I did mind that the carpet in the room is threadbare in places, and that there is a water stain on the ceiling, that the windows haven’t been externally cleaned in months. To begin with I minded the discrepancy between the grandeur of the public spaces and the student-bedsit vibe of the room. As the week went on, I stopped minding. It started to feel like a writing retreat. The crummy furniture and shabbiness stopped registering. I’ve stayed in worse places. The bed was clean, the door locked, theplumbing worked.
At times I would have liked a better view. At others I loved that all I could see from my window were magnificent trees, tall and close up. I loved that I could hear birds I couldn’t see. That I could leave the curtains open all night – live into the natural light of the summer nights – no intrusive street lights, no-one overlooking, just trees and a patch of sky. I especially loved the night I lay awake listening to owls calling.
I learned that I am no longer about needing to get to the top of a hill
Although I didn’t go very far, I did walk every day. I learned that I’m no longer about claiming an ascent, completing aroute, clocking up the miles or even the steps or the minutes. I found that now I’m more likely, more happy, to be watching a waterfall or a cascade, even a man-made one. I learned that curated nature is still beautiful, because it still exists on its own terms. We can lay out our parks and gardens, but how beautiful they actually become is still in the hands of the gods and the growing things. And in the eyes of the people who take the time to really look at them.
I sat in the park.
I walked in the woods. Buxton is ringed by patches of woodland. Some of it along the river bed, some of it up on the hillsides.
I swam in the hotel pool only once. I learned that a “heated” pool can mean trying to swim in something akin to bath water and it is decidedly unpleasant.
I learned that I am still drawn to the myths and histories and mysteries of what
has gone before
I stood by St Anne’s Well, which was relocated by the local dignitaries when the town
was re-designed as a modern spa to rival Bath. I didn’t figure out where the original spring would have been, or who it would have been dedicated to two thousand years ago, but I stood and breathed in the spirit of the waters.
I found a blue feather. Not a jay bird feather, but a mallard moult, from that flash of colour on the wing. I lost it again. Finding a blue feather is an indicator that it is time to nurture your growing psychic abilities. I don’t know what losing it again might mean. I think I left it by St Anne’s Well, and hoped that maybe she’d accept it as an offering: St Anne or the her predecessor as goddess of the waters hereabouts.
They say that what you offer up will be returned to you. I came home with other blue feathers. And a white one, which means I am watched over, and a silver grey indicator of peace drifting in after a period of turbulence.
The waters of St Anne’s Well are currently off-limits. It struck me as sad that a panic about a modern disease has closed access to healing waters. I could stand above the well, but I could not go down to it to touch or taste it. I stood above and read the notices, and breathed in the warm air above the warm water and then went outside to where the river flows on.
I walked up to Solomon’s Temple. The Grind LowTower. A Victorian folly, built to replace an earlier one, and renovated much more recently. A two-storey edifice that serves no purpose, nor ever did. It sits a-top an iron age barrow and as I looked out at the shape of the land below, it looked to me like
an iron-age fort. All those hollows and apparent track-ways, not natural land-formation surely? I feel an age to the place, and ghosts.
Nothing is as it seems. Some of those ghosts are not as old as they feel. A noticeboard tells me this was the site of lime kilns and quarries. So the land is not in its natural shape, it has been forged by man, just a lot more recently than I first thought.
But I am one to hold to her fantasies and I do feel something in the place and I cannot know the shape of the land before the quarrymen came.
For some reason I am reminded of Old Sarum, a visit nearly 20 years ago, and of who I was then, against who I am now. I walk among the wild-flowers that grow where the men once dug and fired the lime, and I pause to watch the butterflies. And I wonder how many times I walked through such grasslands and did not pause. I wonder at all the miles I walked with myeyes lifted only upward and onward, and never down at my feet, never at the air closer to me, always forward into the future. I wonder how much of my present I missed along the way.
I learned humour and bravery from the young Jackdaws, and patience from the Heron
One afternoon the Jackdaws were sidling up to me, because someone else had left peanuts on the path near where I was sitting. They were comical in their pretence of not coming closer, sideways stepping, looking elsewhere. It was the youngsters who were bravest, but they were bullied out of some of their catch by older, warier birds. That seemed unfair.
On another morning, a heron was scouting out the river right in the middle of town. My all-time favourite bird, just sitting there in the park in fish-free water.
I learned that my “vision” is not about the future at all
I did all of the exercises in the book, and learned that I am where I want and need and am meant to me. Which is maybe precisely the reassurance I was after all along.
I struggle sometimes to articulate what I want my ideal future to be.
What this week has shown me is that, despite what I thought, I have already left behind my old life. None of what used to be so important matters to me now.
What this week has shown me is that, despite what I thought, I am not caught up in someone else’s vision at all – it is merely that my connection with them is something that is important within my own vision for my future. It is not about their vision, but about them as a person, and my relationship with them. Connection. Community. Support. Friendship. Love. Some or all of the above.
What this week has shown me is that my vision for my future is so hazy because the degree of shift I have undergone in the last four years is so fundamental, that it seems not only impossible, but also unwise, to set too many parameters around what I want the next part of the adventure to look like.
Or maybeit has shown me that the underlying assumption that the ideal future is far away and out of reach, does not apply here. Maybe the truth is that I am already living the dream. Yes,there is work to do – there will always be work to be done – but the doing of it is already happening. And the doing of it is also part of the dream.
