Is it possible to sustain a ‘wow’ moment for the over two hours? Even if you add in the follow-up words ‘this is just SO beautiful’, you wouldn’t think that it could occupy your brain for 120 minutes and more. And yet it did.
I am a writer, not in the ‘you must have heard of me’ sense, or indeed even in the ‘it pays the bills’ sense but in the sense that a great many of my waking hours are spent either at the keyboard or with pen in hand. I mention this because the thing about writers is that when we walk, a lot of the time we’re still ‘writing’, consciously or otherwise. We’re mulling things over, or storing up images, or converting those images into raw writing that will be marinated later.
The other thing is that we tend to think in words. I cannot imagine what it is like for my dyslexic friend who clearly thinks in concepts and emotions and really struggles to express them verbally, because all of my ideas, thoughts, feelings, arrive in fully-formed sentences. Complete with punctuation. Albeit often grammatically incorrect punctuation.
The exception to this is what I call – with a complete lack of imagination – ‘wow moments’. Those moments where something literally takes your breath away, until you notice you’re holding a vacuum and have to breathe in again. Those moments which are so short but seem to last forever. Those moments when there literally are no words.
I am using the word ‘moments’ because they usually are very short-lived. They may be bracketed by longer spans of intense pleasure, but the ‘wow’ is the suddenness of beauty, the being taken by
surprise, the awe. Take a sunset for example, there is that period of anticipation and there is the after-glow, but somewhere in the middle there is that precise moment that is always surprising – because of the atmospherics on the evening, or the cloudscape, or a shared thought or connection
with someone or something close-by. It is brief. It is wordless.
This morning I woke to bright skies and white frost. This is my favourite weather. Before anyone condemns me for it, I freely admit that I would be less enamoured if I had slept on the streets last night, or could not afford to heat my home today. But the truth is that many beautiful things – perhaps even all of them – are harmful to someone or something. So while I acknowledge with gratitude the fortunate position I am in, let me also sing a little of the beauty of a short walk and a prolonged moment of awe.
I couldn’t wait to get outside today. My journalling was a scribbled mash of nothing very much, and only half the coffee got drunk. I was surprised to catch the moon, and worried that the sun might melt away the whiteness before I got to enjoy it.
The walk itself was just my local circuit down to the university, across the park, through the woods, round the Broad and back again. There are variations on a theme, but this is the basis of it.
Sometimes it gets stretched a little (or a lot) further, sometimes it gets cut short. The route back has several possibilities. None of which matters.
What matters is that there is quite possibly nothing quite as beautiful, as mystical, as soul-invigorating, as childishly magical as a white-frost morning, when the sun is shining from its low, winter, angle. Frost. Glacier-blue sky. Long shadows on ice-fragile grass.
I suspect that I went out thinking I would return full of lyrical conjurings to lay on the page…instead, I am very conscious that the only words that went through my brain for the whole two hours were ‘wow, this is just SO beautiful’.
If I felt anything beyond the words, it was a sense of gratitude: just a warm and warming-to-my-fingerless-gloved-digit-ends flow of being-aliveness. Looking back from the warmth of my back room, I can analyse that into all the things I am grateful for: home and warmth, food, friends, the ability to walk, my eyesight, serendipity. At the time though all of that just fed into the overall awe of being out on a white-frost morning, without words.
Smiling.
White weather always makes me smile.
I start in the garden, which looks like the aftermath of a Halloween party, so strung with white webs.
Are there more webs in this kind of weather or are we just forced to notice them more? I guess that the ice-coating makes them more visible and less sticky, both of which mean that for all their intricacy, they may represent a night’s wasted labour. Unless spinning is warm work, in which case I hope they can sleep in the dawn sunlight, or in the warm shelter under the ivy. I feel for the spiders, but not so much that I’m about to invite them in!
The most I can do is to marvel at their handiwork.
As I head to the woods, I’m arrested by leaves. We think of them as ‘dead’: those that have fallen to earth or are only tenuously held in the autumn browns, and yet somehow they hold the ice at bay. There must be warmth yet within those veins that keep the frost-bite to the extremities. The beech and oak seem even more deeply bronzed for their edging of lace, like confectionary to be picked and placed upon a cake for decoration. How do they do that?
Everywhere I look is sparkle and glitter. Everyone I pass speaks to me – possibly because of the demented grin I am wearing under my purple hat – and the fact that I have two gloves on my non-camera hand but my trigger fingers are turning blue. Or maybe just because they get it. No-one comments on the weather. Everyone smiles. Everyone breathing in cold air “to kill the germs” my Mam would have said, and certainly it feels cleansing to take in a deep cold breath of this dry cold air.
As I walk out along the tree-shaded river to see how the reed beds are faring, a pair of shag fly a long lazy loop, as if to call me back to the Broad. There are robins, and blue-tits, and greenfinches. Somethings that might have been bramblings, but walkers and dogs frightened them away before I could fully absorb their colouring.
I decide that even the most beautiful of paths need not necessarily be walked to the end, and turn back. The shags reward me with a display of their fishing prowess, although one lost points for shouting at the gull that made him drop his catch. I could imagine the gull smirking as it flew away.
An egret startled me as it took flight from just beyond my feet.
And I just kept walking, wordless, among the ice-clad trees and frosted ferns.
Deep joy.
