flotsam and jetsom

 

We've been walking in woodlands, across meadows and through salt marshes. But today I am in my favourite place, beside the sea. I walk along the shore at a snail's pace. I take baby steps. It's frustratingly slow and I seem to tire very easily at the moment. But this will have to do for now.

The sea  invigorates me. I feel the breath rush out of my lungs and the sharp intake of new air. The tang of salt spray, the sound of surf, the call of the sea birds.

Spindle in hand, I walk slowly and carefully, just at that place where the waters and the sand overlap.

I walk slowly because I am tired today. But also to keep the yarn that I am slowly creating from breaking and loosing the whole thing to the sea...

As I walk, as I spin, I find other fibres twisted together by man but also spun by Mother Nature herself, thrown up from the depths of the sea's belly to rest here a while on the sand.

once again

The wheel has been turning since I got back. Singles spun from fluffy clouds. Wrapped back together in a loving embrace. Once again, I am back at my wheel. For the first time, I've been spinning intentionally. Conscious of what I am creating. Conscious of my mistakes, of my successes. Conscious also of the energy it takes me to do so. I spin in short bursts, doing a little here and there, when the fatigue is not so great. My thoughts revolve around the materials, the colours, the textures, the combinations. I breath the wild chaos of my making room. And again. And again. It feels so good, so right.

the things that keep us up at night

It's not the ache behind the eyes,

the loss of appetite or

the painful limbs.

The pallid skin or the freezing hands.

Neither is it the lost years.

The exams left untaken,

The high heels left unworn,

or the broken dreams. 

Rather, it is the perception of others,

their lazy comments or ignorant

judgements. Their unwillingness

to understand. To accept.

Their incessant questions and their hurtful words

muttered under their breath, which we

broach without comment.

These, not the fatigue nor the pain, are the things that

eat away at our lives, that mark us out

that keep us up at night.

the evening I returned

The evening I returned, I walked with in the lanes of rural Normandy, our first time side by side for nearly six weeks.

The evening I returned, we walked quietly amongst the swaths of Old Maid's lace, running our fingers through the blooms, almost too shy to speak. He picked me occasional blooms, handing them to me with a smile in his wide greenish brown eyes.

The evening I returned, We watched the speckled cows grazing in the orchard. We listened to the song thrush singing into the summer sky. He held me in his arms and whispered "Welcome back" into my ear, over and over and over.

The evening I returned, he held me in the fields and I felt both the warmth of him enclosing me and a light breeze caressing my skin. I looked up at the near midsummer sky, and it was as if this evening would go on forever. 

Normandie / La baie du Mont St Michel

 

Heavy sky. Shifting sands. Speckled cows. Biting wind. Hurried picnic with my sweetheart. 

Normandie / Villedieu les Poêles

Normandy, specifically the countryside around my Aunt's home in La Manche was my first taste of France. I've been coming here since I was a little girl, loosing myself in the country lanes and wild flower meadows of the bocage. 

It was a delight to stop by here on my way back to France. To walk along one of my favourite childhood paths. And to visit one of my favourite museums, loosing myself in the antique bobbins and lace for well over an hour.

homeshore

Just before nine, a misty morning in late May.
 

Like countless times before, I'm on a ferry bound for France. It's late May, and today the sun is hidden behind an impenetrable veil of cloud. 

As the ferry leaves the safety of Poole harbour, I pause for a moment. Looking south, the wide expanse of the channel stretches as far as the eye can see, broken only by the shimmering Isle of White to the east and the chalky edges of the Purbeck hills to the West. Only seventy miles away, lies the northern coast of France.

It's now nearly two years since I moved to France to live full time. Here on this ferry, amid the foam, I gaze back at this familiar shore-line. I can feel my two worlds colliding head on in this stretch of sea separating one home from another.

Why does an apple fall down from the tree? Why does steam rise? Because they are quite simply going to their natural home.

Sometimes I feel like I am both apple and steam, that I have a natural desire to both drift up and fall back to earth, that both the northern and southern coast of the Channel are my home-shore.

the mother tongue of our imagination

Eliot from The Mill on the Floss:

"These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows — such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination ..."

If mountains are my present, then the sea is surely my past. 

These past few weeks in Dorset, I've slipped quietly back into that past life. Now it is time to start preparing for the off, it feels almost impossible to leave the grey waters of the channel, the pebbly beaches and the comforting simplicity of their beach hut behind once more.  

Of course, I shan't be sorry to return to my little mountain life. I just know it won't be long before the siren song of the sea starts calling me again...

the tourist

 
To walk the streets of your home-town, the beaches of your home-shore, the paths of your home-forest, is to see not just what is but what used to be.  It is to find yourself a tourist in your native land, to suddenly find yourself a stranger, a tourist seeing not just how it is but also how it used to be.

In the town, American coffee-shops and charity shops have sprung forth where greengrocer's and baker's once stood.

In the forest, new shoots pierce the earth beside pine trees that have toppled to the forest floor.

Beside the sea, the ebb and the flow of the tides, the winter storms have shifted the sands and shingle along the shore-line.


There is movement, new life and decline around every street corner, every bend in the path.

Everywhere is overlaid with the bustle of the past, with people and places that are no longer here but who linger on in my heart.

To walk as a tourist-local is to have double vision, and ability to see the past and the present simultaneously. It is a condition I possess here and only here.

the meaning of trees

We embraced the glimpse of early summer last Friday, by going for a gentle walk in the New Forest. We spied secretive red deer, sleepy dormice, scrambling sand-lizards, vociferous cuckoos and carpets of bluebells. But I was most entranced by the sight and scent and sound of the trees that populate this ancient woodland.