Away days

Well, my holiday feels a million miles away now and my plan was to post some pics sooner, but hey, that's life in the slow lane.

the ubiquitous red valerian

 "What I did on my holidays..."

Walking and knitting mostly, and incredibly, maybe 'cos of all the walking I managed to sleep.

Not every night and not always in bed, but some sleep is better than no sleep.  It was odd to be up in the morning without a buzz of tiredness in my head and taking ages to be able to think or speak.

Sadly the spell of salty sea-air and quiet peace was broken on arriving home.  This left me in a bit of a trough.

the beach at Bamburgh

view from the dune

 Horizontalis

I used to spend a lot of my childhood freedom going out then finding a good place to lie in long grass and cloud watch.  This taught me how being horizontal makes you part of the landscape in a different way than being vertical.  It was always a good way to leave yourself, it seemed, by looking into the sky.

I re-visited the feeling while lying on the edge of a dune with the sea breeze skimming over me.  I had to put a blanket over the spiky grass and was surrounded by soft sand but the sky was the same light blue with white clouds.

It didn't take long to achieve  a meditative calm filled only with awareness of what I could hear and feel, accompanied by the constant reassuring rhythm of the sea.

 

Then on the blue above me was a movement, but without sound, a kite.  While I watched it my awareness changed.  I had the feeling I was watching a film, a fiction, rather than something real.  I even began to imagine the music that would go with it.

Are we there yet?

A lot of years ago I was on the Isle of Skye trudging towards the Black Cuillins.  I say trudge because the ground was rough with the kind of sedges that slow your progress.

It's a tricky place for sure, with dimensions that don't seem to correspond to anything else you know.

After a while of being assaulted by clouds of midges issuing from the heather, and with legs already tightening, I realised I was being deceived by the distance.  The ground stretching before me seemed fairly level, until I got nearer.  There were so many dips and troughs I hadn't seen that it took a lot longer to cross and time began to get strange. After hours, the Cuillins looked as remote as they had when I set out.

A similar thing happened while walking along the coast towards Dunstanburgh Castle, with the sea on my right and sheep on my left, wind whipping right off the sea into me, finding every failing in my inadequate clothes.

It was pretty flat with a path worn by hundreds of previous feet, leading towards the ruined castle that was the only feature.  An impressive one at that, on the edge of the land facing out to sea.  Soon my right ear was like a shell with the sea roaring through it and weirdly, Dunstanburgh Castle appeared to be receding rather than getting any nearer.

A top tip...

'Something Understood' is a programme on Radio 4 based on readings and music relating to a particular subject.  Last week, poet Sean Street was considering what can be found in both silence and stillness.  I have listened to it twice, such are my radio listening habits! but if you missed it, or have not heard the programme before, I'd give this one a listen.

You'll hear some great music - 'In a Silent Way' by Miles Davis, Nielsen's 'Helios Overture', which the composer described as "Sunlight breaking the silence of darkness" and a temple bell in the mountains of Japan, resonating into silence.  Like the final notes in the last movement of Mahler's 9th, you follow them until you can't hear them anymore, but have no way of knowing when they ended and silence began.

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