A piece of bog. Flat and small. Dull brown. So flat that your eye can’t resist putting a spirit level to it. Just to check. Perhaps a little lower to the south? But no. The most unremarkable piece of ground. Sub-map. Nothing to offer a map. A few hundred yards of ‘nothing to report’. It […]Read Post ›
It is late summer. Not by the calendar. What use was ever a calendar for determining the change of mood from the upstroke of a year or a story or a life, to the downward. It is a matter of the heart. It is dirty brown leaves still fat with goodness, driven to an early […]Read Post ›
Although the time for last kisses is not yet upon me, at least not today or tomorrow it would seem, the days of first kisses are behind me. I am with a storyteller, a spell-weaving, place-conjuring lover and she is all the kissing. But still, there are echoes and lessons to be learnt from kisses, […]Read Post ›
Perhaps truth is not a place but a dance. That is what it seemed to be this morning when a piece of knowledge I first had as a young boy, and somehow misplaced for decades, circled around and re-materialised in a new river. When I was small I lived in rivers. I did not distinguish […]Read Post ›
For me, it is ‘the low lands, and the full green of the summer trees’. My longings are for peopled places, rich with memory and story and song. These are the slow, rooting days by the river, so sleek that words slide off them and will not stick. Days filled with the flavours of being, […]Read Post ›
I see so many lines across the old face of the land. There are fences and roads, administrative boundaries and lines of longitude, power-lines and pipelines. The land wears them with resignation and an eye on the long game, when all these things will come out in the wash. And then again there are lines […]Read Post ›
“This is the one place which I don’t yet know how to leave. Which I can’t quite believe that I can leave. My place.” I wrote that in this post, back in January. I wrote about the stone figure that I found almost four years ago in this place that I call simply the Rocky […]Read Post ›
I am not one for goodbyes. Not someone who starts those long goodbye ceremonies that begin with a visitor’s ‘well, I must be off now…’ and last for a further twenty minutes of eking out the long scraggy tail of the conversation, the searching amongst the things not already said as if looking for a […]Read Post ›
I have left more places in my life than I care to think about. So many places I thought I would stay in forever, and yet something has always moved me on – straightforward restlessness, the call of some new adventure, the development of some new need that only a new place could fill. As […]Read Post ›
The process of learning to belong to any new place is in part a process of internal mapping. Not just physical mapping – I know where this track leads; I know what is over that hill – but emotional mapping, as the landscape begins to reveal its mysteries to you, to hint at its stories. […]Read Post ›
