Category: motion

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Ophelia

A great grey roll of cloud lies over the mainland. Over the island, the noon sun is salmon-red, sidling eyewards in quick glimpses between snowballing white clouds. The boats are rolling about, lurching in their berths, jerking as the lines tug taut, as the wind stiffens and rises.

It’s hard to take a wind with a human name seriously. Yet Ophelia excites me, fraying my nerves to a quiet frenzy as her wheeching whine conducts itself through sixty-odd riggings. The noise builds in a strange sheer crescendo. The motion builds too, the boat becoming increasingly restless in her cramped quarters, straining at her moorings, sending my heart shuddering in its hull with each jarring heave. She wants to be released, wants to ride herself free on this great gusting abandon. And I do too, though instead I keep holding on, obsessing over our lines, loosening and re-looping them repeatedly as I try to find the perfect balance – enough slack to have room to move yet enough tension not to stray.

Oh, but it’s tempting – although in this wind we’d be on the shore before we had time to raise even the head of the sail. Patience, I tell myself. It’s not time to cast off yet. It’s not time to let go.

Port Bannatyne marina, Isle of Bute, Argyll, Scotland
17th October 2017

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northward

We’re hanging out here with the eiders and oystercatchers, the heron and a few noisy gulls. We’re waiting for our flu to subside, for the winds to shift, for the tide to turn. And when they do, we’ll be gone again, north again, hopefully further north than we’ve ever been before.

The sun’s cool and golden now, settling slowly behind the various western peninsulas of the mainland. Will it be thinner in the north or more substantial? And what will we be? Still light-driven nomads of sorts, I guess. As I suppose we all are, continually moving in time if not geography, forever following the sun.

Ettrick Bay, Bute, Scotland
10th April 2017

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morning

A soft morning with the hills rising in round blue folds
A cool morning with the mist resting in opaque white drifts
A still morning with each twig and blade balancing spherical beads of dew
A slow morning with the cars moving along the valley floor in a quiet muffled hum
and two robins warbling in bright fluted streams from the top branch of the ash tree.

When the sun comes the mist doesn’t lift but lights up.
The robin songs strengthen, the traffic buzzes a little louder.
The day itself begins to hum, to thrum, to vibrate on unseen strings;
a deft weft, a swift pluck,
     a strum, even,
scattering the dewbeads,
shifting the mist,
palpating our flighty red breasts.

Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales
12th December 2016

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tasks

Everything’s done that needs to be. The hills are heaped up, the moors stripped down, the beaches lovingly spread. The deer are taking care of themselves, ambling in their steady streams down and up the slopes.

There’s nothing to do here.

What a relief.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
3rd September 2016

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the wee things

It’s the wee things, always the wee things. Whether in the middle of the daily routine or swept up in a great adventure, it’s the small gesture which catches us and which somehow, surprisingly, completes.

On the moortop, the stretching views and snow-struck hills are focused into the tiny buffeting of a small white downy feather caught in the yellowed grass. On the sea, the rough grace of the Minch is collected into the handful of froth thrown up by a rogue wave slapping us broadside, which catches the sun before it falls, making a momentary rainbow.

Beauty blooms so quickly.

Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales / The Minch, north-west Scotland
11th February 2016

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for an old flame

Tonight we’ll go in search of bonfires, good fires,
fires of the hearth.

“When there is nothing left to burn, you must set fire to yourself.”

That’s what we’ll do then.
We’ll live for entrance and dancing,
in lithe leaping flames,
interweaving,
interleaving

Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales / Glasgow, Scotland
5th November 2015 / 2006

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days

These are four season days just now.

The morning comes cool and green and dew-wet.
The afternoon glazes over under a hot blue sun.
The smoky sweet scent of autumn draws close in the dusk.

And in the night? We uncover the world. We wrap ourselves in its bare unladen branches.
And sometimes we sleep.

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
2nd October 2015

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River Inver

The whitest water I’ve ever seen was at a “minor waterfall” near Mount Fuji in Japan. It wasn’t just the whitest water, it was the whitest whiteness I’ve ever seen, wild and tumbling in a rapid thrash of motion, shattering like diamonds as it smashed round the rocks, poured over, frothed down.

The River Inver is brown in its depths, its spuming foam yellowish as it roars on. But still – the illuminate flashes, the diamond fragments scattering –

River Inver, Assynt, Scotland
28th October 2024