Category: motion

Posted on

change

We mustn’t take it for granted though – the heart and the belly of it, the pulse and thrust – all this careless, determined change. The world moves, quivering and quickening, and we do: back and forward, forth and on. It’s so easy to forget.

In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd writes of dwelling “in pure intimacy with the tangible world”. She notes that, consciously, such contact comes only in rare moments, such as when we’re waking from sleep or preoccupation, our habitual selves temporarily shed.

But it’s there all the time whether we choose to feel it or not: a low continuity beating in the belly; a green weaving, a breathing red thread.

Pontycymer, Cwm Garw, South Wales
26th April 2014

Posted on

motion

snail on window

The season is on the move. Brambles sneak out their long thorny feelers, green fern heads unwind and the catkins on the alder give way to fresh folds of leaves, thrusting through like small fingers, grasping at the air. In the pulsing world too, things are on the go. Tortoiseshell butterflies drift on gentle gusts around the garden; jackdaws congregate in ragged black crowds to ride up and down the air currents above the rooftops; the white doves from the next village batter up and down the valley more energetically than ever; and high up on the hilltop moors, a red kite slowly circles.

Under the sun, all these layers of life reaching skyward. But none impress me so much as the visitor on our windowpane, who, with resolve and audacity, is quietly going for it, at a snail’s pace, climbing infinitesimally up.

Pontycymer, South Wales
6th April 2014

Posted on

whiteness

The whiteness of Scottish winters is on the go. Not held static with ice or slowly settling with heavy snows but moving: slim streams rushing down hillsides, big sea rollers whipping off into windy spray and blowing foam, sudden batterings of hail. Overhead too everything is in motion: thick white clouds scudding across the sky, the swift belly-white of the gulls fleering around beneath. When there is snow, it comes and goes; a dusting here, a gully-full there, before it’s rained out, wind-scoured, leaving only bleached stones and bones.

And the whiteness of Scottish winters is noisy. None of the soft muffling of snowfall or low creaking of ice. Our whiteness roars and rumbles: beaching waves, rapid rivers, the high clamour of waterfalls, the bright clattering of frozen rain. Scotland’s whiteness throws itself in your face and into your ears. It whips and lashes.

Even the elegant pale-limbed birches wave energetically alongside the running water, although occasionally you come upon the stillness of a white sea-washed stone resting silently at the head of the tide, cast up, waiting for the pull of the travelling moon.

white sea-washed stone

Assynt, Scotland
6th March 2014