There’s an idyllic green field that I’ve returned to now the summer is ending.
It sits draped over the hill behind our house like a soft saddle. From above it looks as if it’s floating, suspended over the tightly arrayed rows of the village, held beneath the bare bleached shoulders of the valley head.
The valley climbs steeply, with the village pitted deep in the cleft of its slow slim river, and the field hangs halfway up, smoothly swathed over a gentle hollow in the hillside, like a dear green meadow of the mind.
I once read a quote in a Kenneth White book about the mind of a deer being a green place and the image has stayed with me. I imagine a quiet clearing in a forest, filtered by leaves, a cool greenness gathering.
The field doesn’t have the close-hid intimacy of woodland, with its winding trails and swift wildness. The field is domesticated, grazed upon alternately by ewes and their half-grown lambs or a few highland cows and a dark brown horse. It’s open pasture, where you can lay out your thoughts and bathe them in the flooding sunlight and sit with them there; or lay your whole self out and rest, while the light illuminates the veridical carpet and the world, for a moment, stays.
Above Pontycymer, Garw Valley, South Wales / Cwm Garw, De Cymru
29th September 2013