I want to talk about something that has become very important to me, and to try to explain why. I discovered “Creative Writing Outside” at a time when I was somewhere between upheaval and overwhelm. Being welcomed into a circle of writers was one of the most healing experiences of that time. I remember some of the early pieces I wrote were full of memory and pain. A lot of the pieces I have written since are also full of memory, and though there is less pain they still come from the heart and they are still very emotional pieces.
The strangeness is that they don’t feel emotional when I write them, only when I read them afterwards, especially if I try to read them aloud, to others. I can write something with a smile, but then falter when I come to try to read it. There is part of me believes that is a good thing. Perhaps we use the written word as a way of distancing ourselves from our own reality, and our reading it out brings it back home.
I believe that there is a form of alchemy that occurs when we approach the outside world with our inner one. I believe that when we open our hearts and minds to the planet, it steps right in and starts spring cleaning – even if we start in winter (as I did) or in autumn, or – just to complete the circle – at the height of summer.
If we let the world in, and by the world I mean this planet earth and its creatures and plants and people and communities, and the deep universe that holds us all…if we let that in, then it will help us to sift through the dusty old cupboards of our psyche, insist we re-read all those old books from childhood that lurk in the back of the brain, tempt us to re-learn the nursery rhymes we’ve long since forgotten and the poems we remember hearing but never quite knew.
If we let the world in, it responds by letting us back in to it.
We might set out to find a sense of a particular place – in this case Cley and the area around it – but what we will find is a sense of our own place, our place in our own life, our place in the world.
If we let it the marsh will call forth a picture from the memory board, of (say) a mother, no taller than the reeds, binoculars in hand, her holiday-permed hair all a-wry and not yet gone to grey, suddenly called to look over her shoulder at a camera.
I have such a picture of my mother. She looks thoughtful, and I have no idea what she has in her head. Though I wasn’t there, I know that picture was taken at Cley. I know my Dad would have been wielding the camera. The photographic print is fading to sepia in the sunlight. Mam can have been no older then, than I am now. The Cley visitor centre had probably only just opened. I remember Mam talking about that day, and about the guide who had taken them into the hides, walked with them among the reeds, told them about the birds. She was excited about the fact that the place existed, with people who would talk to you and teach you, much more than she was about any particular thing she’d seen that day.
I wonder what she would make of the fact that I come back here season after season and try to write about some of it, and about other things that it brings to mind. Like her, and Dad, and my childhood, and all the other times we walked down to the sea, or through woods, or looked at night skies, or morning ones. Or that time in Scotland where we counted the geese out in the morning, and counted them home again in the evening. As if they were planes, and they were ours, and it mattered that they all came home again.
Obviously, there are geese here too. If we let them, the geese will interrupt a lesson as they fly over in full squadron formation and demanding that we pay them attention. So we do. And we do not comment on it, beyond sending a smile to the birds and to each other. It does not need to be explained, any more than the landing of a dragonfly on an outstretched hand.
Or a gannet diving.
Or seals swimming close to shore.
Or why some things are more beautiful when wet.
Or the sound that reeds make when there is no wind.
Or how deep the colours are when the light is autumnal low, and the sunlight is hemmed in by storm clouds.
There are some things about which “if you have to ask the question, you will not understand the answer”.
Yet we try to catch them. We try to hold them as they are, without asking anything of them other than, please stay long enough for me to see and hear you and understand at least a little of who, what, how & why you are. Let me know you. Let me hold you.
Or maybe we are asking: Please. Hold me.
And if we let it – it will. The place. The moment.
Cley, Salthouse, Blakeney, Bayfield.
Marsh, churchyards, villages, freshes, woods, water meadows, riverbanks, reedbeds, shingle banks, beach, stone paths, roadsides, hills, fields, benches, gates, signposts, memorials, forgotten things, found things.
These have held me, and healed me.
If we let it, an oak tree will hold every secret we want to tell it, because not all the lines we write are meant to be shared. I have a favourite oak in Bayfield Woods, that I spoke to once. I promised to sit in silence if it would tell me its story. Now when we go back up there, I try to write about other things, but I go and say hello, and place a hand on a branch, and feel a tree’s reassurance – mostly I try to honour my promise to sit (for at least a little while) in silence. And listen.
If we let it, maybe a tree will remember us.
If we let it, the wind may reward us for a faith. On a morning when we are thinking that perhaps we don’t really want to be out of doors today, maybe it will blow the rain westwards, and break up the
sky into interesting patterns. It will play with clouds, so that some rise above the villages behind us like the plume from some giant Gresley engine on the Muddle-And-Go-Nowhere. It will call others to stay hunkered down out on the horizon, so that it may also call the sun out to play and between
them they will set a pool of ocean a-flame in all the colours of oil on water, and tempt a rainbow to climb slowly into the sky.
If we let it, the rainbow will call forth conversations had with fathers, about the splitting of light with prisms, or the school yard chant for learning the order of the colours, which only ever works if you know your English history. A rainbow: the arc of the covenant for some. A rainbow: a symbol associated with societal change for others. A rainbow: remember when we painted them on windows as a sign of gratitude or of hope, not so long ago? I remember finding one chalked on the cut end of a log in my local woods, towards the end of March 2020, surrounding the simple words “it will be ok”.
If we let it, a rainbow will stop us hunting treasures along the beach; it will distract us from the sleek black heads of seals going about their own lives in a pea-green sea, the colour of storm light. It will say “look at me” – and we will watch an imperfect band of colours climb slowly out of the western sea, reaching up, see its reflections behind, in front, pale imitations. We will watch until the horizon rainfall draws our eyes and we look to east – there a sister band of fractured light starts to rise.
If we let it take the time it needs, we will see a rainbow clasp its two halves together and immediately start to dissolve as the next wave of rain swallows up its birthplace.
If we let it, that seal still just going about its business in the water, will conjure a memory of swimming peacefully off an island, a memory of a sunset, a memory of barking on the rocks in crashing waters below a ruin of a castle in Scotland.
If we let it, a gull crossing the sky will take on the soul of a lost love.
If we let it, autumn will speak of the summer gone, or the winter to come.
If we let it, the land will give up its history, tell of its lost past, of the people and the storms and the wars, but it will probably keep quiet about the ordinariness of farmhands and blacksmiths and dogs and individual cows or pigs that probably had names and were more than food in the making. The land will give us much if we look and listen, but all the more will it hold, those secrets never to be told of lives lived in quietude. Those are the things we must reimagine, if we let the land take us in and if it trusts us enough with its story.
It seems to me there is a two-way thing in conversing with place. We go wanting to know it, the place, ecology, geology, archaeology, birds, mammals, plants, landscape, history – but while
all of that is there for the taking, we only begin to make sense of it, when we allow our own story to be given in exchange.
When I go to Cley, to write outside, I feel somewhat inferior to the birders and the flower specialists and the climatology experts and the woodsmen and the poets and the historians, because I have none of their knowledge. But I keep coming back, and it isn’t –perhaps it should be, but it isn’t – to learn their knowledge of the names and habits of things, it is just to be in this place and to let it draw out of me as much as it puts into me.
I probably still don’t have a true sense of this place, but I know I have a growing sense of my place in the world. And that will do for now.
