Week two of my get-back-into-walking endeavour and this time I do actually get on a train. Before anyone gets excited, I should just say that (a) the word 'endeavour' is used in its loosest sense and (b) I don't stay on the train for very long. First stop up the Bittern Line from Norwich is Salhouse – about 10 minutes away.
Sal derives from Sallow or Salix both of which relate to willow, and which may have come, further back from the Celtic sal (meaning 'near') and lis (meaning 'water'). A near-water tree, which willows are.
Another piece of synchronicity for me. From my earliest childhood, my favourite tree has been the weeping willow. There were two planted on the 'public open space' that I could see from my bedroom. A green, a field, a patch of grass left for people to gather on, or kids to kick a ball around, back in the days when town councils and planners had more sense than they were born with and knew what it meant to allow people to get outside their homes and be with each other, no matter how young or old, knew what it meant to be able to look out and see 'green', see grass, see trees, and – because if you left space it meant this too – see sky.
I was lucky. There was a green behind our house. And there was another one behind the row of bungalows in front of our house. Only one of them has been built on so far, and I hope the importance of the other is recognised and it continues to survive. It's nothing special. It's just a patch of grass, with a few trees, but maybe, in a town, that is special enough.
For us, it was one of the play-spaces. And for me, it had the pair of willow trees. Out of place now that I come to think of it, because they were not near water, as they should have been, so at least I know why those two particular willows wept.
I did not know then. I just instinctively loved the shape of them. I loved to sit under them and watch the light through the drapery of their branches. I did not then know that I was being called to the oriental.
Nor did I know that my fixed and mutable elements are wood and water. Wood Water. Of course I am drawn to the willow.
Very little of which has anything to do with the Salhouse which is one stop up the line from Norwich.
~ / ~
So back to the point at hand. There are two things I love about travelling by trains, as opposed to buses.
The first one is that you don't have to guess where your stop is. This is helpful when you don't know your way around. With buses you either have to scour maps, rely on your own GPS, or chat up the driver and hope he'll tell you where to get off. It's not a fool-proof system, especially if you get a grumpy driver. With trains, if the train is scheduled to stop at the station you want, it will stopthere. Mostly. Barring disasters.
And not only that, they will helpfully tell you when it you are approaching the stop. Again, the caveat is "mostly". I do remember one Kent journey when none of the communication methods were working and it was dark and I couldn't remember what the station before mine was. That was stressful. That was another story.
The second thing I love is that stations are not necessarily actually in the place they're named for.
They could be a couple of miles away. Across the fields.
I can't help wondering if this is an English eccentricity or whether other countries do the same thing.
Certainly, it seems that everywhere has adopted the principle for airports, ach, just name it after the nearest big place people might actually want to go. For example: Luton. No-one wants to go to Luton. I'm born & bred British and I can't tell you the first thing about the place. Solution: call it "London-Luton" that'll fool enough folk.
You have to smile (unless you're fool enough to think London-Luton airport is anywhere near the capital). I think the railways started the trend for that approach as they did for much else that is good and/or odd about life in this country.
"Good" about life, for me on this particular day, included being on a train and being back out in the everyday countryside.
I still harbour long-neglected ambitions to walk a long-distance trail, or a pilgrimage, but with every year they retreat further into fantasyland. In the meantime, I've returned to an earlier love of just getting on a train, getting off wherever it stops and just looking to see what there is.
Add into the mix a plan for a walk (which is nothing more than a plan), a couple of maps, a camera, a notebook and this is me going back to my roots and finding the new route. Any of these paths I may have walked before will have changed since then. And I certainly have.
The person I might have thought I wanted to be back then, may or may not have shown up somewhere along the way… but she's not here now.
That person had plans for her life. This one doesn't.
That's not as sad as it sounds.
I wrote a number of affirmations a few weeks ago. Once of them turned out to be I am living my ideal life. Even as an affirmation, that is quite bold. Generic. All-encompassing. Affirmations are meant to be more specific than that. But here's the kicker: I am!
When I do the Ideal Life exercise these days, the differences between it and what I have, where I am, who I'm spending time with etc are so small as to be meaningless.
When we do these exercises, because of something we read in a book, or because our line manager wants to know where we want to be in five years' time, or because a coach wants us to be "the best we can be" we are always encouraged to DREAM BIG!!!!
My radical thought is: maybe your dreams aren’t BIG!!!! maybe your dreams are small and ordinary. It turned out that mine were. And it turned out that small and ordinary isactually really rather wonderful.
I didn't (don't) dream small because I don't believe that Big Hairy Audacious Goals are a bad thing. If those are what you have in mind: go for it. Dream big, plan big, and do what you need to do to get there, provided it doesn't involve harming others on the way.
No, I dreamed my dreams and now most of my dream is real. It is simply that what I wanted, what I still want, isn't to be mega-rich, isn't to be famous, isn't to change the world, or save mankind.
What I wanted, still want, is to be affluent enough, to be respected by those who know me, to be loved, and to change my little corner of the world for the better. I'm not sure saving mankind is in the best interests of everyone else on planet Earth so I'll leave that one aside.
What I still want is to explore and to learn. What I still want is to wander down quiet lanes, across fields, over hills, along beaches. What I still want is to try to capture my experience, put it into words and send it out into the wild. What I still want is to try to catch a moment in a picture and hold it forever.
What I wanted – and now have – is the time and the resources to try to do these things.
And what I've learned in the process of my manifesting my dream, is that dreams are not things we achieve, they are things that happen if we simply allow space for them. Sometimes we create that space, the way we create space for a garden to grow: by hard work, clearing, digging, feeding, planting, grafting. Sometimes we create that space, the way we create space for new ideas: by resting, de-cluttering, waiting, playing. Sometimes we allow that space by simply getting out of the way of what life has in store for us.
Dream big if you have big dreams…and if your dreams are small, honour them as if they were huge, because when they manifest, you will realise that they were.
~ / ~
I believe that we find what we're looking for. On this occasion, back in Salhouse, it turned out that I was looking for flowers.
I thought about the apps that you can download onto yourphone. So you can take a photograph of some poor innocent plant that's minding its own business, send it to Apple orGoogle or whoever (who won't just take the image, but the date and time and who knows whatever else) and let them tell you what they think it is.
It made me think of those remote tribes who felt (maybe still feel, and maybe aren't wrong) that a piece of your soul is stolen whenever you are photographed. Do flowers have souls? Do I steal a piece every time I take a photograph? Does it matter what I do with that image afterwards? Will they forgive me in the next life if I come back as a plant, or a smaller creature more directly dependent upon their goodness?
I take a lot of pictures. I delete a lot of them. If a picture takes a soul-fragment will it find its way back when we delete the picture or is it lost forever? I like to think it is freed, and will find its way home.
I don't take pictures on my phone. I take them with a camera that is not connected to the internet.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much. but the lady does wonder about these things, for sure. But only afterwards.
As I wandered the lanes and fields and streets around Salhouse, I will be honest, I simply kept snapping. I kept looking and delighting in the beauty of this spring-filled day of colours. I said hello to the plants I recognised and wondered about those I did not.
I don't habitually keep a tally, but this was a day of such abundance…I found:
Dandelions and daisies. Honesty in its regal purple. Virginal Blackthorn. Garlic mustard, which has suddenly become abundant in my garden – I must find a use for this unexpected harvest. Wildradish. My first poppies of the summer. Alexanders in abundance. Buttercups. Stitchwort (lesser or greater, I couldn't be sure). A whole copse full of bluebells, and then a graveyard likewise. A fluorescent field of rape in its Hi-Viz jacket, that some might say I'm lucky not to be able to smell. It might be a chemical-yellow, but surely these too are gorgeous plants? Or is it just me that looks closely enough to see?
An old brick garden wall hosts escaping wall-flowers and cushions of moss for them to rest upon. Wood sorrel (or something similar). A few stray violets. And the gloriously named common ramping-fumitory.
Oh yes, and the Three-Cornered Garlic that I spoke about last week. I found this beautiful single flower, that had an orchid look about it. I was entranced. And then, of course, given what we discovered last week, I found whole swathes of them. Banksides covered. They are delicate and fragile-looking individuals, but en masse, given what we know, they do look a little unruly and out to conquer with their nets and spindles and set-ready seeds.
Beautiful, all the same.
~ / ~
Railway miles: 5
Walk miles: 5.6
