LesleyA

And so I go into the woods

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 06:46:02 -0700

“And so I go into the woods,” said the poet Wendell Berry, more than once and in many ways. He went into the woods to find solace from a world in turmoil. In this season of this year, so do I.

With no apologies for a little repetition from last week…and so I go into the woods, the smallest of woods, a city wood, an old plantation allowed a little wildness now. The wildness of growing and falling as it will, trunks crash-landing across footpaths and left. No forensic clean-up teams. Limbs outstretched but not demanding anything, now.

Just welcoming the fungi, just surrendering the weight of living, that had become too much.

There is such a fragile thing as a single leaf caught on a single spider spun thread, dangling mid-space. This one is framed by trees against a window of sky, but I fail to catch it adequately, photograph it properly, preserve a moment that was simply meant to be observed, and maybe only by me…a single leaf on a gossamer thread…still glowing, floating, spinning in mid-air, not falling.

In the city wood – Twenty Acre Wood since you ask – I have no idea whether there are still that many acres, but I like the name. It makes me think of Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore and Tigger and all the Tao and Te and Zen exuberance we lost when we grew up. In the city wood on an unplanned wander, I come across carvings of the green man, hung on trees, unsignposted,
unclaimed, simply there to be seen if we bother to look. I come across obstructions and unexpected ways. I come across myself. Again.

And I come across that single thread-caught leaf and try, and try, and try, to catch it with a camera and an unsteady hand, and it keeps spinning, and I keep failing.

A runner sprints past and looks back at this weird woman...Read More

One step in front of the other

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:29:19 -0700

It had to happen. At some point I would have to come back to walking, purely for its own sake. For exercise, for mind-shifting, for touching the planet, for getting out of my head, or back into it in a more meaningful way. For whatever reason mattered on any given day.

I talk about coming back to walking as if I had ever moved away from it. I hadn’t. Not really. But, also, maybe I had.

I had come to a place where I would more readily get on a bus when I could easily walk it. I had come to a place where I would walk because it was the only option, and no hardship, but not really think about the landscape or streetscape I was walking through. In that sense I had disconnected myself.

I still went for walks, but not so often.

Walking to get somewhere had stopped being the default option.

Certainly no longer hiking.

I had drifted.

Not unknowingly.

I kept trying to pull myself back in; I kept failing.

There was the ill-fated attempt to use a book of walks inherited from my Dad. It was an interesting challenge, and I did get to some places I otherwise wouldn’t have, but in the end the logistics made it more of a chore than an adventure. I’m too old to be adding chores into my life. I’m still young enough to want adventures. I’d somehow lost the plot on how to determine the one from the other at the ‘setting out’ stage.

There was the notion of going away at least once a month, even if only for one night. Every trip would involve some kind of walking, because it always does, but in the end that became exhausting. I think maybe the organising was more so than the doing, but also the planning ahead didn’t allow for the way my life was filling up with other loveliness.

What do you do when the thing that is taking up most of your head-space is not your story to tell? Do you ignore it? Do you repeat from your own perspective? What, actually, does it mean to bear witness to someone else’s pain?

I’m thinking about this because I’ve been doing a lot of it. Especially over the last two weeks because of a culminating event, but actually over the last maybe three years. I’m also recognising that the notion of a culmination suggestions that it’s all over, when of course it isn’t.

The story doesn’t stop when the author types ‘the end’. The surviving characters walk off centre stage and have to carry on with the unwritten script for what happens next. Something always happens next, and the first next things carry the ripples of what went before, maybe all the next things carry those diminishing ripples. Maybe not. It’s different for all of us.

What do you do?

Perhaps start from recognising that ‘bearing witness’ is not the same as ‘giving testimony’. We are absolutely not under oath to speak all of our truth all of the time. Perhaps only share as much of the story as actually does impact on you personally, and only with the people who need to know in order to understand how you are feeling and reacting if that impinges on their interactions with you.

Perhaps as far as the rest of the world is concerned, then it is not your story to tell. Don’t diminish some-one else’s pain to gossip.

I often think that it is useful to focus on the very words we use. We deploy them blithely without really pondering the depth of meaning. Bearing witness. Bearing it, carrying the weight of it.

That’s what we need to find the way to do. Carry the weight of what we see and feel, and...Read More

Island Walking – September 2026 – Part 2

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:46:53 -0700

As I’ve said, I’ve been walking Guernsey for a fair few years now. I have a map. I have an internal visual of most of the layout of the island in terms of towns, villages, beaches, but at the same time: I have no sense of direction and the twisty-turning nature of lanes combines with the from-every-direction sea-light and sea-scent to throw me off whatever track I might have thought I was on.

Add to that my childlike delight in just going and looking and my Dad’s oft-repeated mantra that it wasn’t a proper day out if we didn’t get lost. Not seriously, life-threateningly lost. Though to be fair I could name a couple of occasions when we came close, the two of us…and a few more when I was, let’s say, at greater risk than I’m comfortable with when walking alone.

Then again, isn’t that the point? You need some level of risk in the being lost, even if it’s just the risk of a night in the open, or the risk of missing your boat and having no idea what to do if that happens, or the risk of running into the wrong people or no people at all, or the risk of wild animals, or the food running out.

These kinds of risks don’t apply when you’re just pootling around a small island with no plan other than getting back to base, eventually, and preferably before it gets dark.

Even the risk of darkness is limited. I have walked a few of these lanes in the dark before now. Not often enough to be comfortable with it, but enough to understand that I can do it. Do I need to add a hi-viz vest to my packing list? I have one, it would take up no room. It’s a thought.

It wasn’t a thought that occurred on the day. On the day, my thoughts to begin with were taken up with a deliberate diversion – and then with the intended destination – and then with the really bonkers idea that I might remember the previous route, in reverse, to get me...Read More

Island walking - September 2026 - part 1

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:25:36 -0700

“Where is Em?” QR asked on the group chat.

She’d given me a different name to begin with, but then stripped me of my laurels and simply called me Emily. A nod to the Brontë or Dickinson I like to think, because I am the writer amongst us, the poet, the romantic.

“Where is Em today?” is a genuine question, and it’s also a gentle check-in, a quiet asking of “are you ok?” because I’m also the one amongst us who lives alone and travels alone. I guess that not responding to anything on the group chat is the modern equivalent of not taking the milk bottles in. It’s good that someone notices.

This particular day she asked, it was also a good question because, beyond a generalisation, for most of that afternoon I couldn’t have answered it. That became true for the following morning as well, and then even more so on another day.

I wasn’t lost. You can’t really get properly lost on a island roughly ten miles by five. If all else fails, keep walking and you’ll hit sea, turn right or left and keep going and you’ll end up either back where you started or at least somewhere you recognise. If the island is Guernsey you will most likely end up on a road with the word “BUS” painted on it at some point. So if all else fails, find such a road, and the word, and (provided it’s not too late in the day) just wait…and a bus from one side of that road or the other will get you back to Town.

Besides these days we have mobile phones and the internet will give us cab company details. The internet will also give us maps, so – really – if you’re lost on a small island it means that you’re really trying to be precisely that. It means that you left your phone behind, or ‘forgot’ to charge it, or walked out of range of any signal. It means that despite everything you promised your father you...Read More

Arrive Slowly

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 14:11:43 -0700

Take two days, to feel the distance, and learn to relax through delays and the dashing to countermand the maybe-getting-there-later, which won’t even matter. Let tired eyes stop trying to focus on all the green blur you guess is trees and seek instead the carved white horse on the hillside. Walk into day two along unfamiliar streets because they are and you can and there is time to pull in the patterns in brickwork, black shadows of leaves on white-painted walls, dew glistening on motor cars and the old abandoned well that might, after all, be the simple whimsy of the council’s architect. Walk to witness the blue of the lagoon seen through the construction fence. Essential flood defence works say signs as if chicken wire will hold back the tide. You cannot taste the sea and all the gulls are silent. Go early to a bare room, with chairs, not unlike the doctor’s waiting room except that when you are called there will be a ship and you will be on your way again.

Beyond a salt-encrusted window watch the land slip, curved beaches, a row of old fisher cottages dwarfed by a castellated pleasure dome: did Kubla Kahn walk this green and pleasant land? Small boats navigate glitter-showers while, on the hill beyond, a bright tarn catches all the light it can to feed down through unseen streams, back to the sea. Watch yachts, the real kind, the ones with sails, not floating palaces, and jet-skis which sound like Russian aeroplanes and the one ramshackle painted wooden craft with its outboard motor and young men in knitted beanies. Watch the land receding, until all there is to see is sea…sea crinkled like tinfoil, sea the shade of shale or slate or blue-rinsed road surface, not aqua-marine although both of...Read More

And the summer became the fall

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:39:26 -0700

Whenever the season changes, there are old songs that play in my head as I walk through the cemetery. They replay because they were part of previous seasons, and maybe because they speak to this season of my life.

If I’m in a melancholy mood, I get the Eagles’ “The autumn leaves have got you thinking…”

I try to switch that one off. I love the song, but I don’t believe that any of it was wasted time. I like who I am; I love where I am in my life; I would not change a second of it. Absence and pain notwithstanding.

It’s too early in the season for Autumn leaves, but they are here. Perhaps the trees have reckoned with their internal dryness and decided to let go early, conserve their reserves. Everything is seeding and shedding. Autumn may be early this year because the Summer has been so harsh. What that means for the year to come, I have no idea.

Or perhaps this is all misperception. Perhaps it is just that the shift from Summer to Autumn sneaks up on me so quickly these days. I don’t think so. I’m sure that August was always still Summer. In our family at any rate. The last two weeks of August, we would be camping. We would be spending days on beaches, swimming in seas, trailing round ruined castles, playing until nightfall.

Only: when you’re young you don’t necessarily pay attention to nightfall. If you’re already tired and ready for an hour of drinking coke and listening to music, playing the arcades, before happily crawling into a sleeping bag, perhaps you don’t bother looking at the clock.

Part of my ‘ready to grow young again’ ethos includes trying not to look at the clock.

So here we are: heading into the last days of August and I am feeling the seasonal shift.

In the last week the temperature dropped from a high of...Read More

Remember to look for the miracles

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:43:17 -0700

Here's a thought: if you don't believe in miracles, consider the humble bumble. Look at the fragility of those wings. Look at the body it has to lift. Look at the complete lack of aerodynamic shaping. Look at all that fluffy, furry, air-catching hindrance. Then tell me that the bee can fly. How can there be enough muscle power to even get aloft, never mind then dance in the air?

Is the miracle that the bee can fly?

Or is the miracle that it never occurs to a bee that it can't?

This particular bee - the one in the photo - is another miracle, because it and its colleagues came down to talk to me. I was cutting back the golden rod. It's all dying, from the ground up, and from the top down. It's all flopped to the horizontal, and has no strength to stand up again, and although I feel bad about cutting anything while it's still in flower, on this occasion doing so would give it time to regroup at root level, and also allow the things around it to take a share of what little water there is to be had. So I set about cutting, and bagging up to await the emptying of the garden waste bin. The garden was quiet but for the grasshopper fest that is ongoing.

But not for long.

A bee that had been foraging the salvias came over to see what I was doing...and within five minutes or so, the fallen golden rod was awash with a variety of bees and wasps and hover flies. It felt like someone had sent out an alarm call: quick - this food source is being ripped away - get here now!

And they did.

I don't like cutting things while they're still in flower, so there's just no way I'm going to, when they've been descended upon by the local possee, intent on protecting their source. I stopped cutting. For now at least.

If the flight of the bee is a miracle, is it not a greater one that it could come and tell me: please, stop that! A greater one yet, that I might listen and say:...Read More

What it is to walk

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:12:25 -0700

During the week we were being encouraged once again to see ‘the walk’ – any walk – as ‘a journey’. Poetic sensibilities being what they are, we extended that into a discussion about any walk being a pilgrimage if we chose to see it that way.

We talked about how far a couple of us had got, separately, in terms of planning actual ventures onto the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. We skimmed over our reasons for not actually setting out, because we were more interested in why – after the why-nots had subsided – we somehow didn’t feel the need to do it anymore. The moment had passed, we said.

I think it’s deeper than the moment. I think it’s more like the ‘need’ had passed. Whatever it was we had hoped to get from or to leave behind on the camino, we’d found another way of dealing with it.

We talked about other potential pilgrimages…all those sites in the British Isles as possible destination points. I recognise in myself that they also no longer call to me. I start to wonder why.

Why did they, originally? Why do they no longer? How have I changed?

I suspect I was looking for ‘something profound’. I wanted ritual. I wanted to prove I didn’t need friends so much as I needed the kindness of strangers. I wanted miracles and enchantment. I wanted a walk to have a purpose. Maybe I just wanted proof that I was capable of a very long walk.

No matter what it was I wanted - and I still don't know for sure what that was - the more interesting questions are: Why don’t I want that anymore? What is the soul-level change?

I don’t know yet.

What I do know is that I have oodles of half-done writing projects anchored in incomplete walking projects. They got started; they got abandoned. Intellectually, I am still...Read More

Stepping into the music

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:05:32 -0700

I danced with an old man last night. I have no idea who he is, and I’m not using ‘old’ either euphemistically or judgementally. As a purely objective assessment he’d have a good ten or more years on me, and I’m no spring chicken. Someone used the horrible expression ‘on the pull’. If he was, well, good luck to him and I admire his optimism. More importantly though, whatever his thinking, he was sweet and gentlemanly – and he was on his feet, alone, and dancing.

And so was I.

As was the female friend that I’d gone disco’ing with.

As were most of the people on the floor. There were a few couples actually dancing with each other, but more people dancing in loose groups, or shifting pairings, or simply alone.

My friend and I talked in those rare moments where we were both sitting one out, about whether we’d have gone there alone. Answer: probably not. On further reflection though: why not? We’d talked a lot over dinner in the pub, but once we hit the venue it was all about the dance – and we dance differently and we like different music.

It’s not like we danced with each other.

Unless maybe you count the first three numbers when we were the only two on the floor – but even then, we weren’t ‘together’ – we were simply in the same space. We were dancing to the music, and the music meant something different to each of us. We were dancing alone, in our own little worlds, and that’s what we did for the rest of the night. It’s what I’ve done for years.

That is the joy of the old-fashioned disco.

By the way, this really was an old-fashioned disco. Real people playing real 45’s on actual turntables. Tables round the edges. No drinks on the dance floor. People dressed up to the nines. People dressed the way they did back then. People looking like...Read More