We came to walk towards the sea, to savour the act of walking, and slowly feel our way back into this place. We watched the cattle graze and the birds take flight. We gazed into the misted sea-light. And as we walked, we talked.
We came to sit upon the shingle. We beach-combed and created one-day sculptures, gardens, scavenged fantasies, and more importantly, we found we sat in silence. And in the silence we began to find our openings.
We came to the hill with its buried history of war-time fears and ornithology. We came up through the tunnel of blackthorn onto the fields, and we nearly came to be harvested by the monstrous machine…and then we retreated to the hedges, that didn't quite shelter us from the rain, to hear the words of others who feel as we do, we came.
We came together to walk the fields, to stand in gateways and along hedge lines. We came to look and listen, scent and touch. We came to watch and wait. To bring our attention to the world, and our intention to our words. We came to capture moments. Ordinary minutes, in ordinary fields, that line up along ordinary lanes, that were once Old Woman places where sacred knowledge might be found, and horse-drawn carts clattered, but now are new man places, rat runs of shining cars and bored families who miss the flowers and the bird prints in the mud.
We came together to look at things we loved and those we could not name, and to know that loving and not naming are not mutually exclusive.
We came to share snippets of our stories. We had not intended that perhaps, but the land called them forth. If we were to walk the land together and ask it to speak whereof it was, then it would demand the same of us…and so, slowly, we opened…like the yellow horned poppies that cling along the shingle, or the common red ones that bloom for a single day among the wheat and the barley.
We came out of the silence of the strangest year. We came, separately, with our anger and our fear and our small joys and hopes.
We came.
And we picked up our pens.
And we wrote.
