For some reason I had clipped an advert for Wild Writing – an invitation to ‘join small groups on-line or outside, writing from theheart and not the head". I must have been interested in signing up, but now is not the time. I have over-busied myself of late. It may just be the influence of the season or, more likely, a deeper need to acknowledge that certain approaches to life have served their purpose and can be let go. Whichever, I am feeling a call to slow down, strip back, reduce.
I need to be completing the things already started, rather than layering on more possibilities When I wrote this is my journal it came out as I need to walk on what there is.
I had intended to write I need to work on what there is.
I am always intrigued by my mis-writes when I hand-write.
They occur on the page in a way that they never do on screen. I figure that it is because of the fluidity of script as opposed to the staccato of type, and also the close connection between hand and page, which does not exist in the electronic version. My hand flows the words over the page, directly – heart to hand to page – with less intervention from the intellectual part of the mind. The brain sometimes steps back momentarily, like it is also curious to see what might emerge.
Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t some mystical trance state of auto-writing. It is the nano-second lapse in focus, which is where a different truth slips in.
So: two truths are told (as someone once said!). I need to work on the things already in progress…and I need to walk. Walking is just one of the things to have been neglected during the year just ending, because I got busy.
Walk and work. Work and walk. There’s a rhythm to be re-established.
So I will not sign up for Wild Writing (or any of the other tantalising offers lurking hopefully in my in-box). I need to find a better map through the resource forest I already have at my disposal.
I like the sentiment though: from the heart not the head. I feel that I have, during the few years I have been taking classes and courses and workshops, slipped from heart to head. It's not a wrong approach; it's just not for me. The simple fact is: my head doesn’t have enough of the right sort of knowledge for that approach to work.
Saying that implies that I believe my heart does.
Perhaps.
Certainly, evidence suggests that my best work isn’t “worked”. It simply emerges from one thing connecting with another. I have spent too little time of late truly connecting. Standing and staring. Looking closely just to look, not to see, but just to remind myself that I am a part of it all.
For a time on Tuesday, I was marsh creature. Standing by the reed screen outside one of the hides. Face into the wind. Watching the pool-light disturbed by shelduck, watching the cloud-shift, backdropped by silvered reeds that I’d discovered were surprisingly warm to the touch. I was
supposed to be writing – but I wasn’t – I had no more to say about any of it than the heron who stood long minutes by another reed bed, even as we watched.
Sheltered heron - still - watching. Occasional slow stretches, but mostly stillness.
Perhaps I had even less to say. I have no idea what heron thought, aware of being watched, content that we were – in the short term at least – harmless. A long yoga stretch of the neck forwards –peering at potential amphibian lunch in the long grass – or maybe just stretching the muscles after too long sitting. Eventually (s)he rose gracefully into the air and made a long wide slow loop inwards, perhaps with a sudden craving for Glaven fodder, the different fish of the chalk stream.
Or maybe that was home and this was just a reconnaissance mission to the marsh.
For a time I felt no need to wrap words around these things.
I had been thinking about feathers. The ones I pick up and the ones I trample unseen. Peter handed me a swan feather, and then another. He marked the path, where they come out of the
dyke, cross the human path, go under the fence where a lowest rail has been thoughtfully omitted to allow them passage, circle round, thoughtfully leaving their midden on the main track, close to a clear sleep-site (not a nest as such, more a regular roost-flattened patch of grass) before moving on and back down to the water. A trail as clear as any deer track or sheep route, once time has been taken to witness it. Imagine it from a viewpoint other than our own.
The swan feathers are bright-white and would have shone against the dark mud of the marsh track – a purer colour than the grey dusters of reed seed heads. Sunlit-cloud-white. And although I had been thinking and talking about feathers, I walked past them, unnoticing. Maybe by then I had stopped being marsh-creature and started being cloud.
So the question then arises as to whether I have anything to say about two forlorn white feathers… I write this in my journal:
They have not been retrieved from the notebook to be placed on the altar so I figure they are waiting their time to speak. When they do, they may tell of long flights on a breast born on powerful wings. Perhaps they remember sleeping on the ice in Winter.
What meaning of bird is in a single feather? Does it hold all the race-memory of its kin? Do I have swan spirit imprisoned in the pocket of a field book – and if so, does it mind? Does it want to be freed, or is it happy only to be seen, to be understood. I see. But I do not understand. I listen but feathers are silent when solitary. When I reach into a feather I find a waiting space. The emptiness inside the quill.
When I come to the page on the screen, I reach for the book to go back to the feathers. They are missing. I wonder briefly how they could have come adrift on the short journey home. Then I go look and find that in the absent-mindedness of the taking hold of a common cold, I had indeed retrieved them and placed them on my altar. There they lay curled around a piece of fossilised tree from the other side of the planet. Strange meetings.
Neither of them is actually pristine – else the swan(s) would have kept them. In the artificial light above my desk they are more grey than white. I try to preen the inner down out of its tattiness and fail. I am not equipped for such delicate work. As I stroke them I wonder less about the birds and a little more about us.
About how lives are built on moments. I talked about feathers. Someone who knows more about such things had been listening. They picked up one to give me, and then went back for another…as a prelude to asking us (not just me, the group of us) to look at what was at our feet: a swan path.
I know these from my own river bank. To be more accurate I have deduced them, implied them, surmised them (to use one of my mother’s favourite words) from the obvious sleep sites to the water. The empty quill is asking me to write the story of a swan path…and I wonder if one day I might. For now though, I decide to release the feathers back into the wild, in the rain, from the improbable patch of my garden, where I’m fairly sure no swan has ever alighted before.
