Wayfaring

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 14:23:00 +0000

When Little Red Riding Hood went into the forest did she follow a path all the way to her Grandmother’s house? Hansel and Gretel hand in hand, woke up in a part of the forest they didn’t know and it was a path, not a road that took them to the witch. Robert Frost followed the, ‘road less taken,’ but I think he was being a little grandiose there, the ‘two roads’ were in a wood and both were grassed over, so were these really roads Robert, or merely paths?

There are a great many stories and poems about roads, Edward Thomas,’ ‘Now all roads lead to France,’ is full of sadness and menace, A.E Houseman, Kipling, Walt Whitman, G.K Chesterton, all write of roads. Roads may be grand, they may be dusty, they may take you on to the hell of a war or be the same road refugees flee along seeking safety.

Roads were built for armies, and after the wars those roads remained for commerce. Trade maintained the old battle-roads, and the grandest routes still exist, cutting across continents and centuries.

Back in the day, in England, travellers were charged to keep on the ‘king’s road,’ stepping off it into the wood was trespass and punishable. But then, back in the day, the dark woods or lonely moors beside the road were the hunting places of bears, wolves and dangerous men, so staying on the road was safer anyway.

Following the road is always easier than stepping off it, especially if the road is tarmacked, a smooth skin over the mess and inconvenience of nature. And everyone knows where the road comes from and where the road goes, even if they never travel along it themselves. On the road you are in community, you follow its laws, you follow its route, on the road you are seen, on the road you are known, you are part of the crowd and that brings with it both safety and danger. Safety in numbers? Maybe (has that ever been true?). Safety from dangers lurking beside the road. Safety in that the road will bring you to food, a bed, shelter. All roads do that eventually. But there is danger on the road too, danger in being so visible, danger in following a well travelled way.

“Stay off the road,” warns Gandalf to Frodo in Lord of the Rings, knowing that it is on the road that Frodo’s enemy will seek him. Frodo takes a path through the woods, a path across open country too, but the fickle paths lead him astray. Through the woods the path changes direction and eventually it fades away altogether. This is the danger of paths. Paths are wild things. You follow a path at your peril.

A path will take you into nature, brambles snatching at your hair, mud in winter, adders in the grass, no surety of direction, no certainty of food or shelter ahead. A path invites you to have faith, someone came this way once, that’s why the path is here. It’s not community on a path, the others are too far ahead or behind for that, but there is a kind of fellowship, others have been here, once, and your solitude is a little less lonely because of them.

A path is a quiet thing. It exists because other beings have trod the way, but only a season or two without passersby and the path returns to the wild, disappears into the grass and wild flowers. A path stays open because it is wanted.

The Storm

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 10:24:00 +0000

Meon hill in the sun

I love storms. I revel in wild weather. When the wind is howling and rain is driving across the hills I want to be out in it. I love being buffeted by the wind and the slightly scary feeling of everything being unpredictable and crazy.

I believe this passion for bad weather goes all the way back to when I was a toddler and we lived in Zimbabwe, Africa. Although I was a very small person I can still remember African rain, the fatness and spacedness of the first drops as they fell into sand-coloured dust, making little craters in the dry earth. My memories of African storms, which must have been tremendous, are happy memories and probably explain my storm-joy.

One of my unrequited dreams is to go tornado chasing in the USA and yes, I confess to seeing the film Twister multiple times. But, despite loving storms and walking in bad weather, I have also been afraid of getting caught in the rain on long distance walks. When you are out for several days, sleeping in a tent, the thought of being wet is rather daunting. I once got spectacularly wet on a long distance walk in Wales, entirely due to my own stupidity, and it was a very cold, miserable experience that I am in no hurry to repeat.

All through my long walk in 2019 I dreaded bad weather, but when it finally came it was not as bad as I thought it would be. I was camping on Hadrian’s wall, close to the Cumbrian border. We had two days of driving rain and although I had very wet outer gear, I had become much smarter at camping over those months and I was able to manage the rain without getting my clothes or sleeping gear wet.

I felt really great after that experience and much more confident about walking and camping in bad weather conditions.

In the late summer of 2019 I decided to walk some of the old Salt Way, a possibly pre-Roman track which ran from Droitwitch in Worcestershire, to London and the sea (did you know there are salt mines in Droitwich?) Anyway, the trail is marked in a few places on the OS maps and the bit I wanted to tackle went from near Statford-upon-Avon to near Winchcombe, taking in parts of the Cotswold Way.

The first day was gorgeous (see photo above). I walked from Lower Quinton to Hidcote, a lovely stroll along rolling hills and pretty, almost uninhabited countryside and that evening I camped in a farm near Mickleton. The set-up at the farm was unusual. I was in a field, the only tent, behind three wooden cabins. The bathroom facilities were small, two loos with a shower, about the size of a caravan bathroom, but very warm and super clean. I liked this campsite actually, especially as mine was the only tent on it.

In the field next to me was a small herd of sheep, who are very nice camping companions, with their sonorous baaings and warm, woolly smell. So things were looking good. I set up my tent, ate supper, listened to the sheep and generally felt rather chilled. Then the storm came.

I sat in the entrance of my tent watching the sky darken. Some distance away a low, blue-black, ‘bruised’ sky hung over the hills in front of me. As time went on, the storm got closer and closer. The clouds were moving quite fast yet the day became ominously still. A wyrd yellow light turned the sheep to gold and birds stopped singing. The air of menace became intense. I watched as a strange cloud began to form in the midst of the darkening sky. Could this form into a tornado?

I felt extremely small and fragile sitting alone in my tent. So small and fragile I got my husband on the phone. Even though he was 50 miles away it felt less scary sharing this moment with someone. Enormous billows of cloud coiled in the sky either side of me as the storm loomed closer and closer. I kept looking at the sheep who were contentedly grazing, I thought if they started looking spooked I was going to make a run for it, animals being wiser about things like tornadoes than humans..

By now a cold wind had whipped up, the sides of my tent were flapping and slapping in the wind. Should I go somewhere? The loos were almost as fragile as my tent and my innate English fear of embarrassment stopped me from hammering on the door of the only wooden cabin that was occupied. So I stayed in my tent, chattering nervously to my husband, watching the apocalypse roil towards me.

And pass by.

Reader, I was a little embarrassed then. That crazy storm passed over my head and just...disappeared. The sky went grey, no raindrops fell, no twister grabbed me. It was one of the scariest, most beautiful and bizarre weather moments I’ve ever had.

Later that night I heard the first soft pings of rain on my tent and by the next morning it was coming down in torrents. I walked/slid from Chipping Campden down into Broadway, dripping wet and with mud up to my knees, where I met a man posting waymarkers for the final stretch of an ultra marathon which was coming up from Stroud to Chipping Campden.

He told me that a thousand runners would be heading my way along the route I wanted to walk the next day. I looked at the mud caking my feet and considered those thousand runners and thought, ‘no.’ The next morning I packed up my soaking tent and caught the bus back to Brum.

At this point the storm was vaguely interesting and a long way away

It got rapidly more ominous

a compilation shot of what I could see in front of my tent

the sheep went gold in the wyrd light

Pretty impressive, right?

The Treecreeper

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 13:52:00 +0000

It was one of those days when it seemed like the world was two things. The afternoon was lovely, the sky pale blue, the clouds lemon yellow and dove grey. Pavements were still wet from the morning snow, now melted, and the clear afternoon sun, low and golden, lit them to rivers of silver.

The wild things were enchanted in that afternoon light. Trees, black with moisture, were inky, fretted drawings against the clouds. Humpbacked mosses glowed like green jewels along brick walls and gulls wheeled in the sky, squalling salty sea longings into the city air.

I walked past a small coppice, a tangled, briar-stringed patch of hawthorn, birch and goat willow growing between a row of houses and the football field. A tiny jerk of movement caught my eye and I halted, turned to see a wee bird, a bundle of bark coloured feathers visible only by its movements against the grey-brown of an ivyed thorn. It moved jerkily up the trunk, a treecreeper! I hadn’t seen one for years, they are shy, solitary little birds hard to spot, impossible if they see you first and scuttle swiftly round their tree to hide.

The treecreeper and the tree, unlikely kin; one quiescent, solid, weighty, the other lithe, agile, featherlight. The bird was so camouflaged it seemed as if the tree itself had budded from its woody heart this soft, fragile, warm-blooded thing. In that occult afternoon, lit with fey winter light, when all the wild things appeared enchanted, it wasn’t such a strange notion.

Two women walked towards me, one, in a bright yellow jacket, was yelling at her dog. The bird vanished. A small child raced past on a petrol blue bike and as I came out of the park onto the street, cars and vans bombed along in a holler of noise, the wet roads amplifying the susurration of their tyres to an intolerable din.

It was one of those days when it seemed like the world was two things; magic and mundane. The mundane world lies over the arcane like tar poured over a feather, but sometimes the magic shines through, sometimes the two worlds can be perceived together, seamlessly visible, side by side. Look for the magic when the sun is low, at dawn or dusk, on summer evenings and winter afternoons; when the sunlight turns tarmac to silver, when dew hangs from the railings like diamonds, when autumn leaves pave streets with gold, when a piece of tree becomes a bird.

The park

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 14:21:00 +0000

Tuesday 5 January.

The morning is beautiful. A long, blue shadow from the house still covers most of the garden, but the morning sun has reached the alder and hawthorn trees at its far end and they are brilliant in the winter light, gold, bronze and terracotta. The sky is blue, although a thick sheet of grey cloud lies low in the Northwest, promising rain or sleet later.

It's the first day of a new lockdown, and I open the back door hoping for the miraculous silence that descended when the first lockdown was announced. That morning my husband and I stood in wonder in the garden, listening to the absence of traffic and as the days passed the absence continued; the air became cleaner and cleaner until one day we stood outside and took great sniffing inhalations, smelling earth and leaves and an air that smelt almost like it does in my mother’s Welsh garden, sans the warm lanolin scent of sheep.

Those days and weeks of aural peace, free from the constant drone of traffic were strange and lovely. The silence was perhaps a little unsettling, the absence spoke to a changed world and our uncertainty and fear. But it was also beautiful because in the silence was a faint clarion call that this could be our new normal, that we could change how we live, get cars off the roads, put health and well-being and nature first. There was a brief, flickering hope for a new world order, the dawning of something good coming out of the pandemic.

It didn’t last. We went back to serial incompetence at the highest levels, the fear of the disease turned people toward their cars and away from public transport, councils didn’t have the will or the funding to implement new commuting infrastructures in the city, and the major and minor lockdowns that followed the first countrywide one just threw into stark focus the trapped, unhealthy lives that many urban residents face.

Pollution was implicated in the severity of how the virus affected people; the mother of a small child who died from the effects of traffic pollution fought valiantly to bring awareness of the problem to public consciousness.

So understandably, as soon as lockdown was eased city folk flocked to green spaces; woods, lakes and beaches, desperate to breathe, to experience a vista that went further than the next street, to feel some kind of normal again. But many rural areas, including my beloved Wales, closed themselves to visitors or urged ‘incomers’ to stay away, afraid of disease transmission into parts of the country that had poor medical infrastructure and despairing at the mess and litter left by people who are used to littering city parks without a thought, forgetful or unknowing that the fields and woods of rural Britain are someone’s workplace, someone’s business, or somewhere where council workers don’t follow after you, cleaning up your rubbish. Where it’s up to local residents, farmers and wildlife rangers to keep the land clean and healthy.

However, on this morning, the first day of the third national lockdown, I go into the garden expecting another great silence and feel a jab of emotion, anger? Fear? Grief? When I hear, as usual, the constant drone and roar of traffic and airplanes. Nothing’s changed, it’s just the same.

I lace up my boots and wrap up in jumper, hat and mittens for my daily walk. Rounding the corner, I am passed by a van puffing out bitter, chemical fumes that catch in my throat. It is very cold, a faint sheen of ice on parts of the pavements. I take my usual route, up a very short steep hill out of our dark, rather damp little house-filled valley and onto the top road, then dropping down a hundred meters or so before climbing again beside a wide open green space. At the top of the hill I turn left, away from the road through a stand of graceful pine trees and into the park. Here I take off my ubiquitous headphones that I always wear when I’m walking around here, where the traffic is loud and hateful. I take a deep breath under the trees and scent the pine and grass, faint under the city smell. I walk on into the park and after a few meters I am at last in the green, beside trees and blackthorn scrub, home to foxes, rats, a sparrowhawk, crows, songbirds, passing herons and buzzards and gloriously, a family of ravens.

Here I am above the city. Below me are the roofs of houses and the cloud-like billows of many trees. Up here the city looks much greener than it seems at street level. My gods! I am grateful for this precious, high green space. So grateful for it I could prostrate myself on the muddy ground, churned up by hundreds of other folk who walk here, escaping for a few minutes from the tarmac and grey, and pray to those gods for the gift of it. I look further, away across the roads to the distant blue line where sky and land merge. I can’t get out there, to the places where I feel I really belong, the lanes and hills and fields of rural Britain. Like millions of others I’m stuck here, longing for there, staying close to home to stay safe, to keep others safe.

The first lockdown I stopped going out for walks, I took the government advice to heart and stayed at home, walking a mile or so every day endlessly up and down my small garden. This time I’m not doing that. Even if my daily walk is limited to the streets around here, to visiting the hill park, to walking in the fumes and pollution of the city, I know now that I have to get out, I have to walk and I’ll just have to do it here in the city like everyone else. And even in the city there is nature to be found, so it’s the trees and birds and green spaces that I’ll be seeking out on my precious daily walks. I’m looking forward to seeing what I discover.

Getting lost

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 14:20:00 +0000

“Not all those who wander are lost..." JRR Tolkien

Ah, but sometimes they are.

I seem to spend a great deal of my time getting lost. I am a truly appalling map reader, I’m not entirely sure why. Though for one, I don’t have a very attuned internal compass, so I’m not very good at being aware of my body in space, and two, I am a details-focussed person, so I’m too busy being entranced by the small things, fungi, mosses, flowers and birds, to stop and pay attention to the big things, like where the sun is or the wider landscape and any distant route markers.

The first time I got properly lost was on a very ill prepared walk with a friend when I was sixteen. We had just finished our O level (me) and A level (her) exams and while waiting for results we decided to do a three day hike in Wales. On our first day out walking through forestry commission lands at the foot of Cader Idris, we got horribly lost, wet, cold and annoyed with each other. After a 16 mile walk that should have been 8 miles, we fell into a warm, welcoming youth hostel, managed to cadge a pint of Guinness each down the pub and went to bed that night feeling adventurous, victorious and friendly with each other again.

I think that walk affected me quite a lot, it began my love for long walks and perhaps instilled in me a secret pleasure in getting lost, simply for the joy of finding warmth and safety at the end of the day.

I often get intentionally lost, especially around my home patch and in places where I have walked regularly, where I like to walk inquisitively, veering off down unwalked roads and paths just for sheer curiosity. Then I’m happy being lost because I know that I’ll probably be able to find my way to familiar places eventually and in the meantime will discover somewhere new, unwalked. I am inspired in this by Iohan Gueorguiev, aka The Bike Wanderer, who in his quest to cycle the length of North and South America, very often takes the unknown path or veers off from his route because his curiosity to see the world is stronger than his need to get to the end of his journey. Sometimes his curiosity takes him into challenging situations which he always seems to overcome with doggedness and a cheerful optimism.

Mental attitude and physical strength has an enormous influence on one’s experience of getting lost. Iohan is over six foot tall and seems to have an almost superhuman ability to overcome physical exhaustion, wading through snow, rivers and cycling for days across mountains and deserts seemingly unflagging. The worst time to get lost is when you are physically tired, or if your mental attitude is not positive for whatever reason. Trying to get somewhere at a given time, for instance when you need to catch the last bus home, seems to be a recipe for unexpected lostness. And understandably, physical tiredness can cause you to get lost, simply because your brain is not paying attention, especially if you decide to take a shortcut, because so often, “shortcuts make long delays,” as Pippin says in Lord of the Rings.

Most of the time, I must admit, my getting lost is not intentional. It feels rather ridiculous to be someone who loves walking adventures and yet is an incompetent map reader and a regular lost soul. It’s frustrating when I am tired and embarrassing when I’m walking in company; getting myself and another person lost is the worst. I can hide how much I get lost when I am walking alone, until I write about it in a blog post for all to see that is.

Shame and embarrassment are awful feelings aren’t they? It’s odd, because the vulnerabilities that other people show can really endear them to us, but when it comes to our own vulnerability we feel shame and want to hide.

I used to feel a lot of shame about the number of times I have gotten lost on my life journey. Probably for exactly the same reasons that I get lost on my walking journeys; not seeing the big picture, veering off down interesting looking avenues and enjoying the journey alone rather than walking it with companions. It occurred to me that getting lost walking and getting lost in life are both the same thing, and really neither should be embarrassing or shameful. Getting lost is an opportunity to see new things, to go down roads you would otherwise never travel. I got very lost a couple of years ago and found myself going down very different, unexpected roads. But it was a great journey, ended up being a bit circular and was challenging, but I picked up new companions and learnt some things about myself along the way, and at the end of it I could see much more clearly which roads suited me and which were best left alone. It was horrible to be lost on that journey for a while, but I think I have found a good path now and I can look back on the places where I got lost with gratitude for what that taught me.

So I am going to finish this by wishing you a special New Year blessing:

May you sometimes get lost on your journey.

And when you are lost may you find a beautiful path and a warm welcome at days end.

You are wild too

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 22:49:00 +0000

One of the things I find difficult about taking a walk in a city, and increasingly in rural parts of this island too, is the astonishing increase in litter. When I see how much plastic rubbish is piled up against hedges or along verges, and wound around trees, it hurts. It's like someone has upended a skip on the floor of a Cathedral.

I believe that this Earth we are on is a holy place. Everywhere that something is growing is a sacred place. Life is a miracle and as far as we know this miracle is only happening here, on this planet, in this minute slice of cosmic time.

Everything that is alive on our planet is the result of aeons of collaboration, cooperation, birth, death, love. A staggering complexity of cause and effect. And everything that is alive on our planet has an awareness of its life and an awareness of the life around it; the slime mould that crawls toward food, the raven that follows the wolf, the swallow migrating thousands of miles. Even the rocks and minerals, usually seen as just inert things, are connected and woven into the complexity of life.

What a beautiful thing this world is!

But for billions of humans there is a deep and catastrophic disconnect from the world. Wildness is seen as 'out there' usually a long way away from where humans are. Those great and famous landscapes; our National parks, the Antarctic wilderness, the Amazon rain-forest, might be widely acknowledged as sacred, beautiful places that we have officially designated as special. But we forget, or dismiss, that the simple, close to home, everyday places are also special, wild, sacred places. The hedge beside a busy dual carriageway, the patch of grass outside an office, the trees along our city streets. These places are sacred places too.

Millions of people love nature and love to visit natural places. But it's a going out experience, one that places the natural world as something other, something we leave our everyday life to visit, someplace we journey to, feel rejected from, have longing for but feel we cannot connect to.

I think that this sense of the wild being other, outside of our daily experience, is what’s really causing us to harm the world. Perhaps, a bit like angry teenagers, we feel that we have been rejected by nature and so lash out in our hurt and anger? Maybe we nurture our hurt by a sense of disdain for our family of Earth beings?

But we haven't been rejected, we haven't been abandoned, we are natural beings, we are nature. We are a part of it, not separate from it and the narrative that says humans are rejected, cast out from the Earthly garden, that narrative is a lie.

Do you see the wild birches growing in the disused city lot? The free birds that nest in them? The feral grass growing in the cracks of the pavement? The unruly mosses that make little gardens along the walls? Do you hear the wild foxes and rats that trash the bins and range across the dark city streets?

You are not separate from these wild things. Your body is host to billions of bacteria, everything you eat connects you to everything else. You are home, you belong here, you are nature, you have not been cast out.
I invite you to take a walk with the mentality that you are a part of nature, not separate from it. Walk among the wild things that are right here. Feel that you are a free being, that you are wild too.

The Midnight Emperors

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 14:43:00 +0000

Raven flying over suburban park

Ravens. I know that traditionally they are a seen as a grim bird of ill omen and that many sheep farmers hate them, but I feel very drawn to ravens. The raven is a bird of wild places, companion to wolves, master of the granite cliffs and high mountains, intelligent, fierce, implacable beings.

Most of the corvids are easy to see; flocks of rooks loll and chatter in our fields, jackdaws play at the tops of church and castle towers, crows congregate on our roofs and garden fences cawing insults at passing cats and humans; but ravens know us and watch us and disdain to interact with us. Trying to watch ravens is like a game of cat and mouse, they never let you get close, but are curious beings and will not hesitate to stalk you from the air.

One winter, just a couple of years ago, I was walking a footpath that ran right through the middle of a ploughed field. It was a bleak day and the field was a high and lonely one, far above the farm huddled below in the valley. As I walked across the field I had that odd, itching sensation you get when someone is watching your back. Knowing I was alone I ignored it as long as I could, until the feeling I was being followed became too strong and I whipped round, feeling a bit foolish. But my instincts were right, as I turned, two ravens suddenly veered away and disappeared over a nearby wood. They had been following me across the open field.

People get confused between ravens and crows, but once you have seen (and heard) ravens, they are unmistakable. Crows are smaller, with a flapping flight that looks as if it takes some effort; head on, their wing tips curve up in a distinctive arc. Ravens however, are Emperors; lifting off and away with a graceful, soaring flight, they soar more than they flap and are masters of the air. Ravens will fold their wings and fall through the air, flipping onto their backs and rolling before snapping out those great wings and lifting up again, an action that seems to be executed for the sheer joy of it.

I once spent a wonderful morning watching ravens, jackdaws and crows play in the winds that blustered round an Oxfordshire wood. The the ravens and jackdaws were the most playful, the crows the noisiest. The jackdaws were lithe and quick, scooting over and around the ravens and each other, being caught by the wind and using it's invisible power to soar and dive through the sky. The ravens folded their great wings and plummeted down before flipping right-side up and soaring back to the crowd, looking like they owned the sky. How the wind blew was of no matter to them, just a convenience they could choose to use, or not.

The other difference between ravens and crows is the call. Crows caw, ravens never do. Ravens are most easily recognised through the kronking call that they make, a rumbling cough that is completely distinctive; once you learn to recognise it you will never forget it. However, ravens have many other vocalisations and are one of the most eloquent corvids in their range of calls.

I've seen ravens in deepest Wales, soaring along the edges of the mountains, in a remote quarry in Northumberland, where they were raising young in a large, messy nest and occasionally in the fields of Warwickshire and Oxfordshire. All of these sightings were brief, alerted by the deep kronk as the bird passed nearby, the sudden exciting glimpse of the midnight black shape, somehow blacker than any other bird, gliding past. A glimpse and gone.

Except. Except late last year, in my garden in deepest suburbia, I heard that unmistakable raven call. I know my ravens, but could not believe my own ears. How would it be possible for a raven to fly near here, bordered as we are with an airport and two motorways? But then, a few days later, I heard it again and this time caught a glimpse of that occult black shape. Impossible, impossible for that bird of the wild places to be here. But then at last a proper sighting, not once but several times. It seems that the birds, two of them, are frequenting the park behind my house. It's a large one, mostly grass with a belt of pine trees at the top of it, on a rise that forms part of an escarpment running from central Birmingham out into the Warwickshire countryside. How incredible it seems, to be on my ordinary errands, a trip to the shops or to catch a bus and to see ravens! What a gift. That harbinger of wilderness soaring in our tame suburban airs.

All shall be well...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 18:03:00 +0000

Norfolk walk, days 4 to 6

Of all the injuries it is possible to get on a walking trip, who would expect to get their worst one getting into a sleeping bag?

The tarp tent was not working out for me, as it had major condensation problems and dripped a light 'rain' on me if I accidentally touched it. So on the third night of my trip I was trying to slide carefully into my too small sleeping bag and not touch the side of the tarp when something went doiiing! inside my chest and I had a terrible pain in my lower ribcage. To this day I have no idea what I actually did. A few days later the pain was so bad I went to an NHS walk-in centre, but the gp wouldn't 'hear' how I had injured myself and said it might be shingles. (Why do they do that, those doctors? Someone should figure out how to train them to hear what people are saying with their words, not jump to conclusions with their eyes)

Well, although I was in quite a bit of pain the day after the 'doiing!,' I decided to ignore it and go for a walk anyway and the gods rewarded that stoicism in the most wonderful way. It was about 8am and I was walking back to Blakeney, thinking about the coffee I was going to treat myself to, when I heard a most urgent voice in my head saying, 'turn round, turn round.' I turned and there, not 50 feet from me a Marsh Harrier was making it's gravity-defying slow glide across the tall grasses. I was standing on a rise, a dyke that runs between the farmland and the sea, so that the Harrier was flying just slightly below me. It was huge, unmistakable, as big nearly as a red kite and with beautiful black and brown markings. What stays with me is it's impossible flight over the grasses, a slow glide like that of an albatross over icy waves.

The next day was pretty wet and grim. I went to Blakeney again and spent the morning in a coffee shop watching Game of Thrones on my phone and feeling guilty; I was on a walking trip, I should be walking! But the rib was bad and the weather was wet and I'm slightly ashamed to admit that a warm, cosy cafe with free wifi won out over birds and a damp cagoule.

The next day I got the bus back to Norwich, enjoying the racing views of the Norfolk countryside and the many stops at small country towns along the way. Back in Norwich I paid a visit to the church of Mother Julian, a 14th century Anchorite. It was lovely, sitting quietly in her tiny cell. I thought about a woman who chose to spend the majority of her life in one tiny room and the deep experience of place and self that she must have experienced. We live in very outward facing times. People in our culture head out on adventures, travelling the world on gap years and holidays in order to find themselves, find happiness, experience meaning. The Anchorites went in the opposite direction, inward, to find their god.

I was at the beginning of a long walk, an adventure that had no fixed time to it. I only knew that I wanted to stay 'out,' in the world and away from my usual life for several weeks. It felt right to take some time to contemplate my journey in the home of a woman who had chosen to go the other way; inward rather than outward.

As I walked over the next few weeks I spent a lot of time trying to connect to my own inner life. Since the experience of that 'voice' that urged me to turn and see the Harrier, I tried to pay attention inwardly, to notice what was being said there. What I felt on my solitary journey, was that I was never alone; I felt connected to the plants, birds and creatures that surrounded me on that walk. and I also discovered that I was never alone inside either. There is a presence there that I learned to trust, a quiet voice I try to hear, a kind of inward holy place.

When I left the church I bought a card from the tiny gift shop with this Julian quote on it;
“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Hoping for Harriers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 01 Jan 2020 09:46:00 +0000

Walking Diary - Norfolk 1.

Sea Thrift - image Kruse 2019

It’s Wednesday 1st May 2019, May Day, the day my daughter and I used to celebrate as the ‘Great Mother’s Birthday,’ when we would go on a mini adventure, picking flowers and greenery to decorate our house and celebrating the beauty of nature.

On this May Day though it is dusk and I am sitting beside a vast salt marsh on the Norfolk coast, 4 days in to a planned three month adventure of walking and exploring natural Britain. In front of me a snowy white Little Egret stalks the marsh with fastidious, delicate steps. Skeins of geese ripple overhead and the first moths flit ghostly through the gloom. After 4 days of blue skies and sunshine, dawn rain is predicted and white clouds are drifting up from the horizon. The brilliant day has softened into a grey evening, a palette of mushroom, sage and palest yellow, silvered where the last light catches the water. I am alone and brimful of happiness.

4 days earlier I stepped off the bus at Sheringham, a typical English seaside town 30 miles from Norwich and started my walk along the Norfolk coast. Sheringham was cheerfully busy and I had that excited nervousness new adventures always start with. I wandered down to the coast path, which I would be following to Weybourne, 4.5 miles north along the shingle. The tide was in, so for the first half mile out of town I walked along a deserted promenade, past painted beach huts and concrete shelters. I stopped at a tiny two-table cafe to get an ice cream and got involved in the rescue of a toddler who had escaped his ditzy father and was climbing purposefully down a flight of concrete steps to the shingle bashing sea.

Coast path between Sheringham and Weybourne - image Kruse 2019

When baby was safely back with dad, heart pounding I climbed steep switchback paths to the dunes and onto a snaking, narrow path through marram grass and pink-flowered sea thrift. On the brow of the highest dune a vintage wooden coastguard hut loomed like a destination in Myst III. Ahead sand dunes and shingle beach stretched as far as I could see, my home for the next week. On my left Skylarks rose, singing hallelujahs into the blue, on my right Sand Martins whipped figure eights up and over the cliff face and as I walked on I saw with disbelief and joy an Avocet wing overhead.

Avocet - image Snowmanradio

The Pied Avocet is the emblem of the RSPB and an iconic Norfolk bird. The species became extinct in Britain in the 19th century, returning during the Second World War when East Anglian salt marshes were re-flooded as defences against enemy invasion. Since then, the bird has become a symbol of positive conservation action, although it is still a Schedule 1 protected bird in the UK, with only about 1,500 breeding pairs here (to put this number into context, there are around 5,100,000 breeding pairs of Blackbirds in the UK). Avocet can be seen all year round at selected sites on the East coast and on the Lancashire coast, with winter visitors also seen along the coast in Devon, Cornwall and Dorset. I grew up knowing this bird as a rare and beautiful creature but one I was unlikely to ever see, living in the very centre of England. Yet here I was, just beginning my walk along the Norfolk coast and an Avocet flies low over my head; an auspicious blessing on the trip?

I was lucky the bird flew over so low as I had to come on this trip without binoculars. My own battered, much loved pair of Zeiss 8x30’s are heavy. Because of my physical limitations I’d tried to make my pack as light as possible, choosing an ultralight tarp over a tent and taking the minimum items of clothing. But that decision to leave my binoculars at home would come to haunt me repeatedly over the next few weeks as I peered myopically at numerous avian wonders.

One avian wonder I hoped to see was a Marsh Harrier, an even rarer bird than the Avocet, with only 400 breeding pairs in the UK. I love raptors but I’m not sure exactly why I do, being a pacifist vegetarian, song-bird-loving human. But raptors are beautiful, in their colouring and in their form. While all birds possess a superpower in their ability to fly, the raptors have the most superpowers, from the peregrine’s astonishing, dive-bombing, world’s-fastest speed, to the goshawk’s incredible forest flying prowess or the kestrel’s gravity defying hover. Thrilled by the Avocet sighting my birding/wildlife excitement was cranked up to ten, so when I saw a large raptor hanging in the wind over the edge of the dunes I was convinced it was a Marsh Harrier. Bigger than the ruddy backed Kestrel and seeming to hover in a similar way, this was a greyish hawk. I enthusiastically texted my daughter who lives in Norfolk and has seen Marsh Harriers with details of the sighting. She was not convinced, explaining that Marsh Harriers are big, nearly as big as Red Kite. I realised later that what I had seen was most likely a female Kestrel, which is larger and greyer than the male. It hanging against the wind whipping up from the cliff edge had slightly confused the issue too, but generally, if you see a bird almost stationary in the sky, it’s a Kestrel.

Still, it was a beautiful sighting and honestly every bird is a pleasure and a thrill to see, with the possible exception of Wood Pigeons, who are masters of disguise and often pretend to be cuckoos or sparrowhawks or even owls (at least to this very amateur birdwatcher).

Alexanders - image Kruse 2019

Eventually my path turned from the coast down a narrow lane bordered with the yellow-green flowers of Alexanders, past a beautiful restored windmill and almost straight into Weybourne Village Stores and Cafe, where I had my mandatory post-walk pot of tea.

Sheringham - image Kruse 2019

The next day I caught the bus back to Sheringham and took a walk up to Sheringham Hall and gardens. The grand house is not open to the public, but the gardens and woods are, which is a treat as they are filled with the most spectacular trees and a national collection of gaudy, glamourous rhododendrons. It was a beautiful walk, through the village of Upper Sheringham with it’s gorgeous flint cottages and impressive village well, then up through a hanging wood to a temple/folly on top of the hill. I brewed up a coffee and sat in the sunshine looking across the valley to the distant sea. This was a lovely day, with walks through a beautiful garden, woods and field-side footpaths and no-vehicle tracks to the sea. I watched jackdaws and magpies, a green woodpecker and a jay. Overhead flew a buzzard and the woods were cacophonous with song birds.

Sheringham - image Kruse 2019

At the end of each day I sit outside my tent and write up my diary. Bats fly overhead and I’m hoping for owls. Norfolk has so far been spectacularly beautiful. I sit and sip my tea hardly believing I’m really here.

Lammas ritual for an artist too proud of their success

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 10:45:00 +0000

In the pagan calendar, Lammas, or Lughnasagh, marks the start of the harvest season, which includes the Autumn Equinox in September and the final reaping, honoured at Samhain, or All Hallows Eve. Despite being a harvest festival, Lammas is more about new beginnings than endings because, when something ends, something new always begins, new beginnings only happen because something has had an ending. In all light there is a seed of the dark and in all dark there is the potential of light. This is the truth of light and dark, yin and yang, birth and death.

In the Spring, the newness and growth that we celebrate there finds its companion in a different kind of beginning, celebrated at Lammas. In Spring, the Equinox is a point of balance before the growth and fire of Summer, in Autumn, the Equinox is a point of balance before the descent into the ice and darkness of Winter. Before both of these equinoxes is an opportunity to begin something new, to take a new path.

Spring newness is open, innocent, enthusiastic, Autumn newness is tinged with experience and with the foreknowledge of coming Winter. To my mind, this Autumn newness is the more heroic of the two. To “start again,” is for me a term loaded with implications; it is brave and perhaps weary, it is full of hope, or determination, it implies an acceptance of effort. To begin something new at Lammas is to begin something in the full knowledge of possible failure, or to start again despite past failures. The call to hope, the effort to start anew that we might experience in our Autumns demands the greatest courage.

In some ways, I think artists spend a great deal of their time at a Lammas point, or at least, we maybe work best when we allow ourselves to embrace a Lammas sensibility. The most dangerous place for an artist to find themselves is in the enervating heat of Summer success. Sure, success is a wonderful thing to have (I imagine, not having basked in its glories myself) and it should be enjoyed for every minute that it lasts. But the danger of success, of the languid warmth of Summer, is that we want to stay there and that we want to stay there even after it is gone.

To embrace the call to newness, to starting again at Lammas is courageous and wonderful. Remember, evaluate and learn from your successes, the work you love, the work you do well and then begin something new. Have that courage, trust the creative spirit that you are tapped into, because it is a well that never runs dry. It has its seasons, it’s floods and droughts, but it is eternal and everlasting and you as an artist are part of it. When it’s abundance seems to flow away, when your successes are behind you, when the Summer goes and Autumn comes have the courage to begin, to start something new.

I recommend the following small ritual to help yourself move into the future:

You will need a bottle of pale ale, cider, or mead, a small but much liked artwork of your own making, an outdoor space where you are alone and can see the horizon, a clear, mostly cloudless evening in August or September, a box of matches/ Stanley knife or hammer.

Facing the West, uncork your bottle, lift it and toast the setting sun. It is your past success. Watch it’s beautiful, golden, radiant light slip away. Watch until the last gleam of it has slipped into the horizon, then take your small but much liked artwork and burn it, smash it or otherwise destroy it saying;
“I sacrifice you to the power of creativity, that endless flowing river to which I entrust myself and my purpose and which will always fill me up, even when it seems not to”

Then turn to the East, which may appear grey and drear and shout;
“Here is to the dawn, to new things and to the courage to start again!” Drink down the rest of your ale/cider/mead.

Clear up your mess, go and find some friends and spend the rest of the evening celebrating, preferably with more ale/cider/mead.

Bloody lonely

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 22:15:00 +0000

I went for a walk today. Me and probably a thousand other people. We walked through our second city past hundreds of other people, in shops and cafes and offices.
I say 'we' but it would be more accurate to say they and me. They and me went for a walk to demand our government do something about the climate crisis.
So it was a good walk to go on. It was for a good cause. There were drums and banners and a feeling of solidarity and hope.
But it was always them and me.
People walked in two and threes and groups and I walked with me.
I walked with everyone else around the city centre twice. I held my banner, that I made alone at home the night before.
I was proud to be there, proud to do this thing.
But tonight my heart is hurting and I am filled up with sorry for me.

I felt the sorry for me when I was walking with the thousand, because it was all of them and me. I didn't have a partner, I wasn't in a group. No one to talk to or sing with, but me.
I saw two people that I recognised from long time ago and went to say 'hi' and introduce myself. I don't think they remembered me and anyway didn't want to talk, there was very little eye contact, I got the hint, perhaps they were embarrassed, forgetful of me.

Today was not about me. Today was for something bigger than me, something powerful that I was a part of.
It was a lonely part though. I was not expecting it to be a lonely part. I was surprised to feel it.
This is how it is.

I walked for three months, day after day alone and I never felt lonely once.
Today I walked in a crowd of a thousand and my heart hurts really bad.
Maybe it's human to feel alone among a thousand, maybe there were other mes today who felt the same way, walking that walk.

All I know is that the distance of separation from me and others felt insurmountable, cavernous, black as midnight, a crevasse, a gorge, a ravine of separation. A distance between galaxies separation. A me over here on this island and them over there on that continent, separation.

This separation is just what it is. There is no blame and no fixing it, except in temporary moments and those temporary moments are jewels and gold rings, brilliant, but small and rare. And usually it's ok because I can be very happy alone, but that's alone and today I was in a crowd and that was bloody lonely.

Pain and perfection.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 14:16:00 +0000

This spring I have been undertaking a number of walks across various British landscapes to gather data for an art project. My initial plan was to walk for 3 months, wild camping where possible and recording data about the weather, landscape, flora and fauna of the world around me. It was a great plan, exciting and challenging. I came back with good data, lots of ideas and a clearer sense of how I might take the project forward.

I knew, kind of, that there was going to be some degree of physical difficulty for me doing the walk. I'm 55 years old, overweight and I have inflammatory and osteoarthritis. But, sheesh, if you want something you just have to go out there and get it, right? I walk between 3 to 5 miles every day anyway, so I hoped that the extra daily distances I'd be undertaking for the project would just make me fitter.

We live in a culture that tells us that we are ultimately responsible for our own physical health. We are bombarded with information that tells us that if we eat well, get enough exercise and sleep we will be healthy. There are websites and Instagram feeds galore devoted to 'clean' eating, to yoga, outdoor adventure and fitness inspiration. I fall for that shit all the time.

I've been vegetarian for a few years, but I've always been fat so I've also done every diet - keto, raw, low carb, calorie counting, Slimming World, 5:2 and 800 calories a day. I've done body building, running, swimming, pilates, yoga. I love water and have tried body boarding and surfing. I had this dream of myself as a fit, tanned, strong woman. I wanted muscles! I wanted to be that awesome, adventurous, outdoor gal that I see in my feed. But none of the exercises I did really ever made me feel much fitter. I rarely seemed to reap any visible benefits from the activities that I was doing. Usually, I'd start a new fitness regime and keep it up for a few months before an 'injury' stopped me. I often seemed to be struggling with some pain somewhere or other, a pain that seemed to move about my body so much I thought I was just a really intense hypochondriac. And I was lazy! Many days I just felt 'lazy' and couldn't find the energy/be bothered to keep up the new regime.

I believed that my failure to be that fit, tanned, strong adventuress was my own fault. Growing up in a family that values 'toughing it out,' probably contributed to that feeling too. I totally bought into a dialogue that said you had to be strong and tough and that physical pain or illness was a symptom of your own weakness as a human being. Are you ill? Eat better! Are you fat? Eat less! Are you sad? Get a grip! Are you a less than perfect person? Well you should just try harder!

Last year I was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis. It is likely that I've had psoriatic arthritis for most of my adult life, although my symptoms had been misdiagnosed at different times as ME, being overweight, stress, and more recently, ageing. And to be fair to my GP, I don't really have visible psoriasis, just small patches on my elbows and scalp that had also been misdiagnosed as eczema.

Psoriatic arthritis causes pain, stiffness and chronic fatigue. It is incurable but also expresses itself in the body in waves, so that people with the condition have periods of remission when they don't feel unwell, followed by flare ups when joints and/or tendons can become inflamed and painful. Different areas of the body can be affected at different times although the most likely areas of pain will be in the hands, feet and spine. Why people get PsA is not clearly understood, but there may be a genetic and environmental component and it may be triggered by an injury or viral illness.

Getting a firm diagnosis was good in that it made me understand why I hurt most of the time and why I am so stiff. Of course I decided to ignore it as much as possible and generally just carried on as usual, guilty that I probably wasn't eating the 'perfect' anti inflammatory diet, with that quiet little inner voice nagging me that if I did yoga or a regime of daily exercise I'd get better. But basically I thought I should tough it out, not make a fuss, not give in to it, keep going, research a better diet, take control, make myself better, start a new fitness regime and finally, go for a three month walk, wild camping and carrying all my food and water.

Yeah, that went well.

The walk was amazing, beautiful, inspiring. The landscapes and wildlife I saw were so, so beautiful. I'm still travelling and walking at the moment and loving it. But I also realised that I can't do 15 mile days like the people I follow on Instagram, I never walk without pain, I'm not going to get better.

While I was out on this adventure I slowly came to realise just how disabled I really am. I guess in my daily life at home I have found a way of living that enables me to function pretty well and I'm very lucky that I have a heightened tolerance of pain. At home, even though I know I'm in pain I can mostly ignore it. But out on the walk it was very different. For example, my body is very stiff in the mornings, which at home just means I stagger down the stairs like a million year old woman, but in the tent I had to negotiate my body out of a sleeping bag and out of the tent, then onto my knees, up onto my feet and stagger off to the loos. I had to use my hands to pull my legs and feet out of the sleeping bag. It took ages and was exhausting. My feet were too swollen and stiff to put on walking boots first thing so I bought some cheap crocs to meet the day in. Sitting down to take a break was painful and difficult if I had to sit on the ground, I became an expert at scouting out suitable rocks, walls and grassy banks to sit on instead. The first couple of minutes walking again after a break were always painfully stiff, my feet blazed with a pain like fire sometimes. At first I put most of this down to age and unfitness, refusing to see that the arthritis had such a grip on my body.

At the end of the second week I hurt my rib trying to get into my sleeping bag. The week after that injury I put my back out. I spent a cold, frightened night in my tent, unable to move for hours because of the pain. The next morning was one of the lowest points of my life. This great adventure I was on was promising to collapse around me. That morning I finally had to face up to my physical disability and accept myself where I was, as I was, facing the reality of myself rather that the fantasy of what I felt I ought to be. It was one of the most painful experiences I've ever had. My back was in agony but my heart hurt more.

I staggered around Alnwick garden that morning wondering what to do. I'd got myself a bunk for the night at the hostel in Alnwick as my back was too painful to sleep on the ground again soon. I couldn't bear the thought of stopping the trip. Despite the physical difficulties I was having, I loved the walking and seeing so much wonderful wildlife and I loved the project I was doing the walking for. I didn't want to give up.

In the end I made the decision to stay with the walk, but I also came to an acceptance that I have a disability. At first a painful realisation, it has since become a positive one. I have a disability, I'm not going to get better, but I can still do awesome things, especially if I think sensibly and make adjustments for my needs. I have a feeling that if I stay with what I really am, instead of dreaming of what I'd like to be, more things, not less, are possible. Firstly, I recognised that my dream of wild camping had to die. If I hung onto that I'd end up in trouble. Instead I decided to stay in hostels, which actually turned out really well and I met some great people too. Secondly, I realised that I couldn't do the mileage that I dreamed of. So I learned to accept what my body can do. Some days five miles is epic for me, other days twelve miles is possible. Some days I can't do more than one or two.

Thirdly, I really came to understand that pain, while horrible, is really not something to fear always. One of the things I dreaded going into this trip was how I would feel if things went wrong. I hate having emotions, especially miserable ones. On that day in Alnwick I felt all the miserable ones and it turned out not to be so bad. That is, the emotional pain was bad, but I was able to think through it. It's a cliche but that pain got me to a place where I could accept myself as I actually was. So in the end I am grateful to the pain, of the body and the heart, that I felt that day.

I wonder if emotional pain is what we are trying to avoid in our culture that values so highly physical perfection and health? Of course, it is wonderful to be healthy and to be free of physical pain and if there is something we can do to help ourselves be as healthy as possible, then it's also great to have access to that information. For me the idea of working towards some ideal of physical strength and health was about hope. I might not be perfect now, but I could be perfect in some imagined future-time. Facing up to the full reality of my condition took away that hope. I'm not going to get better, although I will definitely have times when it's in remission. Facing up to the reality of ourselves is painful if that self is not what we'd like to be, or not likely to change.

It's also made me think about this whole question of our cultural attitudes to health and the dangers inherent in believing that we are totally, personally responsible for our health and fitness. This idea that we are almost to blame if we are not perfectly healthy and fit is horribly damaging. What message does it give about disabled people, the sick and the elderly? Do we believe that it's their fault for being less than perfect? Do we believe that the elderly just need to take more exercise? Do we think that they should have taken better care of their bodies when they were younger? What do we think about bodies that are damaged through pregnancy, work stress, accidents, genetic diseases, mental illness, environmental factors, pollution, poverty?

What does it really mean to eat clean and lead that adventurous, outdoor lifestyle? Who really has access to that? Is it everyone? What does it cost? How far is health and fitness about privilege?

I'm happier since I allowed myself to recognise myself as I am. Of course I don't want this pain, of course I'd love to have a fit, healthy body and I will do what I feel able to do to be healthy. That 'what I feel able to do' is important. It is kindly.

Resources for your pain:
There are some great resources out there to enable us to see other bodies being wonderful. People who are fat, disabled, or just different to us, living their lives. This isn't about that 'overcoming adversity' narrative either. Of course it can be uplifting and exciting when we see people doing awesome things, but at the same time we should not forget the millions of people who are everyday heroes, those people who overcome Everests just by getting out of bed, or making it through their front door, or getting through a day at work. Big round of applause to you all really.

Awesome/funny/inspiring people who don't look 'perfect' but are out there doing their stuff anyway:

Second Chance Hiker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVzpMDMwgVE&t=9s

Zach Anner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBL7UiX3DLI

Fat Girl Running: http://fatgirlrunning-fatrunner.blogspot.com/

The Fat Squirrell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEyQZ6OfsDU (superb episode about body acceptance)

About Psoriatic Arthritis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RDJarFvEqw

https://www.versusarthritis.org/about-arthritis/conditions/psoriatic-arthritis/

Observations recorded on a walk in Northumberland.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 May 2019 14:09:00 +0000

As I walked along the Northumberland Coast path from Bamburgh Castle, the trail turned inland for a while.

Walking across fields and down a farm track I made an audio recording of the things I could see and hear as I walked along. The following is the transcript of this recording.

"House Martin. Crow. Chaffinch song.
Lots of St Mark's flies.

An impression in the grass where a Fox has rested.

Cow Parsley just starting to flower.
Two Skylarks singing.
Dandelions. Plantain. Nettles and Docks.
Hedge of Hawthorn.
Elder tree.
Bramble.

Another field of Wheat.

Listening to Skylarks is like having gold and jewels in your ears.

A grassy field with ewes and lambs.
Some Buttercups.
Flashing by of an unidentified brown butterfly.

A Wall butterfly.
Forget-me-nots.

A Pied Wagtail flies overhead.
Swallow.
Chaffinch.
Wall butterfly.
Sparrow.

On a tarmacked path between fields of wheat and pasture.

A Swallow.
Unidentified white butterfly.
Hedgerow of Hawthorn and Elder.
Same border plants; Dock, Dandelion, Cow Parsley, various grasses, Vetch, Nettle, Bramble.

10 minute rest stop beside the tarmacked path between two farms, one arable, the other livestock.
Skylarks
Sheep grazing.
No Human sounds.

Wall butterfly.

Unidentified white butterfly.

Food that I could eat along this path in season:
Wheat, Elderflower, Elderberries, Nettle, White Dead Nettle, Blackberries, Plantain, Sorrel.

Along a hedgerow of trees: Rowan, Beech, Sycamore, White Poplar, Silver Birch, Rowan in flower, stunted Beech, Sycamore, Maple, Gun placement, Concrete,White Poplar, Oak, Beech, Ash, Maple, Hawthorn.

2 Woodpigeons.

Lots of St Mark's flies.
Unidentified white butterfly.
Large White butterfly.
3 Skylarks.
2 Large white butterflies.
Chaffinch.

Growing against a stone wall along the path;
Cow Parsley,
Bracken,
Bramble,
White Dead Nettle,
Cleavers,
Rape,
Various grasses,
Plantain,
Various lichens,
Small ferns,
Ground Elder,
Sow Thistle.

2 Wall butterflies.
A Chaffinch.
A Blackbird.

Red Clover.
Spanish Bluebell.

A Sparrow."

The tiny, unconsidered things.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 14 May 2019 10:17:00 +0000

So here I am, sitting in a field somewhere in Northumberland, my back has gone out, I’ve had a mild yet very painful injury to one of my ribs, I’ve spent a wakeful, freezing night in my tent and I’m having the time of my life.

In the last two weeks I’ve seen a Marsh Harrier hunting over reed beds, listened to the insectile call of a Grasshopper Warbler, hunted anemones in rock pools and fossils under cliffs, I’ve walked over a hundred miles, stood in awe under the stars, listened to owls calling, skylarks singing, seen starfish and Brown Hares, Oystercatchers and Arctic Terns. This little island we live on is so beautiful it catches my breath.

I’m here making work for the AuTCRONE project. I’m gathering as much data as I can about the environment I am walking through, noting plants, birds, animals, insects and weather conditions. It’s been an incredible, overwhelming two weeks, with at least another 6 weeks (hopefully 10 weeks) to go. I’m keeping a diary every day, but one of the things I have found hardest is finding the words to write about the project, there is so much going on in my head and in my body.

The journey has become two things; Most importantly I’m gathering data for the AuTCRONE, but also I find I'm spending a lot of time thinking about the emotional/spiritual impact of being in nature every day. I defy anyone to come out here, especially at this time of teetering environmental breakdown and devastating change on Earth and not experience something of the numinous.

I’ve come here from Birmingham, a huge, dirty, noisy, frenetic city. To go from that to this peace and calmness is almost shocking and I was brought up in the countryside, so spending day after day surrounded by trees and greenness is like coming home for me.
Inevitably I suppose, during these days I have spent walking through some very beautiful landscapes I have found myself thinking about how I live and how I want to live. Even though I have only been out in nature for two weeks I can see the impact that humans are having on it. I remember a countryside teeming with insects, beetles, butterflies, hoverflies etc. On this trip I see insects mostly in singles, occasionally there might be groups of them, but rarely. I am seeing quite a lot of wildflowers, but not the diversity I would expect and regarding birdlife of course on the coasts they still seem to be here in good numbers, but in farmland, particularly arable farmland, there are very few. Many arable farms I have walked through are actually silent, there are no birds there.

So I don't want to go back to the city because I believe that the time to experience this beautiful landscape is limited. I really believe we have very few years left now. I want to be here, in this beauty for as long as I can. I'd give much to live in a tiny house somewhere, growing food, planting trees and living a very simple, frugal life. I've been wandering along thinking about secular monasticism, about a life lived in simplicity, a life lived in a way that supports rather than destroys the natural world. I dread the thought of going back to the city, to that grey, ugly place.

But this time is a call to arms for anyone who gives a damn about how we are going to live in the future and to every one who loves the natural world. So maybe I have to go back to Birmingham? Maybe I need to do more to fight for the nature that is on my grey, tarmacked doorstep? Maybe this time is a time of personal sacrifice, that I can't have the life I want, that maybe NONE of us should have the life we want, but accept a life that is best for nature and our planet?If I can't do it, how can I expect that anyone else should do it?

How can I make my voice heard way out here in the boondocks? I joined the protests when I was in Birmingham, but out here there is no one to see. This is really what the AuTCRONE project is attempting to highlight, the silent voice of nature, the disconnect between this teeming world of networked beings and the louder self-important human world; that the natural world has no voice where human decision making is concerned. It's only at the place where nature affects human that the majority of us pay attention.

That's not to say that no one cares. Look at the work that has been done recently to highlight the problems affecting the bee population, this has been marketed to the rest of us as a huge problem because of how it could affect our food production. At the same time the world's amphibians are also facing devastating losses, but is that talked about with the same urgency as the bees? It doesn't seem to have the same impact on us as crop failures caused by bee decline, but if course it does. All these distant, tiny, unseen, ignored beings are really giants, they are so important to our biosphere.

If frogs and beetles and bees and microbes matter so much to the health of our planet, and believe me, each and every one of those things does matter, how much do your actions matter too? How much do mine? Don't listen to the people who say this problem isn't up to ordinary people to fix. It is. Your choices matter, your politics matter, your garden matters, the food you eat matters. The tiny, quiet, unconsidered beings of this world matter and so do your tiny, individual actions.

Being out here, all I can do right now is bear witness to what is out here, gather as much data as I can and try to make my actions out here matter in a good way. It feels challenging though, it feels a bit of a stupid and hopeless thing to do some days. Then I have to remind myself that this is what the work is about; that AuTCRONE is a being in solidarity with other beings who feel they cannot speak, or who have no voice; the tiny, unconsidered beings whose lives can seem to pass in inconsequence, but who matter as much as anything ever has.

Spring Abundance and the Festival of Beltane

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 18:27:00 +0000

I think that a sunny morning in Britain in May sums up just about everything good about living and enjoying the natural world. May in Britain is so beautiful; the white drifts of cow parsley along the hedgerows, plump green leaves on all the trees, lilac in flower and the drifting snow of falling hawthorn petals. Birdsong, blue sky and everything on the cusp of fruiting and blooming. I have seen some beautiful places in the world, but Britain in May, to me, is the loveliest time and place anywhere.

In the past and among contemporary pagans, Beltane is the festival that celebrates this moment of ripeness and beauty. Beltane, on the 1st of May, celebrates the Maiden becoming Mother, the gift of life, the lushness of nature in balance. Beltane is vigour and energy and is the first breath, and in that spring freshness lies the promise and hope of the harvest. In Beltane, this time of energy and vigour, the memory of Winter still looms, like a shadow in the corners. We feel great relief that the cold and dark has passed and celebrate the banishment of Winter (in Northern Hemispheres).

Traditionally, the time between March and the end of May was known as ‘the hungry gap.’ This was the time when stores are almost depleted and when there was very little in the garden to harvest. This hungry gap was the moment when the work you had done, or not done, in the previous year showed itself. If you had worked hard and been blessed with a good harvest, then you might well have enough stores to ride the hungry gap. If you didn’t then you would be suffering and maybe making promises to yourself to do the work to ensure a better harvest than the last.

So the May festival of Beltane is a time to celebrate abundance; the riches we have now and the riches (hopefully) yet to come. Most of all, Beltane is about energy, which for artists is also the energy of inspiration.
Artists are asked where they get their inspiration from and the reply should probably be, it comes from work. Because to harvest the abundance of inspiration as an artist, you have to turn up and do the work.

Those times when you are not making good work, not getting sales, not building successful relationships and networks, that funding you didn’t get; those times can be considered to be our artistic winters. The question is, how to hold on during those dark ‘soul’ winters, how to build a store that gets us through the hungry gap?

Probably, there are as many strategies for coping with our artistic winters as there are artists experiencing it, however I think there are certain strategies that should work for everyone.
Firstly, (and as a solitary person I struggle with this one) find people. The most important thing you can do as an artist is find other creatives. You need to know people who think expansively, people who are open to and actively seeking new ideas. The company of other creative thinkers is the most important resource to help you keep going when times are dark. After that, it’s a question of “fetching water, chopping wood.”

There is a well-known Zen koan that says:
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
In other words, turn up, do the work. Don’t wait for Spring, for Beltane, for things to get good before you start. Make work all the time, even in the darkest deeps of winter. Get into notebook or sketchbook keeping as a daily discipline at the very least. Make bad work, make hasty work, make ill-considered work if that is all you can manage, but above all, keep making work.

Every piece of work you make, every thought you note, every sketchbook you fill is food in the stores to protect you against the hungry gap. It might be the equivalent of an ancient jar of pickles at the back of the larder, but it’s there and in a pinch, it can help to keep you fed.

So, turn up, do the work, keep going.

Maybe you will have a mild winter, maybe a hard one and perhaps Spring abundance seems a long way away. Hopefully it will come, hopefully you will be able to celebrate the abundance of success, whatever that success means to you. And when it comes, remember to celebrate, enjoy the abundance of your successful Spring and don’t forget to invite friends to the party. Share the riches, invite others to collaborate, have a blast.

Then keep on “fetching water, chopping wood.”

The Pilgrimage

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 14:11:00 +0000

Ambit walk to Oxford day 5 - Charlbury to Oxford

It's been a funny old walk.
The original reason for doing the work and making Ambit I talked about here. In that post I wrote about isolation and using walking as a metaphor for that in my art practice. But as I got into this walk I realised that for me the isolation I experience when walking is a very different thing from the isolation one can experience in society. Walking in isolation is generally a lovely thing, not a sad thing at all.

I also wrote about walking as pilgrimage, mainly because I have for a few years been inspired by Will and Ed who started A Walk Around Britain and British Pilgrimage which was founded by Will. However, I hadn't really expected for this walk to become a pilgrimage, but a pilgrimage it turned out to be.

The walk was to connect my studio/home near Solihull with the exhibition space in Oxford. I toyed for a long time with the notion of walking to Oxford along the canal via Banbury; the canal passes less than a mile from my front door and it would be a very easy route. I'd already walked the canal from Solihull to Stratford-on-Avon, some of which was really beautiful (I saw an otter!). But generally, canals are too full of people and I prefer to walk on my own, so I took the trackways across country instead.

This route happened to pass through two villages where I lived as a child (Lower Quinton and Charlbury) and by places that had all sorts of familial significance for me, places of childhood picnics, adventures, pony and bike rides and many, many memories. As each day came and went I found myself thinking many times about my eldest sister, who died when I was in my late thirties. I have never stopped missing her in all the years that have passed, in some ways I think I miss her more as the years go by.

Sharon and I did not get on that greatly when we were children, I inadvertently gave her paroxysms of agony with my 'weirdness,' and was on strict orders not to speak when we were in the company of her friends. But, she taught me, as probably all older siblings do, so much. Sharon was the wilderness lover when we were children, whereas I was the sit indoors, bookish type. She was an adventurer, a 'tomboy,' where I was a girly girl, afraid of almost everything. But she must have inspired my great love of the outdoors and nature, for every time I saw some wildlife on the walk I thought of her. So many of the places I walked through reminded me of things she had told me about (Lark Stoke) or introduced me to (birdwatching), or shared a passion for (old churches and history). It felt like she was walking with me along so much of that route. I am astounded how deeply she sits in me, how much she taught me.

So, I caught the bus to Charlbury from Chipping Norton really early in the morning. Everything was swathed in mist, trees and cottages came looming up out of the whiteness and glowed with the gold of early sun.

The bus dropped me off at Five Ways in Charlbury and I thought about Sharon and when she took me to see red squirrels in the trees near that crossing point.
I walked along the road to the lane that went up past our old house and thought about Sharon and I walking to school together.
I started walking down Back Lane, a place she and I visited and played in for years. I thought about a sponsored walk she had done down it to the village of Stonesfield, a walk I was following again today.
I walked along the lane and saw a cobweb shimmering with morning dew and thought about how she taught me to capture frosted cobwebs on curved twigs and how we would compete to keep them intact the longest as we walked to school.
I walked along the lane and remembered the time she showed me a long-tailed tit's nest, a perfectly spherical miracle of twigs and moss and feathers.
I stopped in the lane to listen to skylarks and the tears came.
I howled.
I yelled and groaned and cried; a loud, unexpected, up-welling of grief I didn't know I had. It seemed like all these years I had kept this bowl of tears tucked under my rib-cage somewhere; this unacknowledged agony of missing her.

At last, when I began to come back to myself, I bent forward and let my tears fall down into the dark brown mud of the path. Holy water on holy ground.

After that I walked on to Woodstock along an actual Roman road, my eyes scanning the ground, hopelessly really, for some long forgotten coin or bit of pot. (Sharon once found a Roman lamp in the field behind our house. And a flint arrowhead). The walk to Woodstock was beautiful, with blazing sun and a dance of raptors and then there was a mad dash into Oxford and stress and craziness but that is all for another post on another day.

Ancient Tracks And A Side Order Of Witches.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 15:54:00 +0000

Ambit walk to Oxford day 4 - Chipping Norton to Charlbury

I was really looking forward to this part of the walk because it was a section that I had not been able to do when I was on the Solstice walk in December 2017. That time I had been recovering from a chest infection and felt too ill to walk it.

This time, I was feeling fit and the weather was unseasonably warm and sunny. I left Chipping Norton at 8am and weaving past the children on their way to school, started the walk properly beside the town allotments.

Leaving Chipping Norton

I saw a mouse here

The trail eventually joined the Salt Way, a very ancient track that was used to carry salt from the brine spring in Droitwich, Worcestershire. I wonder how many of the tracks I had already wandered were also part of this Salt Way? I'd love to do more research on this track, it might even be possible to walk the route still?
It's a really special road too because it hosts a colony of the very rare plant, Downy Woundwort. Another reason for coming back to this part of the world later in the year, to see the wildflowers that grow on limestone.

The Salt Way

The Salt Way - lots of Red Kite flying here too.

I took a short diversion from my route to visit a tumulus and a standing stone. The tumulus, a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves and also known as a barrow, had sadly been ploughed away. All that remained was a large stone in one corner of the field. I felt sad that the mound had gone and wondered about the ancestor's bones. I hope they had been ploughed to dust and returned to the earth and not lying mouldering in some museum archive somewhere. I don't think that ancestor bones should be kept. I'd rather that they were archived through digital data, photography and any possible DNA extracted, then taken back to the place of burial. Maybe that is a silly, not very scientific notion, it just feels the right thing to do. I know the bones are just bones yet I also believe that our ancestors had a deep connection to the Earth that is repaid by sending our matter back to it, to help replenish it. Personally, I would be perfectly happy to be buried in a compost heap, food for lovely worms and microbes.

All that's left of the Barrow?

On to Taston village and a quick visit to Thor's Stone, which looked rather bashful and seemed to be making an attempt to get itself over the wall and into an adjoining garden.

Thor's Stone

After a steep but very short climb out of the village I took a long lunch break at the edge of a field. Warmed very nicely by the sun, I used the time to recharge my phone via solar charger. I listened to skylarks and watched buzzards and muntjac deer and had a very lovely doze.

From there I went on through another lovely path, signposted Unsuitable For Motors (always a welcome sign) and passed a herd of Fallow deer, containing a very pale almost white buck. Then the path turned through a beautiful copse and down the hill into the village of Charlbury, where I saw three witches* and had a lovely half pint of local beer.

This small copse was really lovely

Looking back up the hill from Charlbury

beer

*So I was walking down towards the village, still on the hill and I saw three women walking side by side towards me. Normally I try to avoid looking at people, but these three quite caught my eye. There was something in their walk, in their presence; I would be hard-pressed to define what it was, at the time I had the silly thought that they must all do yoga as there was something fluid about their walking.
Anyway, as they came nearer I saw that they were a middle aged woman, a young woman and an elderly woman. As I passed them I looked at the eldest woman and saw that she was wearing a long silver chain at the end of which was a silver pentagram. The woman glanced up at me and smiled but as they went past me I felt quite sad that I wasn't a part of their group. I felt like I had lost something precious.
Witches.

A Heavy Pack And A Happy Mind.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 19:27:00 +0000

the long hill out of Long Compton

Ambit walk to Oxford Day 3 - Long Compton to Chipping Norton
My third day for the Ambit walk started at Long Compton rather than Shipston-on-Stour, where I had left off walking a day before. The section between Shipston and Long Compton was mostly along a busy A-road and not a walk that I thought would be very safe, so I missed that section (about 5 miles) and took the bus to Long Compton.

Once you get to the top of the Compton escarpment it feels very wild and remote. There is so much human history in this part of the country and it feels as if the distant past is always present. It's a place of long barrows, standing stones, ancient trackways and even today somehow retains a certain wildness.

I didn't visit the Rollright Stones on this trip, although it is a favourite place of mine. Having done the walk from them to Chippy a couple of years ago, I chose to walk on different tracks this time. I still felt that wild bleakness, despite the sunny day and imagined the many ancient people who would have walked along the escarpment from village to village.

My pack was really heavy this day. I had clothes and supplies for the next four days as well as the Ambit artwork and an emergency knitting project (which in the end never came out of the bag).
Here is a note from my diary for that day:
"There is always a moment when I start walking when I feel a certain euphoria. I wonder if it is endorphins? When I am all alone I feel very integrated, calm and definitely happy.
Today I had lots of thoughts about the weight of my pack, I reckon double what I have been carrying. With this extra weight on my back I have only managed 4 miles before stopping for a rest. But, a very steep climb out of LC. Will need to concentrate on squats and core exercises when I get home! There have been a lot of birds today, lots of skylarks and pheasants - I love the skylark's song."

I staggered happily into Chipping Norton and straight into the nearest tea shop, an extremely civilised place with loose tea, served in a teapot, exactly how I like it. I spent the night at the Crown and Cushion, where I stayed when I did the Winter Solstice walk in 2017. I really like it, an old 15th century coaching Inn with an excellent buffet breakfast perfect for a ravenous walker...

Looking back to Long Compton

Following the white road

Down to Little Rollright

St Philip's Church, Little Rollright

Memorial to Mr Dixon

The long climb to Chipping Norton

Inside Church of St Mary The Virgin, Chipping Norton

Tudor memorial sculptures in the Church of St Mary The Virgin, Chipping Norton

St Mary's is a beautiful Gothic Church

Church of St Mary The Virgin, Chipping Norton

Silence And A Wild Hare

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 16:34:00 +0000

Ambit walk to Oxford -
Day 2 - Lower Quinton to Shipston-on-Stour

I left Solihull with the dawn and travelled back to Stratford-upon-Avon, where I caught the bus back out to Quinton. Avoiding Meon Hill altogether, I walked from outside the house where I lived as a teenager along quiet back roads to the village of Illmington.

On the way to Illmington I climbed a steep hill to Lark Stoke, a hill and hamlet that I remembered my sister loved to visit when we were kids. I'd never been there and regretted that once I saw how beautiful it was. The sun was fierce for so early in the year, but up at Lark Stoke the wind was equally fierce. I stopped by the shelter of an ancient tree to brew up a coffee before walking on past beautiful farms and through deserted fields.

Rounding a corner of blackthorn I surprised a hare. We stood and looked at each other for a while before she slowly hopped away over the brow of the hill. What a beautiful creature, and surprisingly big too, much larger than a rabbit. Once, when I was younger, in a ploughed field close to Lower Quinton I saw two hares 'boxing,' a wonderfully mad sparring match between male and female hares.

Leaving with the dawn (shot from a train)

Walking out of Quinton into brilliant, fierce sun

The roads around here were very quiet. Perfect!

I decided not to walk the footpath on Meon hill. I know when I'm not welcome!

Quite a steep climb up to Lark Stoke

Coffee break beside this old tree. Is it a beech or an oak?

Took this shot just before sighting the hare.

Illmington village church

Climbing down the hill out of Illmington - this has been a trackway for hundreds of years.

Hot, silent road walk to Shipston

I followed a steep hillside path down into Illmington village and visited the beautiful Norman church of St Mary. Then a short traipse up through a sheep field and I was up on a high escarpment. I followed a very ancient track down towards Shipston. The day was very warm and had an almost summer-drowsy feeling to it.

It was a long walk along more tarmacked roads to get to Shipston, but nonetheless incredibly quiet. I noticed throughout the walk that whenever I walked through arable farmland there was hardly any birdsong. I wonder if pesticide use is affecting birdlife there? It was quite dramatic how silent arable fields were compared to grazing land. I'd be quite interested to do some further research on this during my longer walks in the summer.

Eventually I wandered down into Shipston and caught the bus back to Stratford.

Dreary With A Hint Of Witchcraft

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Apr 2019 15:37:00 +0000

Meon Hill

Ambit walk to Oxford -

Day 1 - Stratford-upon-Avon to Lower Quinton

(Ambit was a durational performance and artwork that I was commissioned to make for Neither Use Nor Ornament (NUNO) exhibition at OVADA in Oxford)

Originally, Ambit had been planned to include several walks, but illness, life and work got in the way of that original plan. The final walk, linking my studio in Solihull with the gallery in Oxford did go ahead. I carried in my rucksack the knitted artwork that I had been working on all through the winter; a 15 foot long, hand-knitted object that represented both the 'white road,' and the physical distance between the artists involved in NUNO.

I had previously walked from Solihull to Stratford-upon-Avon along the Stratford canal, so I

re-started the Ambit walk from Stratford, getting the train from Solihull very early in the morning.

Some of this walk was quite nice, heading out of Stratford along the Greenway, which is a dismantled railway line converted into an activity space for runners, walkers and cyclists, linking Stratford with the village of Long Marston. There are sections where it skirts the river that are quite pretty and I imagine in the spring and summer, when the blossom and wildflowers are out, it's lovely. But on a misty, early spring day it eventually became a bit boring. There's only so much even I can take of a long, straight, mostly view-less track.

The landscape around this part of Warwickshire is very flat, so that the first true Cotswold hill, Meon, stands out in the landscape like a beacon.

There was a fairly grim bit of the walk from Long Marston to Lower Quinton, skirting Long Marston airfield. There was a great deal of flytipping rubbish and great heaps of lager cans in the bushes and hedges. The flat landscape and the rubbish gave the walk a dour, dreary aspect here.

I was feeling pretty fit and thought that I might carry on to Illmington, so I walked up to Meon hill and began traversing the side of it. I lived in Lower Quinton as a kid so there were a lot of memories for me about walking on Meon alone or with my family. Meon hill has quite a sinister reputation in the area; it was the scene of a brutal murder and local people used to believe that it had connections to the darker aspects of witchcraft.

I always had a conflicted relationship with Meon hill. I loved parts of it for it's solitude and beauty, especially up on the top of the hill, but some parts of the hill always made me feel inexplicably uncomfortable. So it was this time. You cannot walk onto the top of the hill any more, so I took the footpath that ran along the side of the hill. I stopped for a brief rest and had a very uncomfortable, unexplainable feeling of dread, so much so that I retraced my steps and walked back to Upper Quinton to wait for the bus home. (The next day I restarted the walk at Lower Quinton, but this time took a longer detour via the roads to avoid going on the hill again. An odd experience).

River Avon in early morning

Following the Greenway out of Stratford

The Greenway was originally a railway track

A list of beautiful things

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 18:16:00 +0000

Ancient grey beech
Purple violets
White violets
Peacock butterfly

Circling kites

Skylark's song
A herd of deer
Imprint of a tiny hoof in the mud
Brimstone butterfly's startling yellowgreen
Water springing from the earth
A standing stone hugged by ivy
A high, ploughed field and whipping wind
Nettles and cow parsley just in the green
Fieldfares

Moss on the stone wall
A brook trickling through a green field
Buzzard lifting into the sky
Rook's acrobatic love flight
The folds of hills
A trackway walked for a thousand years
Lying on grass
Morning sunshine
Silence from engines
Tea.

Ambit - Day 1 Stratford-upon-Avon to Lower Quinton (a list)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 16:54:00 +0000

Landscape:
Mostly Arable farms.
Some pasture.
Scrub
An Airfield
A low hill

Distance:
Total: 56.2
Walked:12.98:

Body:
Steps: 28,451
Lowest heart rate: 79
Highest heart rate: 128
Pain in right thigh, left knee (mild)
Some soreness in feet (mild)
Lungs still feel some mild congestion.

Noted plants:
White violet (flowering)
Purple violet (flowering)
Dog violet (not yet in flower)
Cleavers
Dandelion (flowering)
Nettle
Plantain
Cow Parsley (not yet in flower)
Dock
White Dead Nettle (flowering)
Old Mans Beard
Blackthorn (flowering)
Hawthorn (budded)
Forsythia (flowering)

Insects:
Bumble bee

Birds:
Robin
Goldfich
Blackbird (with worm)
Dunnock
Long tailed tit
Buzzard
Rook
Crow
Swan
Pheasant
Partridge (heard only)
note: Lots of songbirds heard around the town and along the Greenway. Mostly silent through the farms.

Mammals:
Roe deer (from train window)
Horse
Sheep and lamb (various unidentified breeds)
Dog (various breeds)
Human

Walking Is An Act Of Hope.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 18:40:00 +0000

“A pilgrimage is a ritual journey with a hallowed purpose. Every step along the way has meaning. The pilgrim knows that life giving challenges will emerge. A pilgrimage is not a vacation; it is a transformational journey during which significant change takes place. New insights are given. Deeper understanding is attained…
On return from the pilgrimage, life is seen with different eyes.
Nothing will ever be quite the same again.” Macrina Wiederkehr

Walking is an act of hope, an act of rebellion, a gift, an act of suffering, an act of determination, an act that links us to our ancestors, an act that opens opportunities for our descendants. Walking is precious to me as my body stiffens and flares with arthritis. Every walk is for me an act of defiance, a joy, a statement of freedom.

Ambit was a durational performance for MfOR’s exhibition, Neither Use Nor Ornament, which involved physically connecting with 6 artists by walking and taking public transport to get from my studio to theirs. I would create a knitted ‘drawing’ as I travelled; knitting being a metaphor for connecting people and community.

The (neither useful nor ornamental) object I created was intended evoke the white road, the beaten path made by thousands of feet across thousands of years along the hills and valleys of Britain. Every stitch a step, a braid of stitches crisscrossing every inch and representing one mile journeyed.

Many of the old paths, Drovers roads, country lanes and pilgrimage routes that once crisscrossed Britain are covered now with grass and fields or subsumed by tarmacked highways. The journeys that ravelled along them still exist in memory and in the evidence written in our DNA. Humans are travellers.

Today, hundreds of thousands of people are walking across the Earth to escape war, hunger and poverty, just as our ancestors have always done. Today, people walk also because of the damage richer nations have done to the planet's atmosphere, causing environmental devastation on an epic scale. My own acts of walking are done mindfully; a small act of solidarity with fellow humans/refugees and the billions of creatures; insects, birds, fish and animals who are beginning their own mass journeying in the wake of the changing climate.

A list of items taken on a short walk in Wales

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 17:02:00 +0000

Walking poles

Voice recorder (unused)

Pedometer

Yarn

Knitting needles

Smartphone

Phone charger

Solar charger

Water bottles

Water tablets (unused)

Sleeping sheet

Shawl

Ground sheet

Airbed

Travel pillow (discarded)

Tarp

Aluminium Tent pegs

Gas stove

Tin cup

Wooden spoon

Two lighters

Headlamp

Maps

Money

Knee brace

Blister plasters

Micropore tape

Toothbrush

Towel

Painkillers

Suncream (unused)

Deodorant

Handknitted wool sweater

Waterproof coat and trousers

Handknitted wool hat

Cotton bandana

Spare knickers

Two pair spare socks

One pair wool socks (handknitted)

Spare t-shirt

Two pair cotton leggings

Data:
Duration: 4 days

Sections done:

Stourbridge to Kinver 17 Aug 18,

Knighton to Rhayader via Abbeycwmhir 22-24 Aug 18.

steps from Stourbridge to Kinver: 17,150

steps from Knighton to Abbeycwmhir: 50,949

miles walked: 34.04 miles

meters climbed: 860

sleep hours: too few

calories burned: I suspect not as many as I might hope.

calories consumed: a veil shall be drawn over this

number of blisters: one. praise the gods for micropore tape

duration of rest stops: variable

number of rest stops: quite a few

wind speed: variable, blustery on the hills

precipitation: minimal

sunlight hours: not enough

gates opened: many

stiles crossed: more than one is too many

list of songs sung: Help!, It's a long way to Tipperary, Pack up your Troubles in Your old Kit Bag.

number of times expected heart attack from effort: 4

biscuits consumed: 1 entire packet of dark chocolate digestives

In which the Drawing Devices go walkabout

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 11:47:00 +0000

Back in November artist Pete Ashton spent three months in the gallery at BOM making work as part of the Instructions for Humans exhibition. As part of his work on this project, Pete invited gallery visitors to take a typewritten instruction and use it to make a piece of art. I had the instruction, "walk in a straight line," and used this with one of my Drawing Devices to make a drawing for Pete's archive. As a result of that Pete invited me to bring some of my Drawing Devices into the gallery as part of his Data Art Week.

I assembled a dozen Drawing Devices and invited gallery visitors to take one out for a walk. The Devices were hidden inside sealed paper carrier bags. I explained that something inside the bag would make a drawing based in their movements, but participants had no idea what it was that they were carrying, or what the outcome would be.

Some people took the Devices for short walks, some kept them for several days. One participant uses an electric wheelchair, two participants used bikes, others walked and ran with their carriers.

Image copyright Pete Ashton

It was really gratifying to see the participant's responses when we finally opened the bags and revealed the drawings made. Each drawing was different, especially in the intensity of marks made. A couple of the drawings were very light, I guess the pens didn't deliver the ink very well. The most satisfying drawings were those that had been worked on over several days, making intense images.

One of my favourite drawings was the one made by the wheelchair user, which resulted in very delicate distinctive lines. This one was so satisfying because of it's uniqueness among all the images that have been created with the Devices. It inspires me to explore other forms of movement to create drawings; perhaps by train, canoe, horseback....

With the work I did over the summer using the wind to make drawings and the work I started at the Solstice drawing over ley lines and with dowsing equipment, I am beginning to amass quite an extensive catalogue of drawings.