In gratitude.
‘ Love in a hut, with water and a crust,
Is – Love, forgive us! – cinders, ashes, dust;
Love in a palace is perhaps at last
More grievous torment than a hermit’s fast: –
That is a doubtful tale from faery land.’
Keats. ( 1884) Lamina.
The body collects landscape, gathering, forming, collecting, sharing, revealing, fragmenting, traces and lines of terrain shadowing the body. The body as archive. Each day an experience granted. Each day, a need to give thanks.
To stand. As still as still as the deer who is watching me.
To move as swiftly as the foal who fears me.
To move my arms like the eagle who tracks my path.
To want somehow to allow this flesh to become a part of this scene.
When sat in the root of tree struck down by lightning
I watch woodlice make a new home
In the site of such disaster.
A wise man fallen.
The leaves lay and weep.
I sit silent, even my breath too loud,
Such stillness
Then such symphony
As nature will always agitate.
My clothes get covered in red mud.
Beetles in my hair.
Sand in my fingernails,
Mud between the creases.
This feels better.
As though somehow I am being let in to this world.
To want to hide in the shadows of dawn.
To battle with the blazing sun.
To allow the tide to take one at will.
To be alone in the moors
Is a falsehood.
One is never alone.
A cow laughs at me as I get stuck in a fence.
And know for now this is all.
In gratitude.
Urban re:passages 