Waterfall

It's supposed to be therapeutic to walk to waterfalls, so I walked to this one. You can only get to it if you walk, so I knew that the way would take me away from things.  To get there I had to turn off the main road where the river runs under a bridge and follow a minor road along the river to a village. This is as far as it makes sense to go by car. From the village another road - only just wide enough for a car - winds up the valley with the river rushing past in a ravine below. It turns around some sharp hairpin bends, passes a few remote farms, then becomes a dirt road to the last farm at the top of the valley. After that it's a footpath, then just a hardly visible line across some fields, which brought me to a huge ash tree where I sat, ate my lunch, and took the photograph above. I didn't meet anyone on the way except a dog that barked at me through a farmyard, quite a few sheep in the fields, and a toad that crossed the road just in front of me and was kind enough to to stop by the hedge and be admired.

So I sat and drunk the waters of the waterfall in my mind, drinking in peace and harmony even though the cascading water was anything but tranquil. I was here, and sane, and at the end of the world with a wall of rock enclosing the top of the valley. A glacier had made this. But in my moments of  escape it was a wall against the world. Feeling restored after a while I left the tree and dropped down to a lower field which was the way to the falls. This was a bog and it was difficult to get much closer without going through it. I squelched around for a while, then turned back. I could only go back by the way I had come, reversing the way across fields, the track and the narrow road. Thankfully the dog was not in the farmyard, then I saw him up on the hillside with the farmer rounding up sheep. The toad had gone too. Arriving back at the village I met a man cutting the grass on the bank outside his cottage. He wished me good day. It was a welcome back to the human world.

At home I lit a candle. Imagined myself human again. Reconciled to the world.