Winds of Change

To this lake today. The waves rushing across it make it look like the sea, though they are caused by the wind rather than tides. There is a lot of wind here. The lake is up on a plateau in the hills of North Wales. All around it is peaty soil with heather and sphagnum moss, forming tumps which, in different stages of drying out after recent warm weather, take on a beautiful succession of colours from green to yellow-green, dusky pink and rusty orange. Subdued and subtle colours  - at a distance a myriad shades of tinted straw - but close up, and interspersed with the heather, like the hues of another world.

I love to be in these empty landscapes, though ruined cottages and the remains of old lead mines show that they were not always quite so empty. There are wind turbines barely visible on the horizon, also showing that the land is being utilised in this way again. Concrete and tarmac are being laid across the peat where before there were just tracks and rubble roads. Pylons are being built to carry away the power generated.

I have mixed feelings about this. Green energy is of course a good thing, though some question how green this technology really is. And the peat too is a carbon store and this carbon is released when the peat is excavated or dries out through draining. Should I regret the loss of this wild landscape and the special things that are here? Or should I welcome the alternative ways of producing energy? If only I could be sure that it would help to avoid climate change my regret would at least be tinged with hope. But the more I find out about the technology and the impact of putting it in such places, the less I am sure.

Wordless by a Well

I've been away for  a walking holiday in the Wye Valley, exploring the river and the woodlands along it.  One place I went was a village with a old well next to the church. I thought as it was in a guide book it might be crowded but there were only  few people when I arrived and they soon went. So I was alone for a bit at the well, a really atmospheric place which I tried writing about afterwards but it seemed to be beyond words.

So, back home, I've tried to recapture the experience by meditation and automatic writing which has worked for me before.

Here's the (edited) result:

The well wet all around with iron or something from the water staining all the stone work around it. Mosses and liverworts growing up the well walls. A scent of the deep earth from the well shaft and a sudden upwelling feeling of water rising from the depths of the deep earth and from depths within me. I am well water. I am a stream.  I flow. Visions come of flowing streams a figure standing on a bridge: a priestess? a water nymph? a goddess? she stands on the bridge with the water flowing beneath her. I am her, and yet I'm watching her. We flow together washing the land, seeping into the land, one with earth, feeling the warm rays of the sun drawing us up into the air. Falling now as a shower of rain. Back to earth. A sprinkled blessing for all things.

The well coming back into focus. The stonework and the seeping water. The trees all around and the old church which i did not enter, too instilled with earth and water spirit visions to be diverted After a step out of time into the water world voices call me back. A family with young children are coming. I retreat through the churchyard into the trees beyond and linger along a hedgerow back to the village ....

The whole area around this well is a magical place. Part of me wants to write about it. Part of me says words are not the way to represent it. Sometimes I think that about this blog. That I shouldn't need to write it. That it is all just experience and nothing else is real, particularly not words. Though that's all I've got to communicate with. I don't know a lot of poetry (I should know more) but I often look into my by now old and battered  text book copy of the poems of Emily Dickinson which I had to read for A Level at school. It's one of the few schoolbooks I've kept. We looked at one with the words "internal difference ... where the meaning are" and she speaks of "saying it slant" which I remember we had to write about as "elliptical expression". I've gone off the subject I know, but those poems are the only ones I've read that hint at what can't be said in language. I know what she means.