Stepping Stones

WALK 7

This post is being placed on both Animated Stardust and Stepping Stones because it covers both places or rather what it refers to will affect each place. Further chronicling of the subject will happen over on Stepping Stones but a new photo album will appear over in the side bar in the next days and if you are reading this at Animated Stardust and want to know more about the images you’ll find in that new photo album, explanation and thoughts will go on over at Stepping stones throughout the summer. These thoughts and explanations may happen in addition to the scheduled / hoped for Tuesday Thursday and Sunday posts and will continue through till September and the arrival of autumn.

WALK 6

As I sat  trying to do a quick doodle of one of the trees I walk past regularly from the armchair overlooking my garden I considered the lack of physical walking that has been part of my days recently and smiled because even when there are days and even weeks when life is confined by the walls of the cottage and I do not move far beyond the space between my bed and favourite armchair I am given possibility to still walk, still discover and still interpret what I have and am seeing.

From this very rough doodle using a marker pen and watercolour I have been playing with paper and card creating small collages to further explore the shapes and layers that fragments of memory offer me when I try to conjure up what I have seen previously whilst out walking.

From something that looks like it could be a tree the work spirals off into different places and forms. One of the things I am playing with is making a fabric and paper collage which I suppose could be seen as applique and may become a wall hanging or bed cover evntually or more than likely just be a part of a process and does not need to be finished or completed in sense of hanging on a wall or draping over a bed.

It's in the looking round, in making note that I find I walk each day.  Whether I am physically walking along a path footfall by footfall or I am sitting quietly in armchair the walking continues. Mapping the journey is what I seem to be about and these charts, diagrams and signposts are just way for me to check on where I am and whether I am.

 

Walk 5

The very act of putting one step in front of the other is always more of a considered activity than one taken for granted in this life. Because of physical constraints of a body that shows the knocks of a life lived at full tilt and living with chronic health for other reasons my awareness of the gift of movement step by step through my day always has a moment in any day when it is heightened.

This may be because of actual physical pain, which reminds me, that which once was will never be again but in truth this doesn’t happen very often in sense that the pain happens but awareness doesn’t:0), not until sometime later when medication has kicked in and I can smile without counting the bones and muscles that are not.

More often it is because the concentrated effort it involves to get my brain to tell my feet to make contact with solid ground encourages me not only to be aware of what is actually happening as my body moves but what is happening around this body as it shifts the particles of other life around it.

WALK 4

Walking at the pace I do means that I am given many a gift that others who are fleeter of foot or flat pedaling it in a car miss out on. Going at the less than 4mph I travel at means that stopping it rarely an action of note but what I see when I pause often is.

Walking out of my cottage I am immediately on the lane it stands by as I may have a back garden  but the front is the lane tough above that is wild hillside so when I look out of my windows I see trees and more trees. The walks I share with Mr Bryn are most often begun by walking up the lane, and when I say up I mean up. Today the incline is helped by the tarmac and the lack of potholes big enough to lose back axle are not missed.  Already the tarmac is being colonised and given a few more years will almost certainly be more green than black but at present there is a shine to the surface which I find delightful in the rain as it seems to vibrate with the rains energy and is easily imagined as stream beneath my feet - dreams of walking on water  must be in there somewhere.

As we walk along Mr Bryn is busy inspecting nooks and crannies for scent and sight of other creatures whilst I scan the immediate view and the horizon when it peeks through the trees. I often look down to check where my feet are as I am not always quite sure that they are still on the end of my legs, this is often moment when I am fortunate to find myself not just finding my feet but something that stops me completely in its beauty.

At this time of the year there are many fallen branches and general detritus from the days of winter being blown or dropped in my path. Sometimes this means an ungainly scramble over or around a new obstacle or  presentation of a piece of 'art' that makes me smile, whip out camera or sketch book or both and enjoy a moment that I know no other save maybe Mr Bryn will experience.  That another might pass the same way is possible but at that moment it is my eyes and heart that are responding and in that moment the gift is mine to hold and then slip into the imagination for transformation and understanding at a later date in a different place when faced with a blank piece of paper or a grey day that eats away at the fabric of my wholeness.

It is in these fragments that I find a life of meaning sometimes finding way into the light, it is in these fragments that the picture of a life lived becomes less hazy when I transform what I have seen into meaning for myself through word, image and object.

Placing one foot in front of the other is not so much about propelling me along but about carrying me inwards to awaken outwardly with signs placed on paper, cloth and other materials, to carry me inwards to find the maps and charts already drawn and placed there which are unfurled and spread out to understand for the first time.

Sometimes this unfurling and spreading takes years and the outward signs take much time to even become small marks let alone complete landscapes but it is in a fragment that is not missed because a moment is spent standing still that a key is sometimes found that fits a door I had not even realised was locked. Even when the door is unlocked and I open it I often find it difficult to understand the place I have just walked into so slow and painstaking exploration of this place begins and yet more keys and doors are found and the process continues.

Two 'pieces of work' flashed before my eyes as I walked up the lane and I was captured by these 'still lives' enough to take out camera but not quick enough with sketch book before Mr Bryn decided he would exercises some artistic license and 'rearranged' the set up of the first and demanded we leave the second as it was time to move on, he was right for more gifts awaited us and I had noted and stored these fragments which have been added to the mass of ingredients I am considering to make my own 'piece of work' be that my day to day life and living or a concrete expression of that in 'creation'

Two still life images which were anything but still when engaged with heart and eye and did move quite fast as Mr Bryn picked up an element and smiling trotted off:0)

 

 

WALK 3

Even on a dry day my walks will encounter water in some form.  Oft times it is an obvious encounter which involves muddy boots at best and wet feet at worst but often it is the sound hidden in undergrowth that permeates my reverie and I will sometimes set off in search of the source of the 'music'. This time no searching was needed as the water finds its way out of  a stone wall and old metal drain pipe to fall into a storm drain. The water that appears from this pipe has travelled through many layers of mountain to arrive at this point and always seems to me to be shinning with the pride of making it this far.  I have in the past placed small bowl underneath this constant waterfall which has meant encounters with various wild creatures taking advantage of the makeshift watering hole and stopping off point for Mr Bryn and a few other of his dog friends. The bowl cracked during a recent frosty morning so I picked the pieces up and took them home to use in the bottom of a plant pot no doubt.

I love the way the pipe has been colonised by the vegetation but that even though this could have led to blockage there is room for both water and plant to exist. I pass this wall almost every day and each time I find something new to discover or rediscover.  It is not as if I don't know what this wall looks like, after ten years of walking past it even my muzzy eyesight should have been able to grasp the outline at least, but this wall has become in my mind 'my learning wall' for I discover each day what I already know but come to new understanding of and that for me this is what I understand as learning. Gaining insight and understanding of what I already know in a more illuminated and magnified way.

Would that one day the wall and I might be one, that the togetherness of a moment that I fleetingly experience sometimes become experience of always but then always is something I will never understand till I am part of it and then understanding will not need words, images or thoughts it’ll just be but for now I find thrill, meaning and momentum in my ‘conversations’ with a wall.

WALK 2

Today’s word for my consideration was WHOLENESS. As I wandered along my usual path both inside the cottage and outside I thought about what this might mean for me at this moment and realised it was as much about letting go, following the lie of the land without too much thought as to the actual contours and gradients I was travelling through as planning a route and mapping out its course with cartographic precision.

I stood by this falling brook for a long time this morning watching and listening to the dance of the water and the joyous cacophony that the stones and boulders seemed intent on magnifying. I marvelled at the intent of the water as I watched, at the same time the freedom and abandon it seemed to express felt like a strong challenge to me.

To have as much confidence in my purpose, my roll, my goal or even the blind faith as this tumbling racing, rolling stream seemed to express.

To follow the curve crevice and certainty of the Earth with as much energy, joy and acceptance as this brook, trusting to the moment and accepting my being as enough reason to continue with my journey.

Wholeness, to accept and embrace, not some goal or task but to completely be who and what I am meant to be.

A small water course on a hillside in the very early morning spoke to me of courage, of daring to be who one really is. No pretensions to be a river or an ocean though of course eventually this brook will become part of these. As I gazed at the early morning light reflect as if off diamonds as it bathed in the brook I understood a little more of what the word WHOLENESS might one day mean for me.

One day if I am able to begin to get close enough to emulate the acceptance I felt and saw in this brook, to its joy in being, to its trust and acceptance of its being and to continue on my journey with as much courage and daring then my wholeness might afford the light a diamond to reflect off and in this moment wholeness and the Whole will be reason for my joy.

Water running down a hillside, heading for river ocean and sky, to welcome the light and magnify it simply just being without thought to the next moment or where I am going just knowing in the moment there is intent, joy and reason enough to continue with my journey.

Dancing down a hillside with diamonds adorning every molecule seems a mighty fine way of being and this morning for a moment brook and me changed places and wholeness was glimpsed.

 

WALK 1

This series of photographs and thoughts are means for me to begin to notice and take on board the world around me that consists of more than the sky above which I often take in with big gulping glances or the ground immediately in front of me that I am trying to encourage my next step to be made upon. I have set myself a kind of brief for this word that has one line in it that says 'Discover the 'world' below waist height that is not just where your foot falls'  It is not that I do not take these things in nor that I am not startled by this 'world' sometimes but more often this 'world' passes me by and I have felt that for some time I may have been missing something that will not only engage but will open up thought and discovery that are waiting for me to be open enough to find.

I feel this is very much a 'work in progress' and may be raggedy and a little confused but from the 'WALK' posts I will be able to see a progression towards a key, a door and maybe a new vista when I walk through the door knowing a new element of my  practice or a ritual has come into being.

The elements i use in my daily life to endeavor to stay focused and aware haven't just happened they have usually come from an idea that peculates up and then is explored with as open heart and mind as I may offer and through which comes the 'real' idea that then becomes part of the day to day I call my life. 

Sometimes the exploration is the answer in itself, other times it has led to creating the Pilgrim Beads and the composition of the 'prayers' and the working out of small rituals and ceremonies for myself. This process is more usually carried out on scraps of paper or in notebooks, sketchbooks  and with camera.  All the 'outcomes' are put into a box for a period and then I gradually unfold their meaning for me and what I might do with them if anything.So I'm using this weBlog as box this time which is a little surprising but maybe my floundering-wandering- falling-over-discovering way of doing things is what needs to be shared rather than the end piece.

I begin with a photograph .