Beginings

JULY 2012
What is the desire to write? And to write with what audience in mind. Sometimes it is in speaking out loud that I know what I am thinking. And writing also seems a way to slow down, to let thinking go through some process, so that words show up on a page. For the last few years thinking has become more a journey, a reverie, and a silence out of which understanding bubbles up to the surface. Much is lost in this failing memory, but some stays and becomes the next thread, the next insight, and most importantly the next question.

I spent a wonderful afternoon with my cousinVeronica a few days ago. We wandered from the Millenium Bridge down to Tower Bridge and back. The river is industrial, full bodied, nothing gentle or subtle about the Thames. She works hard, hauling herself up into high tide and then breathing out into low tide, her muddy bottom exposed to the endless light of English midsummer. It is hard to believe that London sits on the latitude of Nova Scotia.

This is not the Thames. But the River Stour in Suffolk that Constable painted!  We spent the afternoon floating down the River. This is the England of my childhood imagination. To be very low to the water, watching cattle at knee height seems to conjure up the Wind and the Willows. I  expect to see Toad  and Otter to appear chatting away as we drift by. It reminds me of some movie I watched here in Michigan. Some hilarious take of a proper English matron growing high quality pot above a tiny fishing village in Cornwall. After the the film I sat in the car and sobbed. Something about the countryside, the cliffs and the ever so green fields and hills broke open the geographical DNA in my heart. As I get older I seem drawn into this English imagination.  Nostalgia perhaps. But there is a quiet beauty, even tidy, to the English landscape that tugs at me.