Big Skies and Changeable Weather

Big Skies and Changeable Weather

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week visiting various parts of the Kent coastline and going for walks. These walks haven’t been anything arduous. I think that it’s the ‘going out’ that is important.

John Muir was a Scottish naturalist, who moved over to America and created the first national parks, he said,

‘I went out for a walk, (and finally concluded to stay out till sundown), for going out I found was really going in’. John Muir

Going out, especially in the wintertime, when it’s snug and cosy indoors may not be the priority for most of us. Unless you have a dog to walk, or don’t have access to a car, it tends to be avoided. I am lucky enough to be able to drive, so I can choose quite easily where I will walk and recently it has been a case of picking friends up and driving to a favourite or new spot.

 

Walking with friends in all weathers.

A flask of coffee and biscuits or cake persuades most of them to join me on short, often wild, windy and wet walks along the coast.

Snow coming?

Of course I can walk from where I live and I do. Walking a well known route regularly has different benefits. The smaller details are recognised, such as the movement of something small along the path, for example: a glove that had been dropped onto the floor yesterday is now put up on a wall. This reminds me that others walk here too. Another day the glove may have gone, has it been reunited with its owner or is it in the bin?

My shadow finishes up on the beach!

Small manmade interventions happen every day and of course seasons change too. Nature reminds us of the time passing, if we care to take note we can watch a whole (plant)life cycle. I see the flowers of the Alexanders that thrive along the coast here bloom, fade and then their seeds appear. Dark black seeds denote where the plant thrived as its foliage shrinks back in the autumn. Now, most of the seeds have disappeared but a few remain and I snack on them and enjoy their Aniseed taste as I walk and I note that their foliage is regrowing now, (also edible!).

Detail of chalk cliffs at Westgate.

The artist J.M.W. Turner loved the big skies of the East Kent coast, particularly those of Thanet.

‘..the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe.’ Turner

The sky changes, as the weather rolls in or out. Recently we have had dramatic stormy skies to watch as we walk.

 

Wet weather approaching.

The huge clouds roll across and out to sea and mostly take all that wet weather out with them, but in the process they create the most wonderful reflections and optical effects on the beaches.

Deal seafront seeming to float in midair.

When the sun pierces through the clouds and shines brightly, it creates dramatic silhouettes and dark shadows.

 

Deal Castle.

This is a stark contrast to the glowing low brilliant light that reflects on the sea that can be so bright that I need to shade my eyes.

Walking is good for you!

Last Friday on Radio Four I caught the end of the Today programme. As often happens, the last six minutes were the most interesting. Apparently plentiful evidence, published in the publication ‘American Journal of Clinical Nutrition’ has proved that walking is good for us. To walk twenty minutes daily has been proven to add to our longevity.

 

Piers such as this one at Deal encourage walking out.

John Humphrys interviewed two writers, Claire Tomlin and Ian Sinclair and asked them if the study was correct, does walking allow them to think better too? 

I have written in this blog about Ian Sinclairs work as a psychogeographer, specifically his ode to the soulless ‘revamping’ of the East End of London in making way for the 2012 Olympic Park: ‘Swandown’.

Ian Sinclair and Andrew Kotting in the film 'Swandown'. Photo by Anonymous-Bosch

I had not discovered the biographer Claire Tomalin before, she described her walks along the Thames, literally in the footsteps of Samuel Pepys. She had been advised long ago to experience the landscape as her subject would have done, either on horseback or even better,she said 'by foot'.

‘You see the sky and the river in the same way as your subject did…it’s just very thrilling to feel you are covering the same ground.’ Claire Tomalin

She went on to say that Dickens, who walked 20 miles a day, often across Kent, thought it was essential. He had to walk in order to write, he felt there was a definite connection between walking and writing.

Seasalter Marshes, Dickens could have walked here too.

When Ian Sinclair is interviewed he explains that he does the same walk every day for 40 minutes through Hackney.

‘I walk as a kind of mediation between the state of sleeping and the state of arising…by doing the same thing there is no novelty, other than the small changes that happen day to day…’ Ian Sinclair

Claire Tomalin finishes off the interview by plainly stating that ideas ‘come to you as you walk’.

 

Walking physically and mentally opens up new vistas.

This is a great reminder for me for when I feel ‘stuck’ creatively and it is wet and rainy outside. By going out, I will go in and as that happens, walking, wandering and wondering begins.

 

 (I completed my MA in September 2014 and recorded the last two months of it in another blog called www.thesaltwayfarer.blogspot.co.uk

Please feel free to look at that anytime, as it is from that, that I am where I am now.)

Getting Real

Getting Real

With all the doom, gloom and terrorist horror in the news at the moment I have felt great solace to walk, to get outside and enjoy the reality of my life, at this moment. Who knows what another day or week will bring. Walking out there is real and allows me to count my blessings.

Getting out in nature is 'getting real'.

I listened to a BBC Radio Four Programme last Thursday that reiterated the benefits of the great outdoors. ‘Open Country’, featured the Wiltshire Wellbeing group, who I understood to be a group of individuals brought together by a prescription for ‘forest days’ by their doctors. The days were spent outside in the wood, working together in a community fashion, gaining awareness and skills that allowed them to connect more with each other and themselves. The skills included fire making, green woodworking and nature identification. Many of them said it had changed their lives.

Long shadow, short days; Winter Walking.

I ventured out today with some good friends for a very wet and windy walk. It was worth it; we stood sheltering by a copse of trees and watched the rain blowing across the fields in waves. The bare skeletons of the trees in the near distance were clear enough to identify their species but as we watched the rain swirling around us, the trees further away became shrouded in a deeper mist. Birds wheeled above us and still the wind and rain blew. Lunch was made even more special by this experience and changing into dry clothes we ate as if at a feast.

English Magic

This was the name of the most recent exhibition to show at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Jeremy Deller created the work for the British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, it has been touring during 2014 and this was its final showcase.

I have loved going to see it on two occasions. Yesterday we managed to get to see it one last time as it is due to be dismantled today.

‘Deller uses ‘English magic’ to explore mysterious acts and ‘magical’ transformations in british society- its people, myths and folklore as well as its broad cultural, socio-political and economic history.’

Turner Contemporary.

This may sound serious, but it was fun. He had created a film which can be downloaded here. 

It has music on its soundtrack from Vaughan Williams to David Bowie, artfully arranged and played by the Melodians Steel Orchestra. This means the music is still recognisable, it has been given an unfamiliar but surprisingly upbeat flavour. I liked it so much I bought the vinyl record, which is as thick as some early gramophone records that I have stored away somewhere in my house. The soundtrack was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and released by The Vinyl Factory. I think that this attention to detail, to create something long-lasting, sturdy and ‘proper’ is in itself a sense of English magic. We were once renowned for, amongst other things, our manufacturing plants and inventiveness. English eccentricity can lend itself to open minds and new ideas. This exhibition was a great example of this.

Motion

There is a main section in the English magic film that shows birds of prey flying, landing and taking off in ultra slow motion. Every flake of snow falling, every feather and its ruffling in the breeze is shown in its intricacy. Viewing this on the large cinema screen in the exhibition (whilst sitting on a podium type seat manufactured from one of the crushed Range Rovers shown in the film), was impressive. The birds showed such grace, power and beauty that it astonished me. I would love to feel that movement of taking off, to have the power to rise and glide.

I am bound.

But I will only be able to achieve this in my dreams and journeys, as a human I am grounded by my heavy frame, but given the anatomy to walk, run and dance.

That is something I want to explore. I have a meeting tomorrow where I shall be able to share an idea I have about movement in the landscape. I want to research the theme of human movement, specifically that of women in the landscape as an art project. I developed a design system during my MA study that looks at the integration of people and place. This is constructed using appropriate tried and tested way-marking and place-making methods from an ever growing ‘toolbox’. The idea is to create community engagement, sustainable tourism etc. I believe the art project will feed into the existing work creating a more dynamic and less preconceived model.

Music

I loved the music from the film, listening to it, very loudly is great. Speaking to a friend this week and discussing our attempts to ‘keep up’ with current ‘sounds’, I was recommended, amongst others, Bonobo. I looked on youtube for some more information and came across their song ‘Eyesdown’. The video is pretty mesmerizing in a similar way to English Magic. The woman in the video seems to awake in a forest and wears a costume of rags, (similar in style to the powwow dress of a Native American), she moves in motion to the music and eventually becomes a bird and flies off, out of the forest. Yes, the music is good, the idea behind the video is even better. This, I think could be a starting inspiration for the movement, women and land project. It needs a name. I would like music to be part of it. I will enjoy thinking about this, the meeting tomorrow should further clarify my thoughts.

 

Walking in the shadow of nature.

 

 (I completed my MA in September 2014 and recorded the last two months of it in another blog called www.thesaltwayfarer.blogspot.co.uk

Please feel free to look at that anytime, as it is from that, that I am where I am now.)

Moving Through

Moving Through

Today is New Years Day 2015. It feels very similar to yesterday, the weather is comparable, the grey dull light is familiar for this time of year but it is different. Today is the first day of this New Year, a day that we will be able to look back on, a day that we will be able to tie our different experiences to and that in itself is important. It is a marker, a man-made artifice needed to help us recognise our place in the world, in the natural cycle of life and with each other.

Time and tide worn groyne.

Life and time carries on regardless, I believe that if we are lucky we are able to appreciate this, we may even enjoy the ride. It is a case of moving through, navigating the terrain and enjoying the company on the way.

Today we went again to Seasalter beach and stood on the shore listening to the wind and the cry of the birds on the tide-line. We watched as geese honked their way overhead and traced the familiar landscape of the Isle of Sheppey and the Swale, the Estuary and the receding coastline with our eyes. I have looked onto this landscape as long as I remember, I am fond of it. To me it is my ‘wild’.

 

Louise and I. Seasalter 1973

I unearthed a couple of old black and white photographs at my parents house which show me and my sister on the same stretch of beach, I am aged about 4, my sister is 6 years old. I am quite shocked to realise that both of my own children are older than this now.

Seasalter 2015

Life and time carries on. Today I was probably walking on the same shells that were there all those years ago, the Brent Geese I heard today would have been descended from the geese that would have visited that shore when I was 4 years old, wearing my new purple coat and excitedly showing the photographer, probably my dad, my stone, pebble or pretty shell that I had found! The wind that day would have sounded and felt just as it did today, loud and sharp on the face and ears.

Walking memories

My memory of walking as a family group throughout the seasons is a good one. We used to go out regularly and explore new and favourite places. These included: The Warren at Folkestone, the Pilgrims Way at Boxley, Bysing Woods and of course Seasalter beach. In the winter the walks were fairly quick, in autumn they were always accompanied by carrying plastic punnets and picking whatever fruit was plentiful. Spring walks through bluebell woods were a joy, the smell and colour was magical. Summer walks always seemed to include picnics and boiled eggs and of course there was squabbling, tired legs and probably many other disappointments, but I am glad to say, I can’t remember them now.

Layers of shells pushed up by each tide.

It may be a new year in our human world, but time is a constant, the seasons revolve around and we carry on our life. Shared human experiences are what can build community, especially positive ones. Today I walked on the same beach that I walked on as a child and I still saw the magic of the place.

Me, Seasalter beach, this time, summer 1973.

Maybe my view has been formed by being lucky enough to have parents who made us get out and walk, who showed us the beauty and magic of the turning seasons, the reward of blackberries in the autumn and the thrill of being outside when cold winter wind blew, tangling hair and making noses run. I thank my parents for this love of the natural world and I thank my lucky stars for the power of gratitude I feel to just be healthy again, after a good week of having a rotten cold, I have been able to get out once more and recognise why this is so important to me.

Timescales

Life and time carries on, so do we. Enjoy 2015 and all is has to offer. Nature is out there to be explored and appreciated. It will connect us back to ourselves, (as a 4 year old perhaps), and to everything else. The cyclic nature of the seasons reminds us of our own time and our own timescales. Our lives may be measured by achievements, possessions and experiences; today especially we tend to ask what our new year’s resolutions are?

Let us just have the grace to appreciate the here and now.

 

Tide table December 2014.

Today I went to throw away my 2014 tide table; it ends on 31^st of December 2014. But it is cyclic too; it is just another pattern of spring and neap tides and the space in-between each tide is as regular as our breath. I can look at the months tide table and work out this month’s pattern; I can see the phases of the moon and see how the tides are affected by it. Life and time carries on, the last day of 2014 is not separate from today, the tides are in their pattern, the seasons are in their flow, it continues.

Years ago I heard a radio interview with Claire Rayner, she was once a Matron and when asked how she coped with it all, she said that when she struggled with a situation, she always reminded herself that ‘This too will pass.’ It is a phrase that I have used through difficult times and it has really helped. Life and time carries on. ’This too will pass.’ It continues. I am grateful to be aware of this moment and try to practice mindfulness with grace.

 

Walking on Tankerton beach before Xmas, 2014.

I believe that walking regularly in the real world allows us to adjust to our natural pace, season and thoughts and gain a humbling recognition of our place in the bigger picture. When we walk we find peace in place.

 (I completed my MA in September 2014 and recorded the last two months of it in another blog called www.thesaltwayfarer.blogspot.co.uk

Please feel free to look at that anytime, as it is from that, that I am where I am now.)