Women, Walking and Wellbeing

Women, Walking and Wellbeing

Last Monday I held the first of my walking workshops. This one, ‘Women, Walking and Wellbeing’, looks at our attitude to walking, here in the UK, and includes exercises on creative way-finding and place making and introduces the art of Psycho-geography.

Woman walking.

Colourful and textural detective work.

It went well and everyone enjoyed themselves, the venue worked and the coffee and cake was appreciated. On refection, I find that it is only when I am actually running workshops that the content and engagement can be improved.

 

Finding landmarks.

I went to see Germaine Greer at a new arts venue, The Quarterhouse, in Folkestone last week and found her talk ‘The Disappearing Woman’ interesting but quite sombre. What I decided I would take home from the talk was a determination to make more women visible. So, let’s get out there, get walking, see and be seen!

Some interesting 'clues' to navigate by.

Everyone on my course said a main part of the enjoyment of the day was meeting other like-minded women.This is important.

Learning by Doing

It is through doing courses that they evolve into something quite inspiring for both the facilitator and the participants. I have now changed the time frame and the subsequent costs, tightened up the content, added more dates (next date is 30/03/15) and created a workshop package for each participant to take away with them.

Using modern methods and post-it notes!

I am away next weekend at The Eden Project in Cornwall. I am really looking forward to it, it is a ‘Big Lunch Extras’ event and it supports people ‘to bring about positive change in neighbourhoods right across the UK’. There will be ‘an interactive and varied timetable of workshops, activities and inspirational speakers alongside time to explore and network with others.’ This feels to me like the perfect timed opportunity to participate.

Foreshore detail: low sun, tide running out.

Foreshore, larger view.

I am getting a clearer vision of how my MA Design research and subsequent work is going to evolve into a far reaching and positive ‘movement’ for many. I want my work to be improved by attending courses and events such as this one, but I am also keen to make a living by it. I haven’t applied for any funding yet, as the actual vision needs to be very focused and clear on who it is for, where it will be, what it is exactly and how it will be applied. I feel that I am so close now.

Writing

I am starting with a book which will be finished by early May and the writing of it will be funded by a crowd-funding campaign. I have been researching about crowd-funding for a while and followed some very successful ones on social media. It is not easy but it is possible. The campaign also identifies the market and is therefore very useful if/when approaching a publisher.

On of my paintings was published in last years 'Earth Pathways Diary'.

I have been looking at the possibilities of self-publishing too. There are many online options; one that has been recommended to me is ‘Lulu’. The initial problem I can see of using this ‘platform’ is that they only produce books with glossy covers. Strangely this bothers me, I expect my book to be beautiful to look at, I have a wealth of images that I can use which include photographs and my own and others original artwork.

Beautiful Books

Even when I used to get my photos developed back in the day of processing labs, I used to prefer the matt finish over the glossy one. So I realise that the aesthetic of the book is as important as the content, to me. I have been looking through many of my own books at home and others in libraries recently, pondering their shape, style, weight, layout etc.

Even the form of the words on the page can be evocative and beautiful.

Page from a 1950's book of the countryside, showing page border detail.

There are many that I own because how they look appealed to me first. There are others, but few, that have comprehensive and valuable text, but are a bit clumsy in their look.

One of the shop displays showing some books back in 2014.

I think the feel of a book and its content are both important. My friends own a shop called ‘Number Seven’ in Dulverton, Somerset and I know that they are persuaded by this too.

A wonderful book that I am working through at the moment. I don't know whether Number Seven stocks this one.

This book I know is stocked there. Such a beautiful cover.

Their bookshelves are full of the most exquisite books, colourful, beautiful and precious. Davina also organises a ‘Walking Book Club’ that takes people out into the surrounding wonderful wild countryside, to discuss the book that they have all been reading.

Photo by Davina Jelley, taken at one of her walking book clubs, a couple of years ago.

The club is open to all, the books are available from the shop, to buy and there is a welcoming atmosphere to all that join in.

So next time I will blog, it will be after my Eden experience. Hopefully I will come back inspired and enthused for setting up more local projects, engaging others and connecting people to 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.)

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.)