Notes from June.
A month of dancing, defined shadows flitting across my path, filling my periphery with the fluttering of a breeze. A celebration of green and a backdrop of sun that forces you to squint. The kind of light that my phone camera doesn’t know what to do with. Everything high contrast, so bright and dark that it’s uncomfortable to look at.
It’s not just the sunlight that is casting contrast either. Life is back to the kind of busy that used to feel normal, and now just feels exhausting. Entire days infront of the screen; days as long as the sun is generous at the solstice. I grab fleeting moments outside, feet bare on the sun warmed patio stone.
These screen days are punctuated by day-long adventures, like a decisive full stop before a new paragraph. Scrambling, swimming, walking and exploring. Poring over maps, planning routes, getting in the car and driving, ticking off new places, new landscapes – and choices.
The pond is still a place of retreat in the snatched moments here and there, maybe even more so now that there is more choice of where to go. I’ve been drawn to the wide open sun filled expanse of the park lately to laze, eat dinner on a blanket, take a bottle of wine. But at the pond, the trees embrace me, drawing me in and surrounding me, holding space for me. Especially the old gnarled tree growing sharply at an angle, but twisting back on herself to cast her protective shade over the path. The air feels full: of flies, of pollen, of fluff from the willow trees and sounds – excited children, slightly frazzled parents, geese and buzzing things.
I go to the pond when I need a sense of grounding. Maybe it’s the familiarity of it, a friendship that deepens with each hour whiled away around its banks. It pulls my reeling mind back from the myriad of corners it’s jumping to and fro from, gently but firmly. To here. To now. Even as I’m tripping over time in eagerness to race ahead to our holiday at the end of the month.
Our week off is the ultimate contrast. Wild coast paths, immense dramatic rocks, vast expanses of calm glittering ocean as far as my eyes can see, and then far further still. Freedom and time to roam again.
One evening, a man stops me as I come out of the sea. I have been rashly impatient and ran in in my underwear. Embarrassed, I try to avoid stopping as I rush back to my towel, smiling at him politely. Half my mind has already jumped to worrying about our parking ticket that is about to run out. When I finally hear what he is saying, I am glad. He is pointing to the waves I have just walked out of, to the flashes of silver fish rising and falling with each gentle swell. It stops me in my tracks in awe. A beautiful sight, surrounded by the calm, evening sun filled sea.
At the end of the week, washing off the salt I can still taste – the faint white crystals formed over skin still warm from the sun – the contrast hits me again. I’m washing off the wildness, the freedom, ready to return to screens, to civilisation, to a life where a daily swim in the sea can no longer replace a daily shower.
Returning to real life again feels disjointed. I am dislocated – my body has returned, but my mind is still roaming clifftops, searching for unfamiliar wildflowers and paths to the sea. But, I know where I need to go. The pond will bring me back. Back here. Back now. To a place where maybe I can learn to appreciate the contrasts that life offers.