Stillness, movement
Sep. 20th, 2020 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I woke, thrown out of a nightmare, before 6am this morning, accidentally woke Matthias, and the pair of us figured there was no point trying to go back to sleep. Sitting blearily in our armchairs in the living room, drinking tea and watching the sun rise, we figured we might as well make the most of our unexpectedly early start to the day.
And so we walked to Grantchester. The sky was grey, and the air smelt dry and autumnal. The hedgerows were heavy with rosehips and blackberries, and the leaves had begun to turn yellow. Even at that early hour, Grantchester Meadows were hardly empty: there were dog-walkers, runners, and, most amusingly, a man shout-preaching wildly into a video camera at the water's edge, so loudly that we could hear him throughout the entirety of the Meadows. Then we turned a corner and there was a young couple, ostensibly about to start swimming in the river, but in reality much more concerned with filming the entire experience for the 'gram. We felt we'd experienced the entire gamut of humanity before 8am on a Sunday morning.
On the way home, I picked up fresh bread, still warm, from the French bakery around the corner, and a cup of takeaway coffee, and drank it as I cooked crepes for breakfast. My morning reading was Robert Macfarlane's Underland, the most recent in his loosely-linked collection of non-fiction books about nature, and journeys.
This one ranges from passage tombs to Ice Age cave paintings, from astrophysical experiments conducted deep underground in active commercial mining tunnels, and, most delightfully for me, into the the shadowy realms among the roots of the trees of forests, where he learns from a botanist that the myriad trees in forests, and the fungi that surround their roots, have a symbiotic relationship and 'talk' to each other. Like Macfarlane's first book of writing on landscape, language, place and people, Mountains of the Mind, this book also muses on the strangeness of people drawn to these weird, wild, dangerous places for the sheer thrill of it, even if it risks their lives. Like all of Macfarlane's writing, this book is beautiful, although for someone as claustrophobic as I am (I once fell down a cave during a Duke of Edinburgh Award hike when I was a high school student, which scarred me — quite literally, in a physical sense — for life), it's sometimes a bit too evocative. Some of his descriptions actually make me start to panic, meaning I'm not reading the book as quickly as I normally would for something so flowing and readable. But sometimes the sheer beautiful simplicity of his prose takes my breath away:
Breakfast was followed by an explosion of sunshine, so I took advantage by hanging the laundry outside in the courtyard. It always looks so soothing. I then did a rather energetic class of morning vinyasa yoga, which has left me feeling stretched and strengthened, and in the right frame of mind for the remainder of the day, and the weekend.
I wish for all of you exactly the right mix of movement, and stillness.
And so we walked to Grantchester. The sky was grey, and the air smelt dry and autumnal. The hedgerows were heavy with rosehips and blackberries, and the leaves had begun to turn yellow. Even at that early hour, Grantchester Meadows were hardly empty: there were dog-walkers, runners, and, most amusingly, a man shout-preaching wildly into a video camera at the water's edge, so loudly that we could hear him throughout the entirety of the Meadows. Then we turned a corner and there was a young couple, ostensibly about to start swimming in the river, but in reality much more concerned with filming the entire experience for the 'gram. We felt we'd experienced the entire gamut of humanity before 8am on a Sunday morning.
On the way home, I picked up fresh bread, still warm, from the French bakery around the corner, and a cup of takeaway coffee, and drank it as I cooked crepes for breakfast. My morning reading was Robert Macfarlane's Underland, the most recent in his loosely-linked collection of non-fiction books about nature, and journeys.
This one ranges from passage tombs to Ice Age cave paintings, from astrophysical experiments conducted deep underground in active commercial mining tunnels, and, most delightfully for me, into the the shadowy realms among the roots of the trees of forests, where he learns from a botanist that the myriad trees in forests, and the fungi that surround their roots, have a symbiotic relationship and 'talk' to each other. Like Macfarlane's first book of writing on landscape, language, place and people, Mountains of the Mind, this book also muses on the strangeness of people drawn to these weird, wild, dangerous places for the sheer thrill of it, even if it risks their lives. Like all of Macfarlane's writing, this book is beautiful, although for someone as claustrophobic as I am (I once fell down a cave during a Duke of Edinburgh Award hike when I was a high school student, which scarred me — quite literally, in a physical sense — for life), it's sometimes a bit too evocative. Some of his descriptions actually make me start to panic, meaning I'm not reading the book as quickly as I normally would for something so flowing and readable. But sometimes the sheer beautiful simplicity of his prose takes my breath away:
We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.
Breakfast was followed by an explosion of sunshine, so I took advantage by hanging the laundry outside in the courtyard. It always looks so soothing. I then did a rather energetic class of morning vinyasa yoga, which has left me feeling stretched and strengthened, and in the right frame of mind for the remainder of the day, and the weekend.
I wish for all of you exactly the right mix of movement, and stillness.
no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 04:02 pm (UTC)(As an aside, I'm oddly delighted that the first comment on a post which is largely about a book about katabasis is you, in light of your username.)
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Date: 2020-09-20 08:46 pm (UTC)We felt we'd experienced the entire gamut of humanity before 8am on a Sunday morning.
I loled!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 02:59 pm (UTC)(Btw, if you haven't finalized your Yuletide nominations yet, I'd love for you to nominate Rose and Ayasha, but I'm also definitely going to ask for Chloe and Dominique fic as well!)
no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 03:04 pm (UTC)Btw, if you haven't finalized your Yuletide nominations yet, I'd love for you to nominate Rose and Ayasha, but I'm also definitely going to ask for Chloe and Dominique fic as well!
I've just put in my nominations, and I nominated Rose and Ayasha, as well as Chloe and Dominique!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 03:21 pm (UTC)Awesome! I hope one of us gets great fic about some of these fantastic ladies!
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Date: 2020-09-27 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-27 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 04:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-21 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-09-24 04:32 pm (UTC)