Betwixt Lakeland & Edinburgh
‘Hold on to your hat’ was the leitmotif of the day here in windy Edinburgh, ‘and don’t forget a winter coat and scarf.’ Chilly indeed, but beautiful, and vibrant as ever wherever one looks. Autumn colours and early festive lights at The Dome. Shopping. A coffee stop. More photographs. And by early evening glad to be warm, well fed, and home …
Reflections by a Fire
On moving into an old house in New Hampshire
Fire is a good companion for the mind;
Here in this room, mellowed by sunlight, kind
After yesterday’s thrall of rain and dark,
I watch the fire and feel some warm thoughts spark …
May Sarton
Collected Poems
A good walk on a cool grey afternoon, coupled with thoughts of some more baked apples for supper, have resulted in the lighting of my wood stove and plans for that most lovely of autumnal occupations: hot coffee, buttered scones and books beside the fire. Sometime yesterday I was speaking with a friend about the power of evocation. Oh so very much is evoked and re-membered by a warm ash-burning hearth of red and gold. And ‘warm thoughts spark …’
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Everything on earth is engaged in cycling through purposeful seasons. The biosphere is sometimes beyond our comprehension, and at other times simply unnoticed. We have our favoured seasons. Most like mild conditions, neither too hot nor too cold. Bees at work in summer are readily noticed. The ground-level mulching and the breaking down processes (in earth and in us) not so much. Noticed or unnoticed, the cycle continues. I love many different aspects of each of the four seasons. And I realised, walking through the city streets of Edinburgh in the early hours of the morning, that I love this world more generally, too. It is my home. It is our home. I shall try to participate more fully in the cycling. I shall try to be quietly purposeful – and thankful.
Another busy, busy Festival day at the end of which plans for a beach fire and picnic were thwarted by rain (and blessed by a beautiful double rainbow!)
One of our group came to the rescue – and a quite lovely Edinburgh basement kitchen supper party, in company with some of my dearest friends, followed.
Reflecting on this, among all the memories of great food and inspiring conversation, I’m awestruck by this old man’s having walked home a couple of miles through still-buzzing city streets at 1.45am … feeling absolutely, smilingly ‘at home’
Thanks to our guides whose
constant-shining steadfastness
brings wayfarers home
A big shout out this morning to the people in our lives who bring us art and design. They’re worth their weight in gold – and conversation (face to face or ‘online’) with someone who’s passionate about design – and great at it – always sends my spirits soaring.
Where we deliberately and carefully choose to place ourselves, and things that inspire and bring meaning to our lives, are hugely important. In Kate Laine’s photo here I catch a scent of mince pies just out of the oven, it’s probably blowing a rainy gale outside, and whoever lives here is delighted to be home for the evening. Calming, joyful, relaxed and comfortable.
Heavy grey cloud and rain greeted my early Lakeland walk today, and the continuing metamorphosis of the natural world smelled and appeared earthy and inevitable – just as the design and creation of spaces to hold our own unfolding, resting and rising are. And I’m so thankful for designer / artist / photographer / poet friends I’ve been chatting with in much loved Edinburgh. The juxtaposition of my Lakeland life, and my Edinburgh life, and the treasured people in both, amounts to high art and design in itself.
And on a drizzly grey morning it all seems to carry the wide-smiling imprint of a caring and joyful designer – and of mindful intention.
Edinburgh is a city with whom I am engaged in perpetual discussion! – with architecture, with colour and line, with suddenly come upon and breathtakingly startling vistas, with bookshops, with birdsong, with history (mine and the city’s), with music (I’ll walk a quartermile out of my way to trace the source of the sound of the Pipes), with poetry, wind, hills, coastline – and anticipated conversations with others who are haunted and delighted and vivified by it as well.
Engaged too with the reflection that settles in one’s soul’s having been calmed, and drawn, and enchanted by her colours and her reflections. Edinburgh may certainly be spoken to, but there’s immeasurable benefit to be celebrated in deeply listening to her too. Hers is a hard won, long won, weft and wisdom. And in such slow contemplation there’s a seeing sunrise, sunlight, sunset, moon and starlit spaces behind – whilst simultaneously seeing sunrise, sunlight, sunset, moon and starlit spaces ahead.
Windows into the soul are so important. Here we find ourselves sustained by what’s behind us, and by what is – here in this city, in this ‘window’, right now, and by the light that calls us forward. All this, so often seen in one and the same windowpane. In a bookshop, or a stationers, or our own home, or our own dreams, or – most beautiful among the firmament of the windows of the soul – the eyes of family or friend or beloved.
All this discussion, contemplation and reflection steadily leads us inexorably to metamorphosis – gives wings to ‘The Extraordinary Life,’ to ‘The Boy (or Girl) Who Loved,’ to what ‘Bunheads’ might think of as the Dance of Life. And a certain being at home with oneself, be the days warm or cold, happy or sad: all the while growing …
more at gardenstudiogram
home left forty years
ago re-visited in a
forty year old carSRM – MM Haiku 103 Day 133
freezing rain and wind
have encouraged a warm hearth
and home and books daySRM – MM Haiku 85 Day 115
Photo by Mike on Pexels.comsometimes a poem
is mulled instantly and some
others at leisureSRM – MM Haiku 55 Day 85
Rania is not a name I will forget in a hurry. A friend’s tweet this morning pointed me in the direction of The Guardian.
Yesterday I wrote about ‘healing the world that touches you, that’s around you.’ That touching can and must include any and all means of communication that might open human hearts too quick to judge the intentions of millions of this world’s displaced people.
Made with immense courage, dignity and good humour by a twenty-year old young woman, necessarily fleeing the war zone she still calls ‘home’, may this film open hearts and minds; may a deeper compassion be shaped in the hearts and lives of humankind the world over.
Wall-construction needs to involve the rebuilding of shattered homes. All talk of ‘refugees’ needs to be set in the context, the possibility even, of how it might be for any of us were tables to be turned. Could I pack my life and loves into a small rucksack and head off, smiling and gutsy, to I know not where?
Rania. Ayman. Christopher Columbus. Let me not forget their names!
wind in my wheels 🌱 