Betwixt Lakeland & Edinburgh
Some days are just pottering days aren’t they? – nothing very energetic or exciting, more a quiet tidying this and that, a contemplating, voting in the local elections, watching the progress of the light. And I’m feeling towards the close of day that the teachers who, through the ages, have encouraged a slowing down, a ‘consider the lilies of the field,’ an attentive watchfulness, have, between them, got it right!
May the whole earth reach out toward peace and the coming of the light …
🔆🇺🇦🔆
🌍
So much of life has continuing need for the same set of requirements, and is made up of those same elements: a right balance of darkness, light and water. No wonder so many teachers have asked humanity to consider a flower as we contemplate our own lives.
I love that, with every lap of MS Borealis’ promenade deck, the light changes are constant and dramatic. This is something that lives in my memory – and calls to me – when back on terra firma! 😎🛳✨
Time and time again, I am moved and entranced by the movement of tide and cloud and light – sometimes stormy, bracing and energising; sometimes calm and colourful and wide inside 😊
🎼🎶 Like a small boat, on the ocean …
… lost in wonder as light and experience change, moment by moment 🏴
Proximity to the beach is among the many joys I revel in here in Edinburgh. A ten minute bike ride from my door and the views of sand and sea and sky – changing colour literally by the second – root me to the spot.
Much, much warmer than in recent days, it’s nonetheless still windy and decidedly chilly (what else, in February? – I hear you reply). But the scent and the dream of Spring is in the air – in children pedalling tricycles joyously along the prom, in couples laughing whilst doing stretching exercises on the sand, and in something intangible in the very space of the place that seems to be saying ‘phwoar, it’s gonna be great to get beyond lockdown!’ And in Portobello light, that’s right.
more at gardenstudiogram and at writinginlight
Post-Script
All in an Edinburgh day – from sunlit sea, to sunset, to fireside, to candlelight and shadows during our second power-cut of February 😊
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
I wonder when our
preferences for light design
and order begin?171
wind in my wheels 🌱 