A Patchwork of Place
What does it mean to stay still?
This week I have been thinking about staying still. About what nature means when you can’t get out into it. About what travel means when you have to stay still. About making places, the ones close to you, into a new thing, into a solid thing, into a rooted thing.
This week I listened to Cacophony of Bone read by the author,
. I listened to her talk of the year we were all held still, locked down, listened to her talk of birds and bones and words held close. I got out of the car near work and I walked, though I had little time, down to the edge of the lake and I turned off the tow path and I watched the sun, peach and orange and bronze and white, as it glittered in a line across the water. It would have been a perfect swim. It was not, because I had to turn away, to work, to attend to my responsibilities. But there are other times when I have swum here, early as the sun made everything yellow, late as day dropped toward dusk, beneath wide skies punctured by the whomping beat of a swan’s wing, beneath blue skies that could have come from a picture book. I came here and I read, to myself, on a bench beside litter strewn brambles, from a piece of writing I had published in Echtrai journal, a piece about finding my mother in the landscapes she grew up in, in my memories of us on wild beaches from her childhood, together. We can no longer talk about these things; we have moved to a place beyond language. Yet in the land I find her and I remember her and, perhaps, I create her too.
This weekend I did not visit my friend. This weekend I am still too sick and so we are apart not together, planning separately for, we hope, another residency together. Instead we send each other mince pies in the post and she asks if I will go to the sea and so I do. I go to the sea that I have been to many times before, the sea that is closest. It is not the sea that I love best, but it is near and I am tired and really what I need is the horizon and the cold. The water is flat, folded in on itself as the tide drags, lines like pleats formed by an iron. I have not swum for a few weeks and I have lost my gloves and the water is ice and I do not want to do it. The shingle is sharp, the water is low. I drape my clothes over the post of a wooden groyne, rich with jewel green seaweed, and I tie my things there, I tie them with the tartan scarf I bought in Edinburgh, Edinburgh where my distant friend studied art. It is beautiful and I do not want it, and every time I am convinced I cannot, and yet I do. I go in, walking, inching, moving forward. I walk until the mud beneath my feet starts to swallow me. And then I pause and I look out at everything around, the yellow edged sky, the blue, the colour in between the both of them, all reflected in the water, the water of this beach that I have been to so many times.
Also, this week, there has been the lido. The first time, on the coldest day. The heat rising like steam from the surface, man made fog that I swim through, keeping my head up between each stroke, mesmerised. Big pale sky and white shifting clouds, my small hands striking circles through a surface I almost can’t see. And then again, a different day, just at the point where the sun drops down below the lido walls. For a moment, there, a flare of peach, of gold. My goggles are fogged and through them the colours are hazy, spreading to fill my vision, clouding out the sharp edges, the spiking elbows of other swimmers. The pool picks up the colour of the sky. The water carries the colour of the clouds. I swam here when I was training for the Bosphorus Cross Continental swim. I swam here after working at a different job, one that released me early enough. I swam here while my mum was in hospital. I swam here on Christmas eve, amongst the lightest flakes of snow. I will swim here again, again, again. As I leave the pool is empty and the hose to clean it snakes out across the water, like a scribbled line, a doodle drawn with a sharpie.
I have been thinking about place, about what it means to stay still. In that year when we couldn’t go anywhere, I did not go to any of these places. I stayed much stiller. And yet, these places are my close ones, my familiars. They are the ones I go to without seeking adventure, without looking for novelty. They stitch together to form a shape, to become a kind of rooting.
Yet what when you really can go nowhere? I take for granted that I can swim, can walk, can see these things, these spaces. What if you have to stay really still, in your house, in your room, in your bed? In my collaboration feature here, the first prompt is ‘The Last Walk You Went On’ - because walking, for me, is so much of me. Because, I thought, everyone has been on a walk recently, even just to the shops. And yet, that is my own internal ableism talking. Not everyone can walk, does walk. I must do better, be better. I do not know what the question should be. I will think on it.
My mum has Alzheimer’s and she no longer walks. And yet I do not believe her life is without nature. We fill her room with flowers. There are plants, bushes, outside her window. There is a bird feeder that we have only ever seen one bird on. There are many squirrels. There is a huge oak tree, towering over the housing estate beside the home and, on sunny days, I manoeuvre her chair so the light the flickers through the leaves, the shifting circles dancing in the breeze, move across her lap. Komorebi - this is the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through trees. On the ceiling above her bed, for when she is bed bound, there is a collage of landscapes; gardens, ruins, lakes, the sea. Always the sea. Sometimes I show her videos of the ocean washing in, extinguishing the flames built in stone circles by artist Julie Brook. I think about water, water that fills us, that carries us, that journeys. I think about the River Lethe in Greek mythology, the river of forgetting. The river in the underworld where the shades of the dead drink to forget their earthly life. And yet water, for me, makes memory so vivid. I can recall right now exactly how it felt to stand in that cold sea, ice slashing my waist, mud sinking beneath me, water rippling yellow-gold-turquiose blue around me, gulls above.
My mum’s patchwork of place is different to mine, is different to what it once was. Perhaps those places expand and contract throughout our lifetimes. Perhaps we can visit them still, in memory, or in photos, or in small fragments of the things about them that made us feel whole. All this to say that I do not believe that staying still means no connections. It is a different experience and there are so many varied experiences, none of which I can speak to apart from my own.
This week I saw a cormorant jump from the bank as I stepped from the car, disappear only to resurface upstream minutes later. I scraped thick frost from my windscreen and I saw the way black branches were blurred by the rain on my windscreen and I noticed how lovely the upside down trees in the canal were. I watched the sky get light as I sat in gridlocked traffic and listened to Kerri Ni Dochartaigh talk about being still and growing things, swimming and thinking and reading, and this week I swam and I thought and I read. And I wrote. I wrote too. About place and how we move through it, how we claim it, how we try to make it ours, how we let all of that go. And that thinking, that writing, for now, has to be enough.
Exquisite, thank you. I have read it twice now, letting your words take me into your tender thoughts and memories and then sliding off on my own and then back again to your rhythm. And your photos let me see the world through your eyes. A wonderful, thoughtful essay.
Beautiful Bonnie. During the lockdowns I was living in Ireland next to a lake and I swam in it almost every day. Reading this made me realise how much I miss it.