Blue Haze
Time and space twisted by the lure of the land
This weekend there has been rain but last weekend there was sun and I was in Cornwall with a good friend and isn’t it strange how a week can see you in such a different place to the one before? I know, it’s just how time and space works, but how strange to be here in the grey rain, my boots soaked through, my hair wet, when a week ago I sat on a bench in the curve of a cliff and looked out at blue all around me.
We were on the coast path, and we dipped down then up, the bench a grey scratch in the bracken. It was hidden, a little way down from the summit, but we could see it from below and so, when we stood at the top with the world laid out before us, we knew that somewhere there was a narrow path through the undergrowth and we found it.
The bench faced back toward the coast path. There was gorse behind us, far from flowering, a reminder that the spring would smell amazing. In front of us, the brown footpath dipped and rose and dipped out of sight again around endless inlets, the ragged edges of the land. The light filtered through in turquoise patches, the surface of the sea flat, shimmering, and we looked for dolphins, for whales. We thought we saw a seal but it was only a rock, revealed then concealed by the tide.
To our right was the land; the fields with early skylarks, with a chatter of tiny birds we couldn’t identify all clamouring together, with cows walking ponderously towards a jeep bringing food. To our left was the sea, the sweep of blue and silver, and the green nibbled edges of the country.
If we kept going that way, would we reach Lands End? Because I drove down the country, everything I was looking at had to be down. But no - that way was up. If I kept going that way, round all the rough edges and wide seas, I would eventually be home, where I am today, with the mud and the grey that feels like a different world.
How strange to have such change. How strange that my sense of where I am and where I’m looking could actually mean nothing at all. How strange that we try to make sense of a landscape that is old and wild based purely on our tiny human perspective. There is a richness, a connection to an ancient time, an oldness to the earth in Cornwall that I do not feel at home, with my paved streets and litter strewn woods, much as I love them. But I take the memory of that place back with me, to hold onto on a grey day like today when everything feels an effort.
When we spend time sitting and looking we learn, in a small way, how little we know, how much more the land knows, and hopefully we learn to respect it a little more.