Landscape and Memory

It has been three months since I last posted on the blog and Lammas season is upon us with its mellow fruitfulness. This is the time to celebrate the harvest of the first fruits and to give thanks for the blessings we have harvested personally since Summer Solstice. Now is a mellower time of year...the evenings are already starting to draw in, but we can still enjoy the summer while it is with us and make the most of the light for gathering with others outdoors or simply appreciating the blessings Mother Earth has given us.

Over the past two weekends I have enjoyed some lovely walks and really been aware of the abundance of purple and golden colour in the Cornish landscape from heather and blackberry to gorse and 'whispering jacks'. The sky when not full of cloud or rain has a brittle blue hue.Last weekend I enjoyed blackberrying on the cliffs between Chapel Porth and Porthtowan,as well as walking along the shoreline at lowtide and revisiting a pool from childhood where I had learnt to swim which nestles in the wake of a yawning cave on Porthtowan beach.
For me a walk is an opportunity to enter slow time:to be transported by landscape and elements into a space rich in inspiration and imaginative potential.I enjoy walking alone as for me the senses are heightened and it is possible to be more in the moment.The stretch of cliff from St Agnes to Porthtowan and beyond is stunning at this time of year; a patchwork quilt of purple. yellow and orange. The bracken is starting to turn copper and one is lulled into contentment by the lazy buzz of bees and song of larks. The landscape on these cliffs is a scarred honeycomb of mine workings, shafts and proud haunting engine houses staring out on an undulating terraine of iron oxide, quartz and copper stone.Heather covers the ugliness of Nineteeth century industrialism with its canopy and the cliffs slope steeply into the ocean beckoning in duck egg blue beyond. These North cliffs are expansive and invite the mind to stretch beyond mundane worries and concerns to a wider perspective. For me this landscape touches me with its vastness..the cliffs paw the shoreline clumsily and adits and caves lurk ominously around every bend. The sand is swept daily by tides and it is easy to get cut off. Nevertheless here is liminal space, my footprints shadow those of gulls on the shoreline and the odd shell and scraggy scalp of brown shiny thong weed mark the places where the tide nudges higher.
Being born and raised in this part of Cornwall means that every walk in this area is a walk into my childhood and teenage years and that I can trace my own shadows lurking here along this tide line. It is as if as I follow the golden thread of silted sand I am also picking my way back into my own past and sniffing out a memory lying beneath the cliffs.
The memory for me on Saturday was jolted into being by the corner of a second world war cement wall and the echoing of laughter and a hollow splash ...I followed the trail of awoken sense and clambered up barnacled rocks to look down into a pool of shady petrol blue half hidden in the cliffs. Here was the swimming pool of my early childhood: my minds eye flashed bathing caps and black full piece swim suits, a child's blue duck rubber ring, my grandpa in his wet shiny trunks holding me up in
strong tanned arms so I could float and learn to swim...barnacles sizzled, salt water stung, my skin tingled with sunshine and heat and was immersed in cool, lapping water
Here was that moment Wordsworth calls a 'flash upon the inward eye'.....slow time....the wonder that comes upon us when we are transported in a moment to another moment and another.......so we can hold infinity in an hour.

Lamma blessings xx