Friends,
This week’s post is a Rima story, a walk in the woods with thoughts about how to get away from words. Because we need to sometimes find methods to quiet them in this world, where we’re bombarded all our waking hours by talking heads, opinion pieces, advertising slogans and 24 hour news.
An audio version of this story is available at the bottom of the post for those who prefer to listen.
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I’m no longer certain that walking is good for me. Good for my legs, heart and lungs perhaps, but I’m not sure if it’s good for my mind. Walking has become a fixed part of my day, a 2 hour span of my waking time. When I’m not sleeping, working or eating, I’m most likely to be walking and, at the moment, usually in the same place, along the same track through the woods and up the side of the ridge. I do this because I have dogs from working stock. Flushing and retrieving birds is in their nature and the hill is full of nesting skylarks, which are red listed. The skylarks need all the help they can get, which means I need to stay away from them until August. So I stick to the woods where the birds nest out of reach of dogs.
I think the wood has become used to me. The two resident roe deer no longer flee when they see me. They turn, watch for a while, then amble into the trees. The fox waits for me to approach, in no rush to disappear. I’m almost a fixture, like the planted pine trees, not meant to be here, but here.
People who work with words have talkative minds, minds filled with voices. It’s like entering a concert hall before the performance. All that chatter, all of it overlaid, distorted, nonsensical. For me, it quietens when I work, when I concentrate on a painting or piece of writing. But not when I walk.
Over many years I developed the skill of being able to shut everything out when I wrote, which I always did in stolen moments, with young children around, a hectic job, the constant ping of emails and messages. I learned to concentrate intensely, to build an invisible wall around me. My days are quieter now, the kids are grown, the emails don’t need answering straight away, and writing is my work. The skill of shutting things out is possibly not needed now. But it wants to be needed, so it kicks in constantly, for the sake of the words. And the mind can’t take too many words.
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