Hello lovely ones,
Predictably, Easter began wild and stormy here in my little corner of France, the hill was obliterated by ominous gun-metal grey clouds, thunder rolled like cannon balls loudly over the top, into the valley, along the length of the river before returning once again, on repeat. Days spectacularly interspersed by glorious light in the shape of that ever elusive golden ball in the sky we all hope will stick around long enough to allow us out to play for a while…
And we did, my daughter and I, between downpours and lightening strikes, we dodged the cannon balls, played in the clouds and chattered until our words were whipped up by the wind then laughed until we cried while we ran for shelter more times than we both have fingers. When it was too wet to play outside we played inside instead, made jars of scarlet kimchi and shared secrets only two friends would share.
I couldn't, wouldn’t ask for more.
I hope you will forgive me reposting something from the archives, I have never had to before but time with my daughter has been too precious to spend even a second on anything but her, three days was too short… I hope you understand. I had hoped to post a few words for Earth Day and this seemed fitting.
For those who’ve read Fogbow Delirium before, I have altered the text very slightly, I hope you will delight in this wander over the hill with me once again, for new subscribers, please enjoy.
Thank you all, as always for sparing precious moments of your own time with me.
For Earth Day - this was one of the most gloriously captivating and memorable morning walks I have ever taken, the epitome of all the beauty I am gifted by living on this beautiful blue dot, planet earth.
My love of misty mornings is no secret, few things will see me leaping from the cosy comfort of slumber, throw myself into the dark, and damp faster than a foggy morning. My husband, who has never understood what draws me to such lunacy no longer even questions the why, he accepts and ignores and turns over. This was one such morning…
Like a child; in pyjamas I roam…
Night has yet to liquify into day, dreaming ends abruptly, I sit up in bed.
A sense—I don’t know which one, apparently there are twelve, most I cannot name—woke me when the eerie light of moonlit fog filtered through my half open shutters formed a puddle on my bed clothes, rippling when I moved my legs. Fascinating, milky light speaking to me in a language I think maybe only fog chasers could possibly understand, it is a calling; the first line of a story waiting to wrap its mysterious pages around me just as tiny pipistrelle bats flit to darker places, close their wings, wrap them around their bodies to sleep.
Bed clothes are thrown off, socks found, I pull something woolly over pyjamas—it doesn’t matter what—take silent steps through a still sleeping house, drag on wellies, grab camera, step over creaky floorboards into the damp of trillions of droplets shimmering in the street light. I tingle with the anticipation of a new story waiting to unfold, how it will roll and curl onto the pages. I am thinking of other mornings filled with the wild, exhilarating expectation of dissolving into morning light. Each are unique, each hold faint contours, secrets wrapped in as yet, unspoken words.
In the obscurity, but for the whispered rustlings of wild things, the silence is absolute. I turn up the lane and walk into the blur, the distance is neither near or far. Nothing has form until I stand either under or beside it; even the old oak is invisible but for one wayward branch poking through, in determined defiance. I have no plan, only the irresistible desire to walk, anywhere and nowhere in particular, to wander aimlessly and endlessly, all senses alive, charged by iridescent light.
I am a solitary, pyjama clad, ecstatic child, playing in myriad filigree fingers of light appearing as the sun burns through the damp. As daylight melts into night. I, with the landscape, evaporate into the mysterious nowhere. Here, the first step to a thousand journeys.
I am thinking; this is a love affair between the soul and a land it has come to know.
I am dancing; in my head because my boots make any step other than one in front of the other too difficult.
I am singing; to myself because the silence is too beautiful to spoil.
I am walking; to the top of the hill because the morning is calling through waves of fog and I cannot think of a reason not to do so.
I am a child, playing her favourite game.
I am a bird with silver light feathered wings traversing Le Paradis.
“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
The château, usually an unwilling participant in enticement or enchantment guarded as it is by ferocious keepers—animal and human—this morning abandons its facade. Misty curtains fall open, its stoic resistance to kindling imagination fractures, unveiled, its crumbling allure nestles, comfortably ancient, between rock and earth. As if all pugnacity dissolved in passing wisps of the morning’s ephemerality, redesigned by nature; a fairy castle on the hill.
I dance on. The pages turn. A half moon lingers in a sky painted cerulean blue. The fog lifts and falls again, undecided on destination or form it shrouds and reveals, each revelation a new page.
I hear muffled airborne chimes, two church clocks distinct in the obscurity, one from the town of Aubin to the West, the other from Ruhle to the East, they are not quite synchronised, the metallic sound falls on the silence of misty pages, echoes down and back up the other side of the valley, holy ghosts in a melodic combat neither can win.
Orchestral manoeuvres are fading behind me, my whole body is a smiling child wrapped in adult skin. I fly along the ridge with my silver feathered wings into an arc of fog, my smile reflected as if in strange heavenly symmetry. For many seconds I am stilled in euphoric incomprehension, the arc of light above me is like a thousand angels, wings glittering, fluttering with grace. I glance behind me at the light I am still walking through, then, turning back, I am halted again as the miracle of a second arc, white and luminous appears ahead. I am neither child, nor bird, I am a star soaring in the chasm of liminal space into an in-between world that becomes nothing but a fading, distant memory almost before I realise both are completely, irretrievably dispersed.
A warm—too warm for fog—sun shines and the moon fades into the pages of a story I know has written its final paragraph.
When I—returned to adulthood, residual child tagging behind—I burst through the kitchen door, without recounting one word of my morning my husband takes one look at my euphoric delirium and says, ‘whatever you had for breakfast, I want the same!’
With love everywhere on Earth Day
This piece is so ecstatic. I beg you to post it every year so I can return to it anew, as you do the natural world, every time you step into her. 🙏
I was dancing in the mist with you. Through every word 🤍