Every image has a story
Bark, bitch, boss, ball, bend between rydem.
Still, stand, sting, style, stow away heaven
Cling, claim, court, catch, came believe a friend
Fame, foot, fate, face, full nature is d’same
Run away with all thoughts alive, repeat and fail again
Thought find nothing high, nothing to explain
Now go, go surprise yourself full force wit and will.
And stand beneath the tree and claim your blessing to nature’s thrill.
Stolen from Alan Watts… people used to create words to describe things, now we learn the words to things before ever experiencing the thing.
But here I can’t think of a word to describe the image. Nature has collided together water, rock, tree, earth, lake, light. It’s all there mashed up together, sucked into a single focal point. Makes me want to bite it.
But maybe better there is no word, maybe it’s better to bite it.
Sometimes the picture does all the talking for you. It’s simply beautiful. Roots intertwined with rocks hovering over the water, reflections formed through the sun and shade, stillness and movement all rolled into one. Just look at it and enjoy it will arouse your eye.
You could almost hear the laughter of the kids, the squeaking of trainers, the crash of the backboard or the swoosh of the net.
People had won and lost on that court, people had smiled and cursed and there was a beauty to its abandonment, the emptiness allowed the mind to search for the stories the place had seen and created.
There is something beautiful about a place and how it can inspire thoughts and ignite the imagination.
But more than that when I re-read her words I feel the need to tell them stories. I remember how the imagination was free to roam and connections came easy. I inhaled and looked into the darkness, through the light. She was beautiful and so at ease. I missed her and I missed a little part of me.
‘You know what your problem is don’t you?’
‘What?’ Jay replied
‘Well you think you are original, but you’re not.’
Jay laughed, a smile growing on the left side of his face and his chest bouncing up and down.
‘Why thank you’ he mocked in a classic British accent. ‘It’s so reassuring to know that your best friends believe in you.’
‘Listen’ James replied ‘it’s not that your ideas are bad, in fact a few years ago I did think what you were talking about was a little niche, you know on the edge of fashionable, but it’s true that now people are asking for all that interactive content.’
Jay butted in ‘so I am original then.’
‘Wait let me finish, even though you thought about monetising it before anyone else, doesn’t mean it was original’
‘Before anyone else’ he teased ‘sounds like o…rig…in…al…’ he sounded out like a school child learning to read.
‘But it’s advertising that makes you think of an idea first. We own your mind without you even knowing it.’
‘What are you talking about, you don’t own my mind. 100% original my brain.’
‘That’s what I mean, you are not, we seed your ideas into you mind without you even knowing and then let you think you made them all up yourself.’
‘Shut up James’
‘No I’m serious, we are everywhere, on your phone, first thing you look at in the morning, on the radio, tv, breakfast cereal, newspaper…’
Jay interrupted, ‘no one buys a newspaper’
‘Whatever… we are everywhere, you can’t deny it.’
‘But it doesn’t effect me, I just ignore it’
‘No you rebel against it, which makes you think another way we want you to think. You know classic love it, hate it, still talk about it.’
Jay was quiet and the two gazed across the park from the bench.
‘So how do you have an original thought?’
James waited, then started to answer and stopped himself paused a little longer and answered. ‘Hmmm… dunno’
It’s strange, sometimes you just know, you pick your head up and see it. The picture is clear it says something to you straight away. You look them in the eyes and instantly there is a connexion. But then, all the shit gets muddled, the perception of them, the self perception of you and the ‘what’s the right’ just gets in the way, so you stop. You reach the end of the road and that’s that. The eyes don’t look the same, the feeling in the heart is different and there is just a little sadness in the mind. What might have been, what could have been done differently, it all moves away.
I wish I would really seize the moment, capture it, act on it, stretch out that first flash when you saw the picture, when you felt the bite, like the tickle on your teeth when you bite down on a perfectly ripe nectarine. Or maybe if I did it would be awkward and bitter and the reality would be much worse than the thought in the imagination. Maybe the teeth would just find the stone.
After you see the cat with the third eye you know that life is going to be a little different, how you are probably never sure, but for certain there will be a change.
It’s difficult to work out how much to take from the things you have seen, how much the clues from mother nature are of value to your choices, but there has to be something in it. The energy you take from pacha-mamma must affect you in some way, like the sun for plants, for every action there is a re-action, all the cliches.
Difficult to say, but the cat was beautiful that’s for sure and there seemed to be a clarity to the shapes and colours with current thoughts. I suppose you take a little of this and a little of that and hope you have the right balance.
James stood there looking out at the horizon. He smiled to himself as the blues and pinks blurred together where the sky met the sea. He raised his hand, held an imaginary brush and started to paint, softening the lines where the colours met, blending them together in his mind.
After five minutes of work, the colours started to change, he stopped, sat on the tree stump and cocked his head.
‘needs more orange’ he said to himself out loud…
…and continued, dipping his brush into the pallet and detailing the new colour infusion. How quickly things change, how hard was it to capture a moment. His thoughts drifted away from the make believe painting to how the horizon might have looked before the huge electricity poles, before all the houses and industry soaked up the water of the valley like a sponge. ‘I bet even then the sunset then would have been different. Green perhaps?’ he laughed to himself.
His thoughts continued a pace, ‘maybe 30 years ago the electricity poles would have looked so ugly on the horizon, but now they are strangely attractive, I wonder what human ugliness will bring next, and how we will start to love it.’
The car passed through the gap in the mountains and then they saw it, in all its vastness, the ocean, drawing the eye away from the rugged, arid landscape all the way to the horizon, to the blue. To the edge of the earth where you where unsure what was sky and what was sea. It was magnificent.
They continued along the coast road for ten minutes hoping for a glimpse, hoping that the stories heard for years over countless numbers of pints would be true. The story of the dragon. How when the winds changed direction and blew up the side of the cliff, out from his cave would come the creature, out from his hibernation to stamp his footprint back on the earth.
Up and down the valley they searched, their eyes desperately following every movement in their view and then… they saw it. The air changed, became cold, the sun brightened piercing the eyes of the travellers making them squint for a moment. The Dragon roared, the sound boomed across the valley and out to the sea, the cliffs shook with the vibration and the Dragon soared into the sky, twisting, spinning and stretching its every limb. Then it was gone, as it crossed from one blue to another, it vanished, gone… as if it were just a cloud.
Sometimes I have to tell myself to look around, to stop and appreciate what’s around me. But most of the time I just stare at the rock. It’s hard to look around when your focus is elsewhere. But one day I will, it will probably be too late and I will have missed the chance of a good view, but I promise myself, when I am old and can’t climb as much, I will stop to look around.
Despite promising himself the time to look around was going to be later, Matty was surprised. He was up early at the top of the cliff, he and his climbing partner James had stayed the night on the rocks and were preparing to continue their assent. Dawn was breaking and the light was blue. Matty turned to look at the pitches below him, to seek out the valley floor, but his view was interrupted by the clouds marching in below him.
The valley quickly filled and Matty nudged his mate to wake him. James opened his eyes slowly, sat up on the ledge and let his sleepy eyes dance across the bed of clouds.
‘Wow’ he announced, ‘That’s pretty fuckin cool’.
The two climbers sat in silence breathing in the air letting nature show off in front of them.
Two hours later and the boys were climbing again, making their final push to the top of the cliff, as Matty sat in his harness belaying his friend he thought back to the morning clouds and the excitement they had inspired. Taking his eyes off the rock face he looked to the sky. Above him Vultures circled flying down to his level, swooping below him and then in wide arcs returning up, out of the valley into the clear blue sky. It was a beautiful sound as they passed, huge wings beating slowly, majestically, Matty could almost feel the air they pushed in his direction. He smiled to himself. He smiled back at mother nature.
‘Safe’ James called. The signal that he was secure at the anchor of the pitch. It was his turn to climb.
Life From the Dirt 