A fat bee just collided noisily in a bristly bolt against the side of my head. All fizzy fuzz and sonic joy sounds rattling into my ear. It startles my morning mind as I trample the bleached grass path across shrubby common land and I’m already distracted even before the buzzing. Distracted by the slow woog, woog, woog sounds of a Chinook that’s also moving its way noisily across the same cerulean blue sky.
This heathland is both thrumming with threat and dancing in an undisputed spring beauty today. And I’m holding thoughts of both gently in tandem though these feet are stomping at a slightly furious pace. I’ve a slot booked at the tip, a car full of flattened cardboard and just shy of an hour to walk myself calm.
The dog isn’t careering off as far ahead as he usually does. He’s hanging back. My pockets are full of Cheddar and he’s a slut for cheese. Plus, he raced some twenty odd four paw miles yesterday amongst a pack of hound friends along the South Downs Way. He’s likely quite hungry as a result.
The air is warm and my bones are with it and this absolutely has a soothing effect on my nervous system. Yet the recent turn of global events this weekend, the abomination of toddler tantrumming and tanned trumpery - within the gilded oval playpen across the pond - well it’s proving enough of a disturbance alright.
I thought I could leave it all at home temporarily but the Chinook has stolen my bee happy in nature energy and shaken the entire global shit show pulsing back through my blood and into my walking thoughts.
The giant military insect maneouvering slothfully low above the nearby tree line as they do when simulating combat situations, it does eventually pass by. The skies quieten and I walk on and do get some respite from a head load of worry about world order, shifting states of peace, power play and outright petulance.
The pale grasses are all fragile spikes laced with droplets of dew which glow and glisten in the low sun and my thoughts turn to this evening and a writing course with White Ink with Anna Wharton.
A session titled Telling our Stories by Pictures, Anna has asked us to arrive with a photograph from a difficult time to use as a writing prompt. Now I don’t know about you but I’ve shoeboxes galore of those things. As a professional photographer, I’ve all my work prints to start with. But beyond a decade’s worth of client prints in various sizes and paper finishes, I’ve also a kajillion meticulously catalogued family photographs too. Where to begin? How will I be discerning and select just one?
As it happens, I don’t even need make a choice and am relieved of the need to pick. Last night in the garage, mid box sort - we’re moving house next week, talking of difficult times - out from a tumble of stored books fell several poignant printed paper moments from the past.
We’re going to be exploring the idea of the braided essay and using photography alongside the words. I know how just seeing an old photograph can expand a memory like breathing fresh air into the bellows of an accordion. Often for entirely unanticipated notes of memory then to sound too. Remembered scents and smells and thoughts and emotions are evoked from a one dimensional collection of pixels and, really, a giant sensory soup of past time is conjured. All the sensed stuff that was likely not pivotal or the reason the photo was being taken in the first place. Yet perhaps also in defiance of?
And the photographs that fell out on to the garage floor in the cold Sunday darkness? Well, I know I mentioned ‘meticulously stored’ earlier and that is mostly the case but these photos had, I think, been propped bedside on a towering book cairn the ‘to be read’ pile of a former home. Hence they’d been squirrelled away lose in a packing box.
These loose prints I have here in my hands are both from particularly acute transitional moments in my lifetime. At first glance awkward and a bit confronting for me but equally full of other emotional resonance too. I’ll see how we get along writing about them in the session with Anna tonight and then share some thoughts via a post on here afterwards.
tbc
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