The last week I have been formatting the letters I wrote to subscribers while I lived in The Gardeners Cottage in Scotland into the second volume of the book version. I didn’t realise how much reading them would remind me of how long this story has been birthing itself through me.
It was my second year, the pandemic was raging, and things were really opening up for me. The landscape started showing me more and more. This time of year was really my favourite, the bracken had all disintegrated and the old, solid things in the landscape would take their shape again. It was always February and March when I found the most magnificent things that had been there longer than memory.
Rereading how I was taking that in is so illuminating for how this story is physical to me. That’s how it came to me, through the experience of me, this body in those spaces. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to access sometimes or feels dangerous to access. I’m an expert at accessing my brain, it’s this translation of what I physically felt into a story… that’s more difficult. I’ve been reliving some of those experiences and it’s so helpful for making things feel real again.
The moment I felt a huge ‘aha’ when I learned to walk the circular ramp up to the Iron Age hill fort instead of just barrelling up its muddy side on the contemporary, “just get up there and see” path constructed by former estate owners. As I walked it visions of the winding upwards roads from the fictional cliff city of Gondor from the Lord of the Rings came to me and I must of said out loud a half dozen times “of course, of course!” Of course they would have planned ways to move things up and down more gently. But I couldn’t understand it until I was there doing it. And then other parts of the landscape around it started to make sense once I was thinking about it that way. I could start to see how it might have been. I could feel how people would have moved and lived in its protection. I could never look out my kitchen window at its hill from that time without a smile.
The way I would come upon mysterious little circles of stones deep in the woods, stand amongst them in wonder and wonder about them. Placing them in contact to my other discoveries and the old names on maps. Wondering who was the first to forget them.
I would walk down deer paths which felt like they had been there longer than any of the roads and know what it felt like to move invisibly, secretly, in the woods parallel and undetected by the modern world.
The passageways from the sea lined with standing stones that I didn’t even see for the first year! Gasping as I understood what to me they represented, a space of ritualized arrival.
It’s just been a very good way to put me back IN the landscape of such an important place in our story. I think that will help me back into the next part of telling the story. And what a comfort to remember to go back to my words and discoveries when I need to remember.
Susie
I love how your re-reading helps you to see more and maybe re-vision what you first saw …if that makes sense. Thanks for writing! Be