My Sunday Photo 9th May 2019 River and Field

The River

This is a photo of a river taken on our recent trip to Wales.

Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?” 

― Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

I love this quote, it’s great advice for life. I know I’ve experienced so much life being a river, even a canal. I fear that I’ve now becoming an arid riverbed, I need something to keep me running this race called life. Something more to make me flow.

Yesterday was a bad day, but I don’t want to call them bad days, it sounds so negative. Suggestions given to me on Twitter were, rest days (well, I certainly rested being unable to move for at least two hours!) or Gathering Day, where you need to recoup and gather energy to go on.

They both sound better than bad day or sick day. I have to confess though; the pain was so bad at one point I was beginning to think it was my last day.

The Field.

Another photo from Wales, I’ve not been out this week and I’m missing fresh air and views. I rarely get views like this, Which I took outside the Tynrhyd Retreat where I stayed.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’

doesn’t make any sense.

By Rumi

I was sent this quote on Twitter. I remember seeing it at the end the television drama, The Victim. Sometimes we need to take ourselves away from the world in front of us and just focus on us instead. It’s hard to do but it brings many rewards. In The Victim they used the quote as a kind of forgiveness. So much wrong doing had been done it was hard to conceive and the only way to move forward was to forgive. To take away the reasoning and focus on the wellbeing and conciousness of those involved.

Maybe I need to forgive myself for being sick. I get so angry sometimes at myself. It’s so frustrating that I can’t do the things I used to do and then I take it out on others, blaming them for not doing it.

I need to go into a field and lie down, just look around at the beauty of nature and forget the world and it’s woes. Forget myself and my pain. Forget the stresses of life. It may be impossible now, but one day I want to be the ashes beneath a cherry tree. I want to live in that field forever.

You can read more about my time at The Flea Retreat in Wales here.