Landscape and place help to make us - individuals and communities - what we are. The story that follows tells of something that happened to me over 50 years ago, and helped to shape and inspire me. I wonder how landscape and place have formed you?
As I lie in bed a street away from the beach, I can hear the water shifting the shingle with its familiar, clacking, scraping call. It is very early, and sunlight is only just beginning to come through the window, dust motes dancing stripes across the covers. I get up and dress, careful not to disturb the sleeping children, shutting doors furtively behind me, eager to escape before the household wakes and I have to play the role of a busy, 16 year old au pair to three children for another day.
After the shaded street, the brightness and warmth of the sun hit me as I turn the corner to face the beach. The glare off the surface of the sea is already hard to look at, yet I cannot get enough of the reflections and the clarity of the air, so look anyway, greedy to feel alive and alone.
Dress off, I plunge into the water - the North Sea as cold as it always is, but somehow the sun and the idea of the sun have warmed me to the core. The sea is so still that it does not look like itself, but like a lake of silver-smooth mercury, and the sea and I seem to be part of a fantasy landscape in which anything could happen. As my hands and arms break the water, they throw up molten gold and silver sparks.
The sun is rising as I float on my back and watch the cloud-wisps and the vivid pinks, yellows and oranges banding the horizon. I hear birds calling, the lapping and schlucking of the water, the drag back and rush forward of the pebbles on the beach.
A rush of sensations tells me that I am alive in my body: water on skin; heart pumping blood through my veins; eyes seeing tiny droplets and distant ships; briny smells; salt-licked lips; ears attuned to the tiniest of sounds ... and yet I am also witnessing this scene unfold, watching over myself, and together these parts of me make me whole. I feel a new sense – that of awe.
In this moment, suspended in time and place, a solitary swan appears in the sky then lands with a splash on the water near me. It settles, calms. We float quietly in our shared solitude and the water laps and schlucks on the shoreline and the dawn continues to break and maybe magic exists.
When the swan flies away, I do not feel the loss, more a fullness I have never felt before. I swim until my heart races and I tingle all over. I leave the water; put my feet on the ground and walk back to the hubbub of the cottage, a swan in my heart.
During yesterday’s dance at West Stow, the swan came to me and we danced, and I felt light and soft, vital and sparkling.
I now know that this scene is the one I wish to take into my dying days, to be accompanied by the swan to the other side into the setting sun of my life.
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