WHAT WAS I THINKING?
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This morning the air wraps around me with its cold temperature and brings the smell of raw cake mix. It is the unbaked beginning of a day.
Alt text says this week’s photo is, a red sign with a smiley face on top of a wood roof. I say it is a fence rather than a roof and a frying pan rather than a sign. I saw this on a winter walk and remembering repeating the route on a different day to see it again because it felt cheery and fun.
There seemed to be a lot of thoughts in my head on a particular walk this week. The seeming randomness of them appealed to me, but I also longed for elements of silence as I walked because I seemed to be staying in my head not looking at the surroundings or the view. Perhaps there were no buzzards, no singular robins, no territorial squirrels, but perhaps too I was not in a ‘noticing things outside of me’ frame of mind.
I had the rhythm of 4 in my head as I walked and I wondered why this kind of counting featured. I have noted elements of counting to 60 before which I think are my way of seeing how far I get in approximately one minute and seem to tie in with my Hurry Up Driver when I feel the need to get something completed. I don’t however recall a focus on 4. This led me to wonder why it wasn’t in 8s, I thought of people using 8 as a dancing count so I tried this, but it didn’t feel like it fitted at all. I imagined that I would actually need to dance to make this effective and my walking feet are not for dancing along. It might look funky though. I could picture it, just like I can imagine somersaulting down the aisles in the supermarket, but like my circus skills it’s not a reality.
I had chosen the circular route. I thought about walking this particular route the other way round if I did it again at a similar time because when people came towards me in bright sunshine I was readying to greet a silhouette rather than a person. My greeting seemed to change from person to person on this walk more than usual and I was curious in what it was that generated each response. A ‘morning’ here, a ‘good morning’ there, and sometimes a ‘hiya’ I also wondered why I talk to some dogs and not others.
A twinge in my back had me altering my walking posture to ease it. And then, just as I was picturing myself bending over to relax my muscles, a cartoon speech bubble appeared in my mind, enclosing a line from ‘Beauty and the Beast’. And then somebody bends unexpectedly, it sang.
I wondered what would be different when this walk was a true habit and how my body would feel in a more regularly exercised state. I had already mixed it up today and gone back to the shorter circular route because I didn’t fancy the there and back again I had been doing all week. And now there was an urge to take a drive for a walk somewhere else, to broaden my vision. Followed by a momentary longing for spring when I slipped on a small patch of black ice that had escaped my notice. (Twice I did that this week, in the exact same place!)
The slippery patch marked me being about halfway round, and I used the homeward section of the journey to call to mind the joyful silence of a walk earlier in the week. I was now also beyond the fumes on the main road. This was a good place to take stock and let myself revel in noticing the quiet and noticing that for as far as I could see and hear there was no one else on the road right now. I felt myself tuning in to the way my head was clearing, and pictured the yellow brick road I had brought to mind during a recent coaching session. On that road I was feeling content in the middle of my journey, and here too was a momentary peacefulness on a grey, damp road.
After I had found myself wishing for such things, I did receive a blatant sign of spring. It came in the form of a plump, bright green caterpillar that landed on the back doormat after I had visited the compost bin. I am not sure exactly where it was before it became attached to me in some way, but I returned it to the outdoors world to continue its transformation.
I wish you thoughtful joy, and offer the following poem which I wrote recently for Top Tweet Tuesday...
The tilt of the earth’s axis
offers us to Winter.
We cling on
fingers numb.
Remember Spring my love,
hold tight with me.
Look how the snowdrop
umbrellas lime-green down there.
Remember Spring my love,
hold on.
Let me show you sunrise
clementine the sky.
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