DREAMING MORE
This morning the wind is wild and whips up the smell of grass under a half-moon and a star.
I recall the scent of dry stone dust from our mountain climb and the fact that although we heard an owl hoot as we started out on the trek I did not notice a dawn chorus.
An app on my phone reminds me that it has been fourteen years since I cried tears of joy when reading an email. It’s not something I have forgotten, but it is something that I absolutely love to see pop up in my reminders. That email was what I always refer to as my Golden Ticket. As a child I loved the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the thought of unwrapping a chocolate bar to find a prize. I also thought I was going to be the one to win the trip to Disney World from the cheese triangle promotion when I was about seven, and asked for them for my packed lunch even though I preferred the cheese and tomato sandwiches my mum made. (I loved those quartered sandwiches, and on hot days the cheese was always slightly melty and enclosed the sliced tomato in gorgeous indents!)
I have won some things in my time, but nothing on the scale of the opportunity of a meet and greet with Dolly Parton, and the photo is a great souvenir. Alt text didn’t seem to offer a suggestion for this photo and I say it is me and Dolly Parton and it makes my heart sing.
I was thinking this week about how I approach the big things... I always have a desire to be ready early, I like to think about the thing in detail afterwards and I do like a memento of some sort.
So I was surprised that it took me a little while this week to find a place to put my ‘Defeat the Peak’ medal. I think I wanted to be beyond the stage where my leg muscles complained when stepping down or up kerbs. This feeling was accompanied by a real dip in energy. It was rainy and grey outside and I didn’t feel motivated to walk until the rain stopped. I was very grateful that Claire Pedrick's Supervision Café was in my calendar, and I went along with the hope that a conversation with fellow coaches would help me shift my mood. And indeed it did. I found a shared love of metaphors which started to put the sparkle back in my day, and afterwards I went for a walk and wondered what my grey, cloudy slump had been telling me.
I saw an image in my head of me sitting at the bottom of a mountain and realised that I had been focusing on the tiredness instead of celebrating the human in front of me that had completed the climb. I also leant into the fact that I am missing those sunny walks of preparation for a thing, and that it will be helpful to rekindle the joy of stepping into a new season.
Beyond the metaphor of being in a grey slump I pictured the moment I went for a sit down on a stone wall near the end of our descent. Three things came together to make a perfect little cartoon moment of me rolling from seated to lying... the wall was on a slope, my legs were very tired, my rucksack took my balance. I might have had to stay there a while if my sister hadn’t offered me her hand to pull me up. That image makes me laugh now, but at the time no one in the group seemed to think anything of it or have the energy to find it comical.
So my wondering this week takes me to goals and dreams. I didn’t set the goal of meeting Dolly Parton, but it was definitely a dream and I didn’t dream of walking up Snowdon, that was a goal. I am however interested in the overlap and that will keep me thinking, and perhaps dreaming more, on my daily walks.
Here’s a poem that I wrote after walking one Autumn when I could not remember the name for acorns. It was recently published by Black Bough Poetry as part of my #SilverBranch feature.
THEY ARE AUTUMN
And they look delicious
smoothed brown on the ground
with their snug little green hats.
And I want to eat some
but I have forgotten their name
and I don’t know if you can.
I give in to the temptation
to tread on some,
to feel them hold out
before my weight cracks them open.
All I know is they fell from the tree above.
Its leaves are telling me it’s an oak,
and I know so much depends upon this tree,
but it takes me all day
to remember acorns.
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