I was early today at 8am for a video walk with Vanya , it was light in The Glen but still dawning in Sligo.
We walked and talked and skated the surface of our places mixing deer fences with old walls and talking about our all too human contact and how to listen more to the ‘other than human’ and how to practice, encourage and nurture a more reciprocal relationship with the living natural world …as expressed so poetically by Robin Wall Kimmerer here:
We looked at mosses and lichens, tuning into indicators for the wider environment, and we talked about time, some lichens taking 25 years to grow an area the size of a cent, all of these microcosms cohabiting at different paces rhythms and so intricately, intimately connected, and how time has been changed for us all since last March, losing the dimension and imposition of regulated workdays and routines. What structure can we adopt for a new relationship with time? V has the tides for her daily swim and I’ve been more influenced by the changing rhythms of day light, especially as it is contained within, and plays upon, the East-West gash of the Glen River valley.
Greta the Glen Egret was on the water again at the upper pond, we danced together and this time she stayed the whole time, knowing that my battery was done and there was no way I could capture her… I was happy not to have the distraction. It has been bothering me that so much of my time in the Glen is spent with camera/phone in hand and I realise that this agenda to document has been blocking any kind of creative response. So I am skirting around this right now, as the documentation is also part of the process