Elemental Walk

At the weekend I went for a long walk with one of my Snow Sister’s that turned into a wild and elemental wandering.

I just love walking and have many favourite walks of varying lengths around my home and near my parent’s house.  One particular walk has become a sacred way to journey - time stretches, paths change and that which is familiar becomes wonderfully strange.

The first time I came this way was as part of a Day Walk, an adventure to be told in another post no doubt.  I have taken a few of my Snow Sisters and Soul Sisters with me since and each walk is contemplated in silence or peppered with conversation as needed.  It is a road to inspiration where I enter the realms of the imagination.

Silver Fox and I walked up the hill to the corner of a tree-lined field, where the view is glorious and the sky seems vast.  We were drawn to a place I have named Foxwood after the foxes den and skull I found there on a previous walk.  One of the many woods in this area yearly transformed by bluebells, we entered the shady space among the fading blue remains of the flowers.  The fierce wind was tamed and all was calm within.  I led the way further into the wood down towards a trail that I had walked several times.  Yet now it is overgrown and full of nettles, thistles and briars. Hawthorns with fierce spikes tore at our skin and brambles curled around our ankles to bind us to their will.  Silver Fox was draped in silver spider threads and it felt as if we were in the lair of wild wood women sitting along the path with twig needles and bone pins, gossamer, silk and harsh twine.  In the end the only way out was through the smallest gap in a hawthorn hedge.  I ploughed through with my coat over my head and Silver Fox following.  We emerged bloody and scraped into a sea of oil seed rape with no way through to be seen. 

The tractor road had been planted and so we had to follow the tracks as best we could.  The oil seed rape was no longer yellow but pale green and thick. We moved through as gently as we could towards the dark tree on the hill, while attacked by a crazy wind and hidden thistles.  When at the tree I noticed that the action of my walking through the field had felted my leggings at the front!

Oftentimes I notice that a journey or walk can mirror the path of one’s way of living in the world.  For me it is often that I enter a period of intense difficulty followed by great ease and good fortune.  I have learned that often the joy is found in that moment between struggle and calm.