Here is a short text I wrote after a moment of moving beside the River Teifi, West Wales, late in the Winter.
It's a Musing on Wayfaring.
I am understanding wayfaring to be the description of the process of life. It is travelling a path. It is relational. It is curious. It is a dance with what is yet to be known. And with what will remain unknown.
I have been pondering on wayfaring since coming across Tim Ingold's writings some time ago. He describes wayfaring as 'the fundamental mode by which living beings inhabit the earth' (2011, p12). This makes sense to me in a fleshy human sort of way. I'm still pondering and musing on it...
| Moving into Writing |
Cold but so brilliantly bright.
Light enticing and flirting with a heart made heavy by winter grey.
Moon high. Yellowing horizon reaching up into blue, moon garnished sky.
Even the mud is glowing.
Today I dance a curlew dance. I find myself strutting up and down the water’s edge, dipping and curling, puffing my chest. It feels joyous. A celebration. A homage. Becoming bird.
The water is so calm.
Today not thick with stillness, but shimmering. Small moments of incandescence.
The robin has come again to watch me.
I feel myself untangling from the overly human - it can be such a tricky net to be free of.
I’m a little clumsy, but that’s part of this dance.
Now the birds are making their way to their night roosts.
Gulls, jackdaws, rooks… maybe later the geese will pass.
Gently the palate of the sky changes - weighted down with the gravity of dusk.
I feel I could be edgeless… an exciting blurriness around the edges of me.
My limbs move, neck, torso, are curling through the cold air. Bird-like. Me-like.
How could I take full ownership over this dance? It is only mine in-part.
It is difficult to know the thresholds between what moves, what is being moved, what is moving. There is much to learn from dancing on these thresholds.
