Notes from the Boundary Line

on lifting the string and crossing into the unknown

Photo by Richard Hemingway on Unsplash

Yesterday I went out into the village, heading down to the river, early enough that few people were about. The trees are still mostly bare here, except for the elder which is tufted green on the ends of its branches. There are no lambs out yet in the fields, but there is a sense of life thrumming to the surface, a definite pairing up of magpies and pigeons and seagulls. There are daffodils beginning to flower, there is delicate blossom appearing on the blackthorn, there are primulas among the trees.

I feel like I have been holding myself in stasis, a kind of wintering since the dog died. Now I am pushing myself to leave the house. I have noticed the return of these small signs of the turning season from my car window, and I’ve wanted to get back to connecting with the natural world, but I’ve been self conscious as I leave the house for walks, not going far, worried I’ll have to explain my purpose out in the countryside to some unknown, judgmental entity. I am always so aware of my body, always so aware that to be outside is to be exposed. I worry a lot about taking up space and being visible to others. I have always struggled with a kind of anxiety that has sometimes stopped me leaving the house altogether. But I love being outside so much, to be walking - the thing that humans are designed to do - in the outside, to be noticing the world around me and feeling myself in it as an animal. I feel like each time I go walking I am pushing through a barrier to get to where I belong, because I only really feel at ease with myself when out away from people and in amongst the sensory experience of nature. If I could get on all fours and return to an animal state, I think I would.

This week I’ve been running two zoom writing groups - the Dawn Chorus (7-8am) and the Dusk Chorus (6-7pm). In each group we begin by gently asserting purpose - to put our writing first. We have an extract of creativity non fiction, or a poem, and then an optional prompt. The extracts and poems and prompts are loosely nature based. One of the extracts I used in the Dusk Chorus writing group this week was from Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. In the extract, she talks about the instinct of the body while walking; the type of watching that the body does, in nature, when the act of walking also involves avoiding danger with little conscious thought. She says:

Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a co-ordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step is to fall, even while watching sky and land. The watching, it is true, is of a general nature only; for attentive observation the body must be still.

Nan Shepherd

‘for attentive observation the body must be still’. I thought of this while powering along, self consciously, trying not to take up space, trying not to be noticed. It took a conscious effort to stop, to pause, to be still and observe. What I heard when I stopped were skylarks in the fields. March always seems too early to hear them, but here they are, fluting and rising and lifting their tiny bodies to the sky.

In the Dawn Chorus group I read a poem by Alison Brackenbury. It was from my well thumbed copy of her collection, Singing in the Dark.

On the Air

I am a bat. My head is filled
With radio music, love, moths, grief.
It is hard to loop the low grass. I am freighted.
As the cat strikes, I chatter needle teeth. 

There is a story of danger being told in the poem, but also the joy of freedom, of movement of being a bat. When I looked in the front of the book to tell the group members when it was published, I found that it was 2008, the year that I really began writing, or rather the year that I began to think that perhaps, perhaps I might become a writer, perhaps I might try and get my work published. When I looked at the acknowledgments in the front of the book, I was flooded with a wave of nostalgia. I remember a time way back then, when I was using the acknowledgements pages of poets I admired to set myself submission goals. Acumen, Agenda, Other Poetry, The Rialto…

My first published poem was in Acumen. My first step forward probably came from this book.

This week, to mirror that sense of progress, I found out some very good news about a poem in a competition, and the chance to visit London for an awards ceremony, which when I did the cash-maths seems utterly impossible, too difficult to get down there, too expensive. Our boiler needs replacing, which will decimate the savings and we’ve only just come back from my birthday break in London. I’d requested a visit to the Holbein at the Tudor Court exhibition at Buckingham palace, and it didn’t disappoint. Whilst in London we visited the portrait of Thomas Cromwell and the Tudors at the national Portrait gallery. I was rereading Wolf Hall as part of the Wolf Crawl slow read, and it felt magical to take the book down there and read it immediately after visiting the portraits, holding them fresh as polaroids in my head. We also made a pilgrimage to St Olave’s church to visit Sam and Elizabeth Pepys. It felt like visiting friends. We walked a lot, we sat and watched the boats on the Thames and ate out and drank over priced pints. It was wonderful, but exhausting. And expensive. On the train back I began to crave the mud-smell of spring, the noticing of walking, a horizon of trees and fields, deer. It was a relief to return here to the emptiness of landscape.

Photo by Ann Fossa on Unsplash

So out I went yesterday morning, down to the river where I heard there had been an otter sighting. On the way down the lane I met the nice man with the lovely lurcher who lives in the Hall and whose name I never remember. We stopped to talk about what we’d seen, the chance of otters, the kingfisher which is currently not hunting the river. He told me he’d seen foxes last year on the path over the fence.

the fence with the piece of string tied round it?

Yes, just unhook it, step through

Is it private land?

A shrug

I think it’s owned by the waterways, or drainage board. I think it’s an unwritten rule that people can walk there.

When I got to the river I recognised something about myself. I have walked here many times and come up to this fence and seen the piece of string tied round it and wondered. I have seen the prints of dogs and shoes on the other side and held back still. I allowed myself to be put off crossing over, by a piece of string, and my own uncertainty - what if, what if, what if. What if a farmer shouts at me, what if a Landrover comes at me, what if I accidentally trespass. Yesterday I lifted the string and passed through to the other side. I walked for maybe twenty minutes and found the river winding more naturally, less straight. I saw a pink blushed kestrel perched on a blackthorn. I scanned the steep ridge of the river walls, the glacial till at the bottom of the ditch, but found no signs of the Palaeolithic people that lived along here. I found a few sun-bleached snail shells on molehills, a scatter of rotten plums, the constant lull of the river over small stones. If I kept walking I knew I’d come to a farm track, and then I’d come to the Ghost Lake and No Name hill, and Flixton island and then Star Carr and then on, if I kept walking, kept lifting string on fences, kept crossing into the unknown I’ld cross the A64 and be heading towards the end of this short, strange river that flows away from the sea. But I didn’t carry on. That is for another time.

I walked for about four miles that day, not so far, but far enough to reset my brain. When I returned I found another invitation to London, another party, another celebration of an achievement. It is thrilling. A good week for writing. I thought about all the times I have come up against a metaphorical piece of string and how that has stopped me moving forward and I patted myself on the back for all the times I chose to lift the string, walk the path unknown, the small victories of pushing against the anxiety if it all, and the harder, but still small challenge of realising when I don’t have to, when I am enough.

Later, tea, toast, the cat purring on my knee. And later still, the Dusk Chorus writing group, the daylight seeping away to leave a window of black, pin pricks of lights in the other villages along the way, the bright snake of a train passing through the countryside, all those people leaving and returning.