Here, always
I’m driving past the common in the village near us. It’s the route to everywhere, and in the thirteen years we’ve lived here I must have passed this way thousands of times. As spring sets one cautious foot on the ground, dipping her toes in and out even now in mid-April, I see a team of volunteers from the cricket team mowing, measuring and marking and I feel a shift.
Outside time - because, honestly, my eyes were on the road, and the car only covered a few feet - I suddenly see and feel this little piece of grassland in all its guises.
The frosty, winter wasteland with a brave spaniel and her owner crunching around the edge. The spring greening that’s trimmed into a cricket pitch blessed with leisurely applause and a pint of cider. The summer footballers with piles of sweaters and water bottles shout encouragement across a patch of not-so-level playing field, surrounded by long grass that swallows the wide shots. Autumn is the hay meadow, so beautifully wild before being expertly mown and laid into stripes to dry. The iconic annual bonfire; fence panels, old furniture and random garden waste teeters ten feet high as the famous firework display fills the common, the roads and the pub on Guy Fawkes Night.
It’s happened, I realise. This is what it means to know a place. The revolving seasons so embedded, so many times lived, that I can be in them all at once. Outside time, in no time.
This first experience was spontaneous, but now here at home in my garden, this lane, these few acres, I can step into it by choice. It’s not the same as memories. Memories are like snapshots, frozen in time. This is a visceral thing. I’m digging for a word and all that’s coming up is the sense of a whole breath; in and out and in and out. Deep, slow, felt through my body. It is alive and eternal.
How many breaths for me over those thirteen years? Nearly eleven million, apparently. The blink of an eye. The flare of a match, up and gone. Less than a nanosecond in the history of this place on Earth, but nearly twenty per cent of my life so far.
If I’m very still, and I open to it, I can feel beyond my thirteen years into the energy in other layers. There are trees here that have two hundred years and counting. Some of the stones that make up my home have been here for almost a millennium. All the lives; all the stories.
Wherever I end up, whatever my future, part of me is imprinted in this place. From actual, physical cells that have fallen from me to be worked into the dirt - cycling round into earthworms, dandelions and blackberries - to the impact of my simply witnessing the stream flow and the birds raise their young. I am here. Always.
