The gift of labour is rest; there is nothing better than for us to enjoy our work, because this is all we have.
I love how close either side is, how thin the land is, how close sea to sea is. I could flit from one side to the other and never once feel trapped. Maybe it’s because here, my nature, my life-truth, seems to be found. Here I find that my escapism revels in the sun, we arrived and she kipped up, feet up, heart free. Maybe it’s because I’m not trapped by city that expands to another and another, the hedonic treadmill life. Maybe it’s because here land is freer, not held as captive, not pulled so tightly close to each other, not stacked on top of one another, like she’s a pressure cooker and we’re the chef. Maybe it’s because here I feel the same. I can just be, I’m not strung like a bow waiting to snap when the fiddle of life gets too much. Maybe, just maybe.
We’re sat in the car, George and I, hurtling, it feels like that but it’s not quite, down the A30; I think it feels like a speed greater than we’re going because the road is long and the ends can be seen winding and curving around mounds and hills and squared-off fields snapped together like Lego. Here, on this land, I feel like I could touch both sides, pulling them into myself. Holding them tight. Wrapping them around me like a patchwork blanket sewn together from discarded squares of lost and forgotten fabric that became shirts or dresses and were since forgotten, or lost. I just want my mind to still. To stop whirring like the fan of an overworked, overheated computer. To be still. So I breathe. Breathe in the windmills and congested tractors we pass, breathe in the raptor circling above, breathe in the clouds that fold and refold into shapes like endless origami. Breathing in the me I feel like I am or should be, or could be…
I look out the sticky window, that’s more smear than window, I forget the last time we cleaned the car, it’s slow to feel dirt; the landscape appears more ragged here. I don’t know if it’s because I romanticise moors and green, or if because Cornwall crawls out of the UK like a favourite but discarded sock in the washing machine. The land sticks out here, it’s brave, unprotected. It’s been contorted, pushed, pulled, stretched, weathered more. It lives life riskier and it’s all the more beautiful for it. It labours, but it also edifies rest. Maybe I can learn to be like that.
This page is for this – because moments can be hard to find.