Just over three weeks ago, I wrote a blog about our relationship with the land. Yesterday, I wrote about a particular place in an urban setting. Perhaps partly because my focus was slightly different, I didn't at first realise how much these two blogs could be linked and I'm going to do that now.
When writing about our connection with the land, I quoted from Raynor Winn's Landlines. She describes these as paths which are walked, but which are more than paths and "which connect us to the earth, to our past, and to each other."
Over the last few weeks, I have been reading a book by Jini Reddy. Its title is Wanderland, but it also has a subtitle: A Search for Magic in the Landscape. Towards the end of the book, the author starts to wonder if "listening" to the landscape might include being aware of synchronicities in which she interacts with other people as well as the landscape.
I have been wondering if there was some synchronicity in what I experienced yesterday morning. This was both in where I found my feet taking me without my planning it and in conversations I had with people on the way or other human interactions.
For a number of years I have wondered how we can deepen our interaction with the landscape in an urban environment. I think there are numerous ways that we can do this, but I have become more and more aware that some of them would involve connecting back to previous inhabitants or users of the land. More recently, I have begun to wonder if we need not just to think of human beings and the land being connected but even somehow combining into a human-land combination, as space and time are combined as space-time in some modern understandings of the universe.
There may be some sort of dynamic equilibrium between the human and the land, which is always shifting. For example, when we are in an urban setting, we may be more aware of the human dimension, how we have shaped and indeed altered the landscape. But it pays to remember that the land is still there. Conversely, when we are in a more rural setting, which may look totally natural, there are many ways that any landscape will have been affected by how humans have lived within it.
(The image that I have used is of St. Winefride's Well at Holywell in North Wales. Wells are perhaps a good example of the how exact dividing lines between the land and the human can be difficult to discern: a natural spring in the landscape can attract both physical structures and legends or stories to itself, but its essence is still the water which continues to flow).
Maybe all of this is what Raynor Winn is referring to when she says "we are at the point where time and place and energy combine, where we become the path, the walker and the story". One of the things that has struck me about my experience yesterday is that I was connected with time more than a hundred years ago and the more recent past and the present. Perhaps this melding of the human and landscape somehow includes all time within itself, like a core sample taken from putting a probe down into the ground. Somehow, just as divisions between ourselves and our surroundings can blur, time also becomes less solid and more fluid, as if such a sample is dispersed in water or as pigment dissolves in a watercolour painting or the deep black of charcoal can be smudged and smeared.