If these shoes could speak...

Last Saturday I set out on a country ramble... a 22.5 kilometre jaunt across hill and valley, forest and farm, grass and stone... and after six and a half hours of non-stop scrambling, scrabbling and sometimes tumbling, I got to take a little bit of the countryside home with me on the train.

If my shoes could speak, they would report three big blisters on my left foot, two on my right, sweat soaked socks and heavy fatigue from my knees to my toes. If my shoes could speak, they would also describe raucous laughter echoing through damp forests; re-enactments of the the famous Sound of Music twirl on the top of a particularly Austrian-ish hill (Oww come'on no one would be able to resist that!!); boisterous singing of every national anthem on a loamy track and forraging for chestnuts and geological samples along a pebbly path.

Have you ever noticed how good food tastes once you season it with a little country air? That dry Marks & Spencers Chicken and Stuffing wholemeal sandwich I brought with me took on a gourmet quality when I tucked into it at lunch time. It's quite amazing how my bourgeois stomach craves a rustic and unpretentious chunk of bread and cheese and mulls contentedly over a crisp cox apple!

If you think food transforms in the country air, the most remarkable metamorphosis is still in people. On the train, there was still a little bit of "size-you-up" and "check-out-your-gear" between the six of us. But all the reservation and that circumspect energy was snuffed out when we got into the wild grass and the robust wind. I think that the wild terrain and the big wide open sky is a marvelous leveller. By the end of the day we were chatting, laughing, discussing and arguing like we knew each other for forever and a day!




There were the highlights of the walk that I don't think any of us will forget: Like the goosebumps we felt the first time we saw the big open-ness of sky, field and air when we got to the top of our first hill. Like the little church graveyard midway where we sat down on soft wet grass and listened to bird song. Like the smell of the loamy ground as we pulled ourselves up four hundred meters of wet rock. Like the vain hunt for faint white arrows on trees that were supposed to point us home. Like the little treasures we picked up from the ground - flint, agate, chestnuts... Like the poor constipated sheep we saw walking around in distress in his little wooden paddock. Like a quiet church ruin behind leafy curtains...
...a little piece of treasure from the 12th century...


When we finally got back to civilisation, and entered the busy town of Henley, there was only one thing on our collective minds - FOOD! Our feet dutifully conducted us to a restaurant called Loch Fyne, where on a nice white tablecloth adorned with candles and crystal wine glasses, we polished off a little ocean's worth of seafood within the space of half an hour! We then stumbled out into the cold evening air and back to the train station in time for the 6 pm box cart to London. And on the way we passed by a little museum by the river - a slice of tempation that any true blue riverman~~~ would never be able to resist! It was all the more wonderful because it referred to one of my favourite childhood books ---->







It was on the train on the way back to Charring Cross at around 7 pm that I took a look at my shoes for the first time in all their muddy and grimy glory, and snapped the picture above on my mobile phone. I think it sums up all the struggle and sport of a wonderful spring country walk in early March. As I sat on that jerky train beside my friends (because that was what they had become in a space of a day!) all in various stages of coma, I knew what I would want to blog about this week.



It's a peaceful and quiet feeling going back to the countryside after a long two year absence. She's an old friend and She has stayed strong and true like rocks beneath a river, always patient and always wise. I am not "Wordsworthian" by any means, but I do find it surprising how starved I have been for Her. Somewhere I sense that She had been waiting for me to come home to Her, and when we met somewhere in the green hills and the forests last Saturday, there was a reconciliation - a sort of inner sigh of relief and a restoration of harmony for the both of us.


Maybe we call Her "Nature" because She reflects what is within us (our own natures), and we feed off each other and need each other to Be...


Ah well... poets, scholars and philosophers have attempted to explain Her, immitate Her, learn from Her and woo Her. Far be it for me to believe I will ever understand Her! Maybe all I will learn to do in my lifetime is to respect Her, and to learn to listen to what She says.


And if I can do that, I think I will be in very good company!

~~~

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived - Henry David Thoreau

I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than a journey-work of the stars. - Walt Whitman

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. - Kahlil Gibran

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.... - Alice Walker (The Colour Purple)

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. - Aristotle

How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude! - EmilyDickinson

All Nature wears one universal grin. - Henry Fielding

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence. - Hal Borland