Odd one out

Whatever else is going on (test results still awaited) and in spite of the ups and downs and grinding frustrations of my present state I've got some mobility back and that's extraordinary.

The aspens are still as glorious, though over the last day or two I've noticed the very first yellow leaves on the ground beneath the trees.  We're a week away from Lughnasa, the start of the harvest. The summer is inching its way along towards autumn, the nights now imperceptibly lengthening.  There's a way to go yet of course but the first signs are there if you look.  A reminder, even on hot motionless July days, that the world is ceaselessly turning, that nothing is forever.

When I'm walking by the river I feel the odd one out. Nothing new there and I'm wearing my differences much more comfortably these days. But even at weekends I'm aware that I'm the only person who is just walking for pleasure (as well as therapy in my case). With a camera. On my own. There are a band of regular dog walkers. One or two joggers very occasionally.   All of us smile and say hello as we pass each other.  Maybe they wonder what I'm doing or - more probably - maybe they've got better things to think about.

 A dog might be nice though. Just for the walks. Perhaps I could borrow one?

Today, July 27th, would have been my father's birthday. Someone else who loved to walk just for the sake of it.  I'll light a candle.    

Taking stock

As is so often the case, the biggest hurdle is fear. I am going to have to live with a degree of pain. Not all the time, thank God, and not always excruciating, but flare-ups happen regularly. The usual contributory factors, stress, tiredness and so on and sometimes the sacroiliac joints just inflame and stiffen for no reason. But pain per se I can manage.

What scares me is the prospect of the recurrence of the sacroiliac instability that dogged me for months, in spite of treatment, at the outset of all this. The fear of the instability that the pain conjures up is the stuff of nightmares. According to the doctors, because of the strengthening effects of the course of prolotherapy that I underwent, a reasonably active life within limits should be possible. I'm trying to believe them but I'm dubious; in my experience doctors definitely don't have all the answers when it comes to backs, particularly my back. Nonetheless I am reclaiming - slowly - my beloved walking and I might learn to at least tolerate swimming because it's such good therapy. But the body will need kindness and attention. It has to be the priority. No exceptions.

Now to learn this, digest it, face it. Live it. Learn when to take the painkillers and apply icepacks and rest. Learn how to take care. When and how to exercise. How to try and desensitise myself to the uncertainty, because it's a given. Learn not to panic and sink into despair with every ache and twinge. And the incentive is there because I want my damn life back. There's so much I want to do.

Today I'm in a no-man's-land in the recovery process. Can't remember what it felt like to be fully fit. Body and mind are taking their own time to heal. Energy levels can and do plummet frighteningly at the drop of a hat and muscles are still too weak, but I'm not as prostrate nor as debilitated as I was. I do some basic pilates exercises daily. A, the cranial osteopath, has helped more than I can say. I'm thinner, so I'm told, and also my hair is greyer. Things will be very different going forward, I know that, and not just because of physical stuff. In the isolation of the past two years I've changed, become tougher, but in a good way. The boundaries are firmer. Integrity now matters more than anything. So life and my relationships will change.

Right now the craving is for human company, human warmth - not all day every day, that would be too tiring, but for short spells. There's a way to go but I'll get there. I will.

****

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions. Hafiz - trans. Daniel Ladinsky

Green corn

On this misty, rainy morning we climbed a hill ...

and walked through the bluebell woods ...



... and along a leyline and passed a church and two dogs and their owners and marvelled at the bluebells and the cornflowers and the pink campions and the rape (ugh, hate that word but the fields are shockingly, wonderfully yellow) and the red soil. And against the red soil the green, young green wheat, green woodlands. In the field, larks rose around us, singing.





A verse from the John Masefield hymn came to mind

Lo, all my heart's field red and torn
and thou wilt bring the young green corn
the young green corn divinely springing
the young green corn for ever singing.






Echoes of long ago school assemblies. Horrible, I hated my schooldays but on this particular morning the angst has faded and I'm not going to quibble about the religious theme. Masefield, the avid reader, seafarer and eventual Poet Laureate, was a local lad: he knew about red soil. And it is a beautiful poem ....

... the laughter of holy white birds flying after

On this hill, the parliamentarian armies laid siege to our royalist city in the valley below over four centuries ago. The men were so hungry they ate the cider apples in the orchards and the potatoes and robbed the farmhouses of bread and towards the end in extremis resorted to eating acorns. Difficult to imagine today in all this greenery and lushness. Indeed, the land is almost too perfectly cared for, too well manicured: wild flowers flourish along the lanes, no pesticides on these verges, no litter that I could see. A mystery solved when the landowner's name is spotted on a notice. Enough to convert one into a present-day royalist.



The hardest part of the walk was the last part, climbing the hill for the second time. A steep, hard pull. Near the summit we rested on a log on the edge of the wood in silence for five minutes or so. The field in front of us rose steeply, the line of the horizon curved like a giant's back recumbent against the sky. Raindrops on leaves. The moist smell of earth. The harsh call of a pheasant. The distant murmur of traffic, faint but just discernible. I hadn't wanted to come out this morning, had something on my mind, hadn't wanted to see anyone. Yet growing older, I have learned from experience that I don't always know what's good for me and consequently can be persuaded. By people I trust, by an uncertain yet stubborn faith in the apparently random flow of life.




"Shall we go?" my companion asks. We head for the car. Next stop, the house and a late lunch.

...

The shoulder still stiffens when I spend too long here at the computer. I overdid it on Friday and it took thirty six hours for the pain to subside. Thank god that nothing is obligatory in the blogosphere. Short posts, long posts. Whatever works. Right now, photographic posts seem to fit the bill. I love taking photographs and it's easier on the body than writing.

Respite

The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk but divert yourself by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise.

Thomas Jefferson


Sunrise. Day off, the last one ahead of a work scramble to meet a deadline. For the first time for aeons the rain has stopped and the sun is shining. I need to get out of the house. Throw on clothes, a parka and wellington boots and head for the fields with the camera. Nothing like photography, with the focus and attention on the present that it demands, to curb - if not stop - obsessive thinking.

The air is cool and fresh, the sky a pale blue. Puffballs of cloud blown along by a gusty south-west wind periodically hide the sun and the drop in temperature at these times is noticeable. The morning light extraordinary, as it so often is. Crows pass overhead, cawing, then drop from the sky onto a newly ploughed field. A faint deep throb of machinery from the small industrial estate hidden behind a barrier of trees can be felt, rather than heard.

No-one else to be seen. It is midweek, after all, and most people are at work.

Just past the railway bridge, a touch of the surreal.


The river flooded recently. My guess: an angler’s chair, temporarily moved to higher ground. A group of mallards are swept downstream by the force of the current and I watch them until they disappear from view. They speed past, imperturbable, bobbing on the surface of the water. I stop and turn around, looking for my visual touchstone, the ridge of the Black Mountains on the western horizon. The wind strengthens, buffets a mass of gold-brown leaves on the oak tree, but they cling on tightly, reluctant to leave their branches.

At the hawthorn bush I turn for home. Under the arches of the bridge, a hint of the macabre. A doll’s leg half buried in the mud, left behind by the floodwater. No sign of the torso.

****

A lunch meeting in town. Good talk. Then back to prune the ivy that grows up the side of the house. It is starting to grow over the electricity and gas meter boxes and must be cleared. Cut back the lavender and trim the dead fuchsia stalks, raw material galore for the compost heap.

The cat sits in the November sun and makes a show of supervising my efforts, but his heart isn’t in it. After a few minutes, with a twitch of the tail, he wanders back indoors.



I didn’t have high expectations for the day. It surprised me with its perfection.

Anxiety

Stressed. Work. Uncertainty and indecision.

So, once again, it’s a walking, not a cycling, day. What convinced me was pedalling full tilt into the side of a slow moving car recently when the concentration was elsewhere. Fortunately no harm done to self or bicycle or car, and the driver was touchingly concerned about my physical welfare - and my mental state probably, though he didn’t say so.

I crave the rhythmic action of walking. Steady and regular. One foot in front of the other, right, left. The autumn morning, damp and so still, the trees enveloped in their auras of gold and ochre and russet, the earth solid beneath my feet, reassuring. People pass. I exchange greetings with one or two.

The brain still runs in dark circles and the stomach remains a black hole. The exercise doesn’t make the symptoms go away, not at all. Yet it becomes a wordless instruction on surviving a future that seems to crouch somewhere ahead, menacing and waiting to pounce.

Keep going. One step. Then the next. Walk right towards it.