Mind journeys

All nature has a feeling

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks

Are life eternal: and in silence they

Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;

There's nothing mortal in them; their decay

Is the green life of change; to pass away

And come again in blooms revivified.

Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,

And with the sun and moon shall still abide

Beneath their day and night and heaven wide. 

John Clare

This morning as I got up to make my first cup of tea, George Monbiot was on the radio, he was walking with Claire Balding and as I caught the last five minutes he was talking about the ecstasy of the natural world and experiencing the sheer vitality of life.  Where he was I don't know, probably in Wales in a valley, he likened it to a rain forest, the damp atmosphere, the ferns growing on the fallen trees took him back to  mesolithic times.  Suddenly I remembered a walk through Ebbor Gorge, the great rocky places of the Mendips, Burrington Combe and Cheddar Gorge. A place of magic the steep cliff like gorges, but Ebbor was somewhat different it also had the rain forest magic of tumbled trees and ferns.  A sunny open lit glade of meadowsweet shimmering in the shadows and light, great tumbled rocks that you had to climb over.  Except for Moss I was alone on this walk, cool in the shade of the trees but the day was hot, the path led upwards and then you looked down on a great mass of trees through which a rocky ridge ran through and in the far distance you could just see Glastonbury Tor.
Landscape or mindscape, which is it I wonder, of course 'escape, also has the same ending, this union with the natural world, perhaps I should learn to take these journeys again.  In a couple of weeks we go to Cornwall, firstly to see some megalithic wonders - King Arthur's Hall, a great square of prehistoric stones, strange it is not rounded, or are we looking at an medieval animal pound on the moors amongst the stone circles, who knows but the archaeologists have become interested, it just needs some dating evidence.
Then on to LS's cousin on the other side of Cornwall, and to explore things there, it will probably be my job to make an itinerary of things to see.  Have not been to Cornwall for years, when I was a child we used to take a cottage in Polruan, opposite Fowey, and I remember going out fishing for mackerel with my grandfather, in the evening we would go up the river in a fishing boat to a pub, and I can just remember the wild tangle of trees in the creeks there.

I used to take my daughter and her young son Tom plus my son Mark, there is only about 11 years difference between these two, for picnics to the Mendips, we even camped in the Forest of Dean, the car piled high with camping gear, two dogs, four people, the forest itself a cool place of trees and people using their leisure hours to walk, cycle or just brood. My son tired after his exams falling asleep most of the time, and that little creature below as we started to put up the tents, saying one of them was broken, no said I it is new but he was right and we had to go into Monmouth and hunt round for a camping shop so that we could  find and then laboriously fit a cord through that part of the tent, now he is at university studying criminology, time does fly.

Tom when he was little