Stories of Slowness.

( Late posting due to no signal )

A chill campervan morning. A slight breeze rippling over Loch Ettrick, looking for that perfect mirror shot, but the breeze has other ideas. A pair of geese float along the shoreline making their presence known. A few ducks in the water, a mother with several ducklings in line astern crossing the loch. The sound of crows in the very tops of the spruce, lighter birdsong, what I think could be swallows on the air and the wind in the trees. A distant rat a tat tat of a woodpecker. The sky streaks of grey cumulus sitting below lighter grey, with the occasional flash of blue. A thin whisp of mist rising from the forest. A total contrast to yesterdays misty, fogged out, almost ghostly day. The relative quiet disturbed by a passing logging lorry, filled to the brim with its recent haul. Slow turning wind mills atop distant hills. There’s quite a firm breeze blowing through, bringing with it the briefest and lightest of rain, showering droplets across the loch, as quickly as it came it’s gone I came across an expression yesterday, which hopefully sums up the next few days, the idea of the ‘Stories of Slowness ‘. This campervan morning, feels like one of those and hopefully the next month or so to come will be stories of slowness. Yesterday spent close to a loch, soaking up nature, the quiet, the sounds and smells. The view ever changing, mist, fog, dreich, rain, back to mist again. I think the quiet and the total absence of humanity in any shape or from was the winner. No signal, no nothing.

Reading Solnit as the evening drew in, she spoke of change and that most people don’t until they have to and that often it’s as a result of crisis, be it health, work, relationship or friendship, your own or some else’s.

“Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked later“

Stories of slowness, lovely days people.

“The new life seems the product of an urgent certainty that clears most of the ambiguities and ambivalences away.”

Rebecca Solnit.