Spirit of Land, of Nature, of Home
I am called to the in-between spaces in the land of my home. Colloquialisms name this place “the back of beyond”, and “the wylds”. These liminal lands have a language of nature, a creation of sounds to describe the textures. Artists once stayed here to try to capture the mood, such as John Ruskin, Wordsworth, Constable and Turner.
There was a vast vocabulary of Celtic, Norse, and Roman sounding names for what we now, only call hills and waterways. Our mountains rolled off our tongues as pike, peaks and plains, to vales and valleys over the spine, to crags and riggs, across howes and fells. The glacial waterways were meres and tarns, a pow, a dub of “watter” over to becks and brooks, down ghylls with foaming force, to fords to cross riverbeds and streams.
The mood of this land arises at sunrise through misty peaks over craggy edges. The hilltops breathe mizzle to mossy becks and pooling brooks. The water chatters down fell and force into meres where the spirit hovers, not touching, but tiptoeing across the tarns on the wisps of the Helm wind.
This is sacred breath to me.
It is visceral, it sharpens the senses.
It is magical, mystical and musical.
It is transpersonal.
The humidity touches the skin, just like the mist that kisses the meres as kin.
It is the spirit that one can see “up on’t fell” on temperate mornings
and when we breathe with Her, Her breath, Her bur.
In my homeland her name was Modron –
Mother of the Earth, Mother of the blue planet.
Image: Cumbrian Lake District UK
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