Bedtime Story Conservatory 93 09/07/2020
Hello everyone,
I went into the city centre today, and was eating my lunch on a stone bench at the cross section of 4 roads. Within seconds, a sparrow landed next to me looking for food. A minute later, a crow landed 2 metres away, presumably for the same reason. Lastly, another minute later, a seagull flew down over my head and landed in front of me. I was surrounded by these three different species, all waiting for me to drop some crumbs. They formed a perfect barrier in front of me. The sparrow caught a fright and flew away, and the seagull and crow both hopped up onto the all behind my head, as if they thought I wouldn't see them there. The crow then scared the seagull away by cawing at it, and at this point I had finished my lunch, and the crow noticed this and quietly hopped away.
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Bryn Celli Ddu, meaning 'the mound in the dark grove'.
A neolithic burial chamber excavated in the early 20th century located on the Welsh island of Anglesey. The site was a henge (a circle of vertically standing stones or wood), that was thought to be used to plot the date of the summer solstice. A mysterious pillar lies at the heart of the chamber, along with carvings of serpents.
When I visited here years ago with a close friend, we walked to the top of the burial site, which is in the middle of a farm. My friend went inside, as I stood on the top, and I noticed a black and white border collie crawl underneath the fence. The dogs owner didn't seem to be near, and as I saw this, I instinctively turned around irrationally and went back down the hill out of fear of the unknown animal. When I got to the bottom, I turned around, and the dog had vanished.
Now the dog is imprinted in my mind as a 2 second moving image, but exists so strongly in my memory that it can even now conjure up that same specific fear, raw, irrational and instinctual. I can probably locate and maybe even measure the distance of the dog from the periphery of my vision, if the image was still and printed that is.
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Today's reading is an excerpt from Year of the Monkey 2019 by Patti Smith, "a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year". It's really slow, loving and inspires me to stop and observe.
Links:
Warmest wishes, and warmest love,
Sam
