Old world
Trenches through valley and peak
There are some places in the world that match you, where prior to your arrival the land knew you, where without ever knowing you belonged to that view, the way the shape of their hills called for you. Some would have passed right through, but you stopped to notice, paused there, felt an exquisite truth, for that part of the world held something within you too.
The valley was beautiful, unwinding in green shards and shapes. Each time I returned to their paths and roads I lifted with the beauty of their underworld. The way life rolls by, passing through, rolling hills, plots of land carved by hedges, fences, parceled by stone and wood. The ease of endless grass, anciently cut into paddocks by overgrown thickets, by stone, by Napoleonic trenched roads. Grazing cows, some sheep, some horses, not in the flatlands but on gathered and secluded hills, curled and bent, broken and built, one stationary stone house in the distance, framed by sunlight, rays cutting through cloud. A curved road. Not a boring line in sight. Nothing the eye could possibly be trained to, strained to, or deadened by standard linear equations. Nothing square or sharp or unnatural, everything loose, rolling, softened.
Pasture grazing.
I learn a new word, Bocage, hedges, the way I feel about it I can only capture in pictures, in videos out passenger side window. We drive to deliver hand baked sourdough bread, to setup booth at weekend wine festival. I butcher my unsettled nerves in meandering broken conversations. I try too hard to make amends for the incompatibility I feel, for not knowing how to speak in their language, for having chosen a life of financial comfort, a business man in a farm suit, denying my heartland. I feel fraudulent, like an escapee, a wanderer returned but with comforts that have tarnished me, the big city life, no longer with desperate needs - for desperation builds character, and comfort builds simplicity.
The hills keep. A seed once dreamed. Old world — land and chore, child’s story. And once calmed, once acquainted, their hills and valleys return perspective and peace. The slow pace, the sweaty chest, the closeness to earth and it’s humbling throw. I take the view, I capture it with everything I’ve already known. Because those hills hold me. They know me empty and full.
