Travelling Back In Time

Recently I took myself off to remote Upper Eskdale and on my back I was carrying a time machine- a tent.  Sleeping in a wild and remote place on the banks of a beck in spate with the wind whipping and the rain drumming the flysheet can be very therapeutic!  Wrapped up warm and dry in my sleeping bag there with a long dark night stretching ahead I had time to think, to imagine, to rebalance and to create.  There was absolutely no human, animal or mechanical sound- the tent had transported me back in time to pre-life and the raw natural sound of a spinning Earth.

And what an orchestration: the deep, ground tremoring bass of the beck, the pounding percussion of the rain and the snap and flap of the wind, all combining in a gloriously frightening primal power.  In complete darkness, Tardis-like the tent merged with the soundscape- I was consumed.

In the morning I woke up in a landscape shrouded in dense mist- I was still in some other place, in some other time.  Something remembered, something restored- source of life.

Ps Samuel Taylor Coleridge described Upper Eskdale as: “…the wildest and savagest surely of all the vales”- I don’t think he was wrong.