Juxtaposition

For what feels like weeks (wet weeks, weeping weeks…), the rain does not cease for a moment. I walk through great puddles up on the moor, the water having nowhere to go until the water table drops. Table is an odd word to describe the saturation of the earth, don’t you think? I imagine all the water from the sky filling earthenware pots, standing on an immense table, a table of water. We have a bucket standing on our deck, left behind after last year’s building work. It is brimful with water and that was before the rains began. When we first announced we were moving to Devon, people who no longer lived in Devon informed us that we would find that it rains a lot in the county - but we had lived in the Lake District so the concept of raining a lot was fluid in itself. According to Met Office records, coastal areas in the south-west of England like Plymouth, receive on average below 1000mm of rain annually, but ‘this can almost double in Princetown’ on Dartmoor. Princetown is not far from our village, albeit one hundred metres lower in altitude, so perhaps we can expect somewhere between the two figures, let’s say one and a half metres of rain a year. Over a metre of rain must have fallen this winter so far. A water deck of five stacked buckets.

When it’s not standing, water is running. Down the lanes, scouring and deepening the potholes that reappear each year despite the council’s half-ardent attempts to fix them. It gathers road particulate (another fine word that doesn’t truly denote the specks of rubber, diesel, oil, plastic, that cloak our roads beyond our vision). It sweeps the lanes clean (to our eyes), down to the stream.

I walk each day, out into the rain, down lanes flowing with water, and over the stream as it appears and disappears around the village, breaking its confines and bubbling over the loose edges. On the last day of the year, walking beneath the pine that marks the top of the village road west, I recall our time amongst the pinos in a dry Spanish mountain winter. Waking each morning in clarity, walking narrow lanes edged with dry limestone walls, passing now and then a signpost to a trail that led up into the blue expanse above the valley. Simple days, fetching bread, drinking café con leche in the valley café. Oh, the airy potential of it, a life pared-back, thinned-out, so only its essence remained.

Now, in these late December days, lanes flow uphill in shining sinuous tracks. Musty leaves, mulched and mixed with mud, clog their edges. There are winter moments of delight: a red berry perfectly round, still intact on the lane, triumphant in its avoidance of tyres and feet. A green sheet-garden of vibrant moss, hanging from beech trunks and glowing an almost electric green, sopping from almost continuous water falling amongst its phyllids. Our black deck merry with robins and tits, a joyous jay hopping to fetch his supper.

Days pass and the lanes continue to run with water: complicated sheets, criss-crossing refractions, where stone disrupts and meets another sluice. Streams surge, running like spilt milky tea beneath the road, porting soil from the upper reaches of the valley. Channels either side of the lane funnel all the water gathered from the field and hedgerows. Water likes the familiar path, always heading in the same direction, channel joining channel, holding hands down to the unseen river. Shapes sway across the dusk blue sky. I pass the point on the lane out of the village where the road crosses the stream, water coming from all directions, a thundering shout of liquid, surging forward: finding, fighting its way towards its imperative. What can we learn from water? That nothing, ultimately, can contain us?

Like water that recurs in dreams, my journal fills with rain. I flick back through the pages: it seeps from the ink of my fountain pen, trickling between the words.

These are the days when I can hear the stream down in the valley flowing from our garden, a sound familiar in those years I spent living in the true uplands of north Wales and the southern Cumbrian fells. There is plenty of time (most of the year) when I cannot hear this sound. Then, I must trust that the lifeblood of our village is making its way beneath our house, through the rocks, down through the cracks in the strata and down into the thin strip of water that snakes down to the sea. When it has been raining long enough, water stops being an event and becomes a way of life, a milieu through which we live.

All that water, days sodden with it, has now vanished from the land. I can barely remember its urgency. It seems absurd, this juxtaposition of wet and dry. The air is still and cold. I crack the ice from the bucket. The muscular stream is measly and clear once more. Each night the temperatures fall below zero, but with barely enough moisture in the air with which to create ice particles, there is little frost. The valley is quiet again and the lanes have dried, all save the place where four lanes meet at the lowest point, where the water barely a week ago culminated in a frantic flow. Here, it is still damp, leaves stranded in tidelines down the middle of the lane, a visceral token of flow interrupted.

Juxtaposition. Wet/Dry. Water Here/Not Here. I used the word three times last week. I was on campus for a School of Education event. I enjoyed seeing people again, those who looked more tired than before the break and those who seemed rested, elevated somehow. How was your break? When asked about mine the only word I could summon was juxtaposition. After long quiet days reading by the fire, thinking about writing, walking in the rain, when I returned to my desk on January 2nd, the contrast was startling. It was the admin that got me. Mary Oliver spoke of three selves: our child self, our daily self who puts the bins out and works to earn an income, and our creative spiritual selves. I had spent the break reconnecting with my latter self: what I had learnt the past year, what I hoped would come to pass in this one, what rituals I needed to maintain. But most importantly, I had spent the time reinstating the meaning in my life, reminding myself that to write is a noble enough pursuit and to live a life that is worthy of writing is a valid intention. Now, my daily self was required to muster care for the administrative processes of higher education, a necessary evil in an academic’s work but one against which my body regularly revolts. In hindsight, it was not an ideal task to kickstart the year. Once terms gets going, I care plenty enough to be a good teacher, but the juxtaposition of my soul life and my daily work life was almost too much to assimilate. Flow/Stasis. Wet/Dry.

Life is flow. Sometimes more than others. I trust that my opportunity for creativity will ebb and flow this year, like the water in this valley. We need both wet and dry times, and we need to live both soulful and daily lives. For now, I must bear the juxtaposition and drift across the borders of my selves, like water across a lane, finding its way where it can.