Category: sunrise

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Morning Walk

I went looking for the sunrise today, but I missed it by ten minutes – only I didn’t realise it at first because it was so cloudy.

I got to the beach at 5:50 and sat on the bench outside the Beach Café, staring at the thin strip above the sea and below the clouds at the horizon, expecting the sun to appear at any moment, till I checked the app on my phone and discovered it was due at 5:39, at which time I was walking towards the sea through the streets, where it’s almost impossible to see the sunrise because of all the houses in the way. I had noticed the clouds, but had told myself that clouds often make for interesting colours, and there probably was a brief flash of brilliance when the sun came up above the sea before it disappeared again behind the clouds, but I wasn’t there to see it.

So I sat and drank coffee from my thermos and watched the hi-vis litter pickers and the odd wild swimmer or dog walker or jogger, and tried to find something – anything – worth photographing. Even the waves were pretty subdued, and the gulls didn’t show up against the clouds.

I finished my coffee and put the flask back in my bag. The first café to open would be the Coffee Cup, fifteen minutes’ walk away down the beach. I could go there and get another coffee and a sausage roll, or maple and pecan plait, or toasted tea cake.

In retrospect (because I didn’t think of this at the time), I could have gone the other way, to the Co-op, which probably also opens at 7, and maybe I could have got a sandwich and even a coffee there and eaten it on the beach – except that I’d forgotten to take a mask or scarf.

I started walking along the beach, but then when I got near to the steps up to the prom, opposite the Rose Garden, I thought I’d go up and just walk home from there. I couldn’t cut through because the gates were still locked, so I turned left and walked past the model village and what I think of as the Mondrian beach huts (flat roofed and square and painted in bright colours, not pastels like the conventional pointy-roofed ones opposite the Coffee Cup). I sat on the wall and checked on my phone for the opening times of the nearest cafes. As I thought, the Coffee Cup would be open at 7, but the Beach Café, Tenth Hole and Tea and Thistle (which only reopened on Tuesday) wouldn’t be until 9. By this time it was 6.45, and a ten minute walk, so I wandered back to the beach and carried on.

I ordered coffee and a toasted teacake and sat outside. I felt some spots of water as I was finishing, so I didn’t hang about. Looking out of my window now, I can see it’s properly raining.

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Bother

Why do I bother? God knows. I haven’t got a clue.

I did another of the five items on the list yesterday – and a bit of another (sorting out my accounts, which is going to be a long job), and had a stab at another (renewing the insurance on my van) but got stymied by the technology, because I thought I could renew it online, but couldn’t see how, so now I don’t know if it will renew automatically or if I have to call them – which reminds me that the van itself is a can of worms, because I need to call the garage – but I don’t want to use it at present anyway.

You’ll notice there are still five items – I haven’t added any more, although I keep thinking of them, but I never remember to write them on the list. However, I did do last night’s washing up when I got up, and tidied and wiped the kitchen counters and sink (again). We’ll see how long that lasts.

I made a plan yesterday evening that if I was awake early enough this morning I would walk to the beach and watch the sunrise, but I slept in till 5.20, so there wasn’t time to get myself sorted and to the beach before the actual sunrise at 5.37.  And although I don’t really like lying in bed when I know I won’t get back to sleep, I still don’t want to get up either, even now, when it’s warm.

This is why I’ve decided that routine is so important, because if I know what I ‘should’ be doing, maybe that will push me (‘motivate’ is too strong a word) into doing things even when I really don’t feel like it (which is about 23 hours and 55 minutes of every day). Given that I’ve got quite good about doing my half hour of exercise and meditation, and writing my 500 words of drivel, over the last few months, I’m hoping that maybe I can squeeze some more useful and positive habits into my days.

I’ve given some thought in the past to how to get over the problem I was talking about yesterday, of never knowing where I’ve left things. One solution would be to constantly scan every room for anything which isn’t in its ‘specific place’ and return it so I can find it when I need it again – the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I guess that’s what most non-cahotic (I like that typo, I think I’ll leave it) people do automatically – but the idea fills me with horror and deadens my soul. There wouldn’t be time for anything else, would there? But then if it actually worked, wouldn’t it save the time and stress of constantly searching for things? I think of my spirit animal, Mole from The Wind in the Willows, throwing down his paintbrush and running out into the springtime to cries of ‘Bother!’ and ‘Oh blow!’ and ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’

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May Day

Today’s memory is from a year and a day after the previous one (a lot can happen in that time – in fairy tales, at any rate).

On the beach at sunrise with a smallish group of friends and friends-of-friends, one of them a Pagan celebrant who led us in a ceremony of welcome to the sun on May Day morning. I remember chanting, facing in the four directions (towards the sea, the land, the sun and… towards the pier? -it’s all I can think of in that direction!) There was also singing, djembe banging, some mandolin playing, probably dancing and definitely consumption of brandy supplied by her partner (not something I normally do at six in the morning, not even on May Day!) And breakfast in the Beach Café.

Thinking back, I realise I hardly ever see that group of people any more. When the world passed around the sun again, I had entered the year of my own personal self-isolation, of chemo and surgery and radiotherapy, and when I emerged from that into 2018, it seemed as though everyone’s life had changed, not just mine, the dance had shifted, we had all taken up new positions and our paths no longer intersected – except sometimes on Facebook, repository of friendships and social medium of choice for my generation.

That wasn’t the only memorable thing that happened that May Day, however. When I got home to the flat, I had an email from my ex husband, saying that he’d received and provisionally accepted an offer on the old family home; obviously my formal agreement was needed, but that was hardly in doubt. The beginning of the real end of that chapter of my life, a summer of driving up and down between here and there, clearing out everything, including the attic where so much of my past had accumulated; helping him initially to move into his new place in Bedford (and in the interim our son and his fiancée from their tiny studio flat in Guildford to a two-storey maisonette), and finally, in October, moving into this house, with one van of stuff transported professionally from the flat, and another trip for me up to Bedford, another rented van loaded and driven down by my daughter’s partner, another drive back southwards in my Micra with another terrified cat in a basket on the passenger seat.

If I’d known on that spring morning that it would be almost another six months before I was finally settled in my own home… well, I don’t know what I would have done. But it happened, all the dusty accumulation of the past, the physical stuff and the emotional clutter which had haunted me, all moved, all resolved, and here I was.

Maybe the stress of that year contributed to my body’s next bombshell – who knows? But I got through that too. And here I stand, and every day, whether May Day or any one of 365 others, the future still knocks on my door.

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Day 24 – Dark of the Moon

I woke.
It was dark.

I thought I would get up
and walk to the sunrise.
I stayed in my bed
and listened to the radio.

We all skate on the surface.
We walk on the knife edge.

Don’t look down,
don’t look back.
Shit happens,
keep smiling.
See the bright side.
half-full.
Stop thinking.
Stop doing.

You’ll never do enough.
You’ll never be
good enough.
You’re half full,
half empty.

Sun rises,
sun sets.
Moon wanes,
moon returns.
Spring rolls
into summer.

This is all there is.
Don’t fall off the edge,
Don’t shatter the glass.

Linda Rushby 24 April 2020

Now the words are coming and I can’t stop them – however banal, however dark. Why don’t I just ignore them? Why do I need to write them out? What happens if I don’t? I’m sure I’ve written about this before, somewhere back in the past, in the morass of words I’ve written and then never read again. Do all those unwritten words fester somewhere in the back of my mind? Things that go rotten do one of two things: they infect what’s around them and spread the rot, or they make compost for other things to grow in. What about my thoughts, my words? Which way do they go? Maybe both – but which predominates? They don’t seem to have borne much fruit so far.

Part of me thinks that writing them out helps in a way, it’s therapeutic, it helps to defuse those thoughts – maybe (but they still come back). There might be some value in writing them. But then, what about the next step, is there any point in trying to share them? What is that compulsion that makes me think it’s a good idea? Who reads them, and who of those really hears them, who responds, who finds them interesting, who is repelled by them, who ignores them and moves on? Anybody?

I want to be clear that none of this is directly related to the current situation. They’re just thoughts that come to me even in the best of times (and anyway, as I’ve said, these last few weeks of inactivity have suited me quite well.) Maybe the self-imposed pressure to write poetry has influenced the form that my thoughts are taking in terms of presenting themselves in lines and stanzas, I’m not sure – and the chain of connections from thinking that way, to writing them out, to blogging about them, and so on. Maybe.

Things have happened in the wrong order today. If I’d got up when I woke, at 4.30, how much would I have done already? At least, I would have had breakfast and gone for a walk to the sea. At 5.30 I checked the time for sunrise, and found it was 5.50, so only twenty minutes to get up, dress, make a flask of coffee and get there. I stayed in bed and listened to a play on podcast. Then got up and wrote. No coffee, shower, cat-feeding, yoga/tai chi, breakfast – just this drivel.

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Knife Edge

This morning I added ten minutes of tai chi to my ten minutes of yoga and ten minutes of meditation. Now that the beds have been dismantled (not anticipating any visitors any time soon), there’s room in the spare bedroom/meditation room to do the first four moves to the four directions, and mostly for the rest of the moves I know so far, with a bit of adjustment. So the routine from tomorrow (because I did all the tai chi today at the end as an afterthought) will be: 5 minutes stretching/standing postures; 5 minutes tai chi to the four directions; 5 minutes for the rest of the form; 5 minutes floor stretches; 10 minutes meditation. It sounds like quite a lot but it’s not so much really. I started the yoga routine when I was in Prague and had a big room but hardly any furniture – or maybe before then, when I had the flat in Ramsey – anyway, I’ve never been consistent. When I was having chemo in 2017 I started again with a scaled down version that was mostly stretches and lying on the floor.

Now the clocks have changed, and sunrise is an hour later (by clock time), it occurs to me that the next few weeks are the best time for sunrise walks on the beach – added advantage being that there’s less likelihood of contact with other people. When I first moved here and was living in the flat on Beach Road, it was so close – 2 minutes up the road and then through the Rock Gardens – that I went all the time. Now there’s a 10 minute walk past boring houses before I get to the park, it’s not so appealing. That first summer was quite idyllic now I look back on it – that wonderful sense of getting away from the past and starting again (again!) but this time with the sense of finally finding the place where I needed to be, a place which was exciting and new, but where I could see myself staying for the long term, without a future where I would have to go back, or move on to somewhere else. A place where I could make a home – and have – more comfortably and easily than I would once have thought possible.

It’s been nearly five years, at the end of next month. I was asked a few months ago to choose: past, present or future? I replied: future, because if you expect the future to be worse than what went before, why bother carrying on? Now the future is confused and uncertain, hard to see, but that’s always the case, for each of us individually but also collectively. Throughout our lives we walk on a knife edge between what has happened and what might happen next. Though we may feel secure and comfortable in our certainties, none of us knows for sure whether we will see the sun rise tomorrow.

So tomorrow I will go and find it. Maybe.