No intentions but words

This morning, swimming, I was thinking of words. I had the entire pool to myself, its blue expanse, and the light coming in the big western window was grey, wintry. I thought about light, how places have their own. In October, we were in France and I fell in love with the Vézère Valley, the way sunlight made the golden limestone buildings glow as though from within. And within? Caves, caves filled with images of reindeer, bison, aurochs, horses, hands outlined with red ochre. I remember the light on the trail up to Font-de-Gaume, how I kept stopping to look at tiny ivy-leaved toad-flax growing in crevices in the stone, and ferns, and leaves of bee orchids, and a blue campanula. The campanula in particular held sunlight in its bell. I think now of that light and how different it is from the light I am accustomed to here on the west coast of Canada. This morning, swimming, I remembered my early swims in the lake nearby, the trail from the parking lot to the little beach overhung with mature bigleaf maples. Even on mornings when the sun was already hot, the trail was cool and green-dappled.

This morning, I was thinking about words, how they can be difficult, how they can pierce our hearts, and how they can be generous and loving, sometimes in the same sentence. It’s in the hearing, the reading (if the words are written down, a letter, say). Places have their own words too. What would the words be from my week near the Vézère Valley? Duck confit, for sure, and sarladaise potatoes. The mysterious beauty of the narrow cobbled road that passed the pretty flat where John and I woke late in the mornings because we couldn’t hear any sound through the thick stone walls. What time is it, I’d ask, and he’d look his watch. 8:30. At home I’m usually awake at 6.

I have no resolutions. I have no specific intentions for the year. I have words, the ones I thought of while swimming–light, ivy-leaved toad-flax, limestone, grey. This morning I listened to Hilary Hahn play Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, the final cadenza so exquisite I was in tears as I washed the dishes. There are no larks here but the day before yesterday I went out to water plants in the greenhouse and heard a winter wren in the woodshed, its high sweet notes as lovely as anything I’ve ever been gifted. If I closed my eyes, listening to Hilary, listening to the wren, I could imagine myself back into that golden valley, blue campanula, pink toad-flax, green ferns fringing the path.

For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
                  –George Meredith, “The Lark Ascending”