Day Zero Reflections from Anglesey Island

Day 9: Day Zero in Beaumaris

The world is crazy, but…

I can’t express how much our walk across the ocean has refreshed me. Our world feels noisy. It’s too much. Too much, I tell you! And yet I look for noise.

I feel bored and uncomfortable with silence. So I fill it with «real» clips, reels, podcasts, news, TV, activities, concerns, and stories from people I don’t know and who don’t know me, and try to sort through what’s true, real, good, crap, and…

Then I can walk along an ocean path. It’s too good.

The sandy city

It’s here too. The noise.

Part of the Wales Coast Path takes us through sandy industrial areas. From sewage treatment plants to giant smoke-spewing factories. From city streets packed with pushing vehicles to the air filled with the sounds of screeching machinery and horns of high-speed passenger trains.

The waterfront trails leading out of the industrial areas don’t really offer nice views of nature. Instead, the scene is filled with amusement park rides, illuminated arcade signs and cotton candy stands.

Yes, we need factories. Amusement parks are… fun. But …

Nature is restorative

When we finally reach the unpopulated coast, after a while we both realize that it is mercifully calm and deliciously cool. Grass, breeze and salty sea air. Dirt. Real, fresh dirt. And the rhythmic song of the seagulls. Are they laughing? Crying? Both? Cah haah cah haah cah haah

It’s great to be on the road. The sights and sounds of the gritty city behind us are surely a modern phenomenon, right?

Stain and odor/Scorched and erased

I think of a poem I studied at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth in 1983.

The following lines of that poem could have been written today.

“Generations have stepped, they have stepped, they have stepped;
And everything is singed by commerce; blurred, smeared with work;

And bears the stain of man and shares the smell of man: the soil

Now he is barefoot and his feet cannot feel it when they are shod.”

The date these lines were written? 1877. Things change and do not change.

The beautiful world folded

But the poem does not stop at that gloomy section. In reality, it begins with joy. And it ends with hope. Here you go.

the greatness of god by Gerard Manley Hopkins

“The world is loaded with the greatness of God.

It will go out, as if glowing with a shaken sheet;

It gathers until it reaches greatness, like the exudation of oil.

Crushed. Why then do men no longer take into account his rod?

Generations have stepped, they have stepped, they have stepped;

And everything is singed by commerce; blurred, smeared with work;

And bears the stain of man and shares the smell of man: the soil

Now he is barefoot and his feet cannot feel it when they are shod.

And for all this, nature is never exhausted;

There lives at the bottom of things the most beloved freshness;

And although the last lights of the black West went out

Oh, tomorrow, on the brown edge to the east, springs…

Because the Holy Spirit upon the inclined

The world broods with a hot chest and with ah! bright wings.”

Take a walk and breathe it in

Today I found a diary entry from a previous walk in Wales. I asked our taxi driver if he ever got tired of the sea views. He responded that he realized he didn’t even see the ocean anymore. Too busy thinking about work and tasks.

So he had gotten into the habit of walking along a sea trail once a week and just breathing it all in.

The most beloved freshness at the bottom of things

Walking is good. Sometimes it is better to walk daily. Stop and drink in the peace and appreciate the miracle of creation? Good. Too good. For the new mercies of the morning.

Today I publish photos of places that have refreshed us with their beauty.

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