This is walk no. 14 from ‘Walking Beyond Words’. Aya Hastwell who is facilitating the project with me has just returned to her family in Kazakhstan and chose this prompt because of her appreciation of the global connections created through people walking in different places. She invited us to send a photograph and a single word as a response to the Walk. She will collage them together.
I vowed to write for 10 minutes after each walk and to post regular blogs. There has been a long gap, an extended backstitch as I connect to the last post and link to the present again. A decision is made to take my 10 minute writing for today and place it into a public space. I will allow myself some leeway to amend what I have written and to let the ideas develop through the process of transferring from the hand-written to words on the screen. These are stitches into my memory of a recent walk, picking up threads of thought – a tacking of recollection onto the page (or screen).
A sewing pattern on the road near the school
A zig-zag
A straight stitch
Embroidered rectangles and stripes
It is a guide for when and where to tread
Tread of feet and tread of tyres
Feet push energy into the earth
Passing through tarmac paving
Downward and upwards forces
Repetitive stepping
Connecting here with there
Tree roots coming to the surface
and burying into the ground
Reaching out to each other
Binding the soil
Grass carpet
threads knotted
holding firm in the earth fabric
Reeds reach up
and out of the water
Lilly pads float on the surface,
anchored in the river bed
All types of stitching.
Barbed wire and grass weaving
French knots
Backstitching steps
forward and back
Cross-stitching car park
concrete grid with foliage
pushing up through the holes
Threads emerge from the earth material that nurtures the seed
Cotton thread originating in the ground
Willow puffs rolled between fingers
Steps in one place resonate with steps taken elsewhere
through the shared imagination
of a Walk that extends into the earth
and stitches us together
