Once Upon a Time I thought this...

Going through my old notebooks, typing up the novel, I came across the following:

• A Newspaper clipping on Balcombe Vidaduct 
• A to-do list from the days when I used to have lunch breaks 
• A spider-diagram from the days when I used to have ideas
• A game of hangman starring my friend Laelia
• A list of birthday presents to be acquired for an ex-boyfriend
• The following weird snippets, which sentimentality and loyalty to a former identity drove me to type up and retain... they felt sort of relevant to this time of year.

NATURE. THE WILDERNESS

Always present in a capacity of strangeness, of non-urbanity. When we are far from it, it is delivery, or abandon. When we are amongst it, it is honesty, or a distanct forgotten something - to be connected with, defined, related to.

We lose ourselves in the city, as unnumbered, writhing lost-things. We can dissolve our minds here. On being suddenly lost amongst nature a strangeness comes - the upshot of such learned, conditioned infacility.

But nature always yields connection. Through fear, desperation or desire, ultimately we find union in the manner it chooses for us, not one we chose for it. Seasons, climates, droughts and plenty - to be reminded of what we do not control is a step from our surrender to it.

Surrender can be found in an hour, found in a weekend, found in a year. This is the internal inclination that distances the natural world from the honed predictability of the urban landscape, the singularity of which cultivates on a lack of necessity. In the city we function. In nature, we relent from habit, release persona and connect. In connection your purpose is another's. Another's purpose is yours.

AUTUMN

Autumn comes first with one cool morning. The sun naps another 5 minutes and I suddenly notice the breeze - a novel movement of air and I ask myself, was it there yesterday?

Consciousness seems more abrupt on waking. I'm warm in bed, but the air slices through the cracks in the duvet, and I recoil at its touch. Outside, in the half-hearted light, beneath a white, forgotten sky, everything is damp and somehow darker.

The dew lingers, the air thins, and when it whips through me - on a station platform, round a street corner - it whispers ' come away'

Change is here. An awakening less fevered than passion, more an instinct of history spurs me into movement, to find a new place. 

Another movement and my heart migrates and the change is within, a pain, an unpointed yearning - just a clear beginning and end. Every year it comes, and every year I follow.