Spirals

My home town is set in a valley, but then there is a valley within a valley and this one holds the river. Moving towards the town by road, from any direction, one sees green fields and trees, so many trees. In the fields there are sheep, pheasants, and big brown cows, and in the trees, warbling birds. A dull little town but with a beautiful backdrop.  Stunning steep green hills rising to one side, and rambling ones to the other, my town nestled between, schools, shops houses, greying out the landscape.

Burns and streams spring from the hills, curving down through parks, and quiet paths, until they disappear under the trees, where they meet the rock ridden river in a covert assignation. Here is the home of the fish, rats, kingfishers and beavers, while its journey’s end is the sea.  My town is awash with secreted spiralling pathways, lurking behind the undergrowth, a threatening eerie pulse, ridges, still ponds, ravines, the craters waiting to kill you.

Poised ready for that downhill spiral that life can be. A snakes and ladders of hope and despair. A coil of hurt and confusion. Birth the starting point and around this, life winds, increasing in velocity. Growth spurts, learning, independence, careers, weddings, children, an unravelling far from the mind.

Then you have the corkscrews which curl around your life’s epicentre.  Gripping you tight, a slinky of sensations.  Happy, sad, angry, cold, hot, hungry, joy, irrationality and darkness.  The gloom brings shadows, you can’t see what’s coming, a nervy coiled spring, heart pounding behind the cage of ribs, the fear of escape, to where next.  Where will the heart take you next on this twisted journey.

The river in my town knows where it’s going. It knows it must reach the sea.  The geography is all mapped out.  We don’t know have any such map, don’t know where we’re headed. We might think we do but the wheel kinks suddenly and you’re warped, thrown in the wrong direction, into a gulley of fear, and your soul, washed away with the current.