After a long, if fitful, sleep and then a shower, I am feeling refreshed and capable again. My pack is still exploded all over the room from last night--I dump everything into a pile and re-sort and repack and purge a few more things to mail back to London.I see now that I do better on a travel day to wear the daypack and haul the big bag all tidied and tied up for the shorter distances. Without the hip and shoulder straps flopping around, it goes better onto bus and rail racks, and there's no need to climb into and out of it every three minutes. Combining the packs is definitely better for the longer schleps from a train station to a B&B. This plan sets me in a better mood already.
I hate reading history. Always have. Had a blurb in my hotel about the room and the hotel. My brain seized up halfway through the first page. I like hearing and seeing history. Hearing it through docents and walks, seeing it through pictures and reenactments. I deal with words so much that the thought and effort of reading more today leaves me enervated and blah. It's another form of taking in from the outside, from someone else's view of the world, and being influenced by it.
Yet isn't all life creation, artistic creation, an outpouring of our experiences and views in life? Can we pour out from a vacuum? Not really. But where comes the source? Head experiences lead to head output. Heart experiences lead to heart output. Physical experiences lead to physical output. Spiritual experiences lead to spiritual output.
We out-put into the world what we dwell on the most. Our minds build a model, a construct, a way of thinking, and our words and actions and even the world's responses retune themselves to that model and construct. We see what we believe. What we choose to vibrate to, the world will give us. I'm trying to stay out of the head experiences as much as possible on this trip.I'm beginning to experience the pull to write and to put my words out into the world, even if no one reads. I write. That's one of the things I do. I am here, and my words are the proof of it. My graffiti is left in bits and bytes on servers instead of stone all over the world. I was here. Remember me.
The Lost Gardens of Heligan, which I bused to this morning, are called "lost" because they were a Victorian garden that fell into acute disrepair during the war. Buildings toppled under the weight of overgrowth, gardens died, ponds choked with plants and debris. A group of volunteers began resurrecting it several years ago, and have returned much of it to its former splendor.
It is still a work in progress, with many long walks and interesting paths, areas devoted to special types of vegetation (a jungle, for instance), a lovely café that cooks with site-grown organic foods, a huge gift shop, and an amazing collection of restored plants (such as a decades-old rhododendron forest--really!--and rare handkerchief trees, like the one I saw in London).
I liked the idea of starting from the debris. Of the teamwork and design involved in creating a place like that--of reclaiming it, really. The bones of the place were there; they just needed a loving hand and lots of back-work to bring them back. I like that better than working on acres of land from scratch.
The other thing I liked most about Heligan is the mud art. The Giant and the Mud Maiden, both of them very big. I am drawn to the idea of sculpting to that scale with mud and cement. It's like a sand castle only more permanent. Simultaneously whimsical and artful and useful to a garden.
Like the brother and sister artist who created these outdoor pieces, I loved mudpies when I was a kid. Anything that makes a mess is a preferred medium for me. Is that where my sculpting needs to be put? A great feeling of enthusiasm bubbled up inside me when I looked at those: "Hey, I could do that." Anyone have a bit of garden they want to spice up?
The rest of my day was anti-climactic travel--a train ride to sprawling Plymouth through some lovely countryside in between endless tree-blur. An amusing busboard of Britain’s ubiquitous campaign to get people to use a trashcan for their gum instead of sticking it to sidewalks, buses, signposts, and toilets. A one-hour trip to Lydford that stretched to two hours because of a huge backup after an accident on a bike path that crosses the area.
Reached The Springs with ease from the flag-stop bus route at the top of the road out of Lydford. It's a cozy three-story B&B run by Mr and Mrs Wray; she's Margaret. She and her husband spend every winter in southern India, and he's over there now building a home for them to use when they're there. My room has a view onto a friendly garden with a lovely collection of June flowers, and Margaret is a great cook.Ate dinner at The Dartmoor Inn, barely a quarter mile from The Springs along a dangerously narrow (no shoulder, heavy traffic) B road.
I am hungrier than I expected to be. Also tired after a long trip up here. My server, Val, is very game--arranging for me to sample the black pudding, a traditional slice of stuff made from pig's blood, fat, organ meat and who-knows-what-else leftovers from a slaughter. Leave it to the frugal Brits (or any European heritage) to put all parts of a pig to work for sustenance.
The stuff is very rich--a forkful goes a long way--but tasty in a meaty, slightly peppery kind of way. I could almost feel my iron and vitamin A levels go up with each of my three bites. My main meal of marinated fish over salad greens was worthy of a fine restaurant, which this has been rated as.
Finished off with a lemon tart with a dollop of clotted cream (yes, that’s solid cream, not ice cream on that wedge), waddled home, and was more than grateful for the chance to roll into bed and sleep it all off.
