The rewards of exploring

I have found an absolutely wonderful place. A magic place. And it's so close, it's on hospital grounds!

Not that I'm meant to be there, I think the padlock on the gate was a bit of an indication I'm not allowed in, but when I saw it through the wire fence...I just had to get in. And lucky me, there was a hole in the fence that I squeezed in through! Looked like some sort of animal made it...

The Place is this smallish fenced-off area next to one of the carparks, bounded on the other side by a stretch of grass with some sycamore trees. Once upon a time there was a building there, and the concrete of the foundations pokes up from the ground, in big flat broken-table plateaus.

It must have been ages ago that the building stood, because there's long grass all over, and plants and flowers-there's buddleia and lilacs growing wild, smelling gorgeous, and attracting so many butterflies. Tortoiseshell butterflies, and cabbage white, and once I saw a shimmery blue and white one, though it was gone so fast I only glimpsed it. And sweet peas and a bush covered in rosehips-I think there must have been a bit of garden there once-and the tough weed-flowers, fireweed and those yellow ones like stringy dandelions and some reddish ones I didn't recognise, that had fluffy silver clouds of seeds.

And stones. Smooth round flints, embedded in the concrete and lying around loose, little ones and big ones. Rusted iron pipes, about the width of my thumb, long and spindly-some loose, some stuck in bits of concrete. Rubble, and plants growing up through it...

And it was a special place. An extra specially alive place. A sunshiny feral growing calm place, a place with warmth and stillness all about it. A magic place.

One smallish plateau was particularly special. It was more or less in the centre, and shaded by buddleia bushes, and I knew as soon as I saw it that I had to make an altar there. I made it from flints and a bit of rusty pipe-bigger than most of the bits of pipe lying around, more drainpipe size-and consecrated it with the milk I had brought with me to drink and put a sweetpea on top.

And I scratched out a name, on the concrete, in front of the altar.

Once I googled the name Tikal and discovered that as well as the name of Pachacamac's daughter, it is the name of an ancient city. A ruined city of the Maya. I saw some pictures of it-stone pushing up through grass-read a little about it. One site called it 'the incomparable Tikal'.

That phrase stuck with me.

So I named that Place, that special place, The Incomparable Tikal. And I sat there, and felt more alive and at home than I have for ages.