A Few Days Ago...

...there was Athene, and bad fish with good chips, and very happy plastic elephants; there was a museum with happy rocks and pretty metalwork, and a very fancy gun, and there was discussion about Balthier stealing from museums, and Charles the Second, and Ashelia B'nargin Dogmasca. There was Mieville's wonderful latest, which you MUST READ NOW, 'Thene, and there were green tea puffs and green tea mochi, and a very wonderful hoodie.

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.

I wonder if you could be my therapy~?

So recently Knux has been doing stuff in my head. Good stuff.

It's...subtle, and complicated, and hard to describe. But it's about boosting self-esteem. It's about allowing myself to feel comfortable in my body, it's about not feeling guilty, not mortifying the flesh, not practising self-denial. It's about untying my hopelessly tangled shoelaces and letting myself walk barefoot over the grass and get dirt inbetween my toes.

It's about not feeling like I'm under a moral obligation to give away every bit of security I can get a hold of, not having to be the one who saves the world, being allowed to be one of those characters with sub-par stats that never gets used for the boss battles, being allowed to be the human equivalent of my Platinum-version Weavile, who has no surefire big-hitter moves and whose stats are only average, but who is pretty and has a lot of character and is named after a good friend of mine, and who keeps up with the other five members of the team, more or less. It's about not panicking, not rushing or hurrying, staying calm, keeping it together, living in stone time.

(Water-name notwithstanding, Tigris is fire in my head; hot and quick and impatient. In fire time, every second, every nanosecond counts. Tigris always has a sense of energy about him; always poised to jump up and do something. To roar and fight or laugh booming-deep-golden and romp like...well, like a cat chasing sunbeams. Do Something. Time's a-wasting. This is the time, now is the time, every moment is the most important moment, the decisive moment, the moment of the fight, so do it, get up, do something, make something, fight something, change something, whatever you do, don't stand still. If you're standing still, you shouldn't be.)

Stone time is geological ages and patience. The slow, slow movement of mountains rising and tectonic plates shifting. They'll get there. There's no rush. No need to get in a lather. There is world enough, and time. Everything in its time, and a time for every purpose, if you only wait. Stone time is the green soft glow of the Master Emerald. It's meditation in a cool still room, and walking a meandering path through the Marble Garden, smelling the flowers, picking fruit, playing in the dirt, doubling back on yourself, lying down to sleep under a shady tree. Granite calmness, basalt wisdom. Stone just is.

Acceptance.

That's stone time.

Things that I have Learned Today

• Library amnesties are love.
• So are libraries now being open on Sunday.
• Greggs's cheese-bacon-and-tomato toasties are delicious.
• Greggs, despite stereotypes, is not frequented solely or even mostly by chavs. While I was having my breakfast there I saw two geeks chatting about some videogames they'd just picked up, a pair of grey-haired folk who looked like somebody's grandparents, several ordinary-looking mothers with children under thirteen or so, a pudgy, long-haired, tattooed middle-aged fellow who rode one of those moped/buggy contraptions for folk who have trouble walking, and an Asian girl of about twelve, alone save for her younger sister, who was terribly overexcited at the fact that the aforementioned middle-aged man had a Mickey Mouse mascot attached to the basket on his buggy. Of course, it might be that the ones up north have a greater proportion of chavs; I reserve judgement.
• Sometimes, people forget to put the jam in jam doughnuts.(On the bright side, though, once I complained about this they were very kind and gave me another doughnut-this one bejammed-free of charge.)
• The church in the square in Huntingdon is not so impressive, inside, as St Neots's, but the people there are generous and you can find some very nice titbits in their booksales. I found a copy of The Neverending Story for 50p.
• The people at the church also agree that while Oliver Cromwell may be their one claim to fame(christened in their font as an infant)he was also an idiot, and that when Christians ban Christmas things have come to a pretty pass.
• Despite flunking Systems and Control Technology, I am able to figure out how to collapse and put up a scooter in a few minutes, despite never having owned one since I was eight.(I discovered this while waiting for the library to open; there were three small girls with one scooter between them, which they were having serious problems with. First they needed it collapsed and couldn't figure out how, then once it was collapsed they wanted it up again and couldn't figure out how to do that...I offered to help on the offchance that all it needed was stronger muscles than those of a twelve-year-old. But it turned out to simply be a matter of understanding mechanics.)

I cut my finger on a rough bit of pavement, but it was SO WORTH IT

Sidewalk chalking is win.

Especially when little kids join in with you!

Yesterday afternoon was a ridiculously happy time for me, yes it was. ^_^

Homeland

Recently I reread Wee Free Men.

I love that book, but it's always made my heart ache. Because Tiffany has things I've never had and never will...an ancestry, and an ancient homeland. Tiffany is pure calkin girl, she has the hills in her bones. Her face and her name. Her eyes and her hair. Tir-far-thoinn. One place out of all the world that is hers, Land Under Wave.

Me, I'm a mongrel, a muddle of different lineages, so many that they cancel each other out and it's like having none-I have no ancestry, only ancestors. And my ancestors came here, to this bit of the world, only very recently...

But I reread this book, and something struck me a different way, and I thought.

This land is not like the chalk downlands, it is not ancient, but like the chalk downlands it was made by men. Men moved the earth around, planted trees and raised buildings. They brought plants from every corner of the globe to grow in their gardens, and they laid down paths among their houses. Just as men, so long ago, cut down the trees of the old forest and brought in sheep that ate the seedlings in the grass...

This land is. It is real. Not some abstract, historical ideal, but real earth and stone and concrete. It is a real place, and there is life here. Humans, animals, the million small tough plants mixed in with the short grass in lawns and parks. Down to the clay and the chalk below(for all South England is built on chalk), this land is alive.

Men brought many things to this land. Plants grow here that have grown here since time immemorial-oak, ash, thorn-but also there are plants that men brought over the water. And plants that men made, breeding for shape or colour or taste. They grow here just as well. I can be one more transplanted thing, here, one more naturalised citizen of the earth. There is a place for such as me.

There is beauty in this land. There is the big sky, which is more beautiful here than anywhere in the country. Painters come here, just for sky. There are the trees. I climbed a hill, here, and saw the patchwork land laid out before me; I found a still small pool, surrounded all by trees, and light shimmered down onto it at sunset. When I was at Longsands, there was a courtyard there, and in that courtyard a cherry tree. In spring it blossomed, and then it was a tree of wonder, a tree of pink-white foam, a tree fit for samurai to write poems to. But it did not care that no samurai saw, that no-one respected it or wrote haiku in its honour. It just was. And maybe some people saw. I know that I did. Maybe there were others...

There is cruelty in this land. But I can accept that. There is cruelty in every land. This is one problem that Tiffany has no advantage over me on. She knows that the people of her land can be just as vicious and unthinking as people anywhere. There was the old lady...What was done to her made Tiffany angry and ashamed and resolved that it should not happen again, not while she drew breath. But it didn't make her feel that she didn't belong right where she was.

I have lived in this land all my life. I know it. They say that the landscape you live in for the first seven years of your life leaves a mark on you. I do not know how true that is, but it is true for me, I think.

The ancient lands have their witches and wizards, and all know. Tiffany tells the hills what they are, and they tell her what she is. But is there anyone to tell this land what it is? Not just the parts of it that are old, but the new? The suburbs lying quiet in the hot sun, the man-made gardens, the playgrounds in the parks? The boats on the river with puttering motor engines? This land is real, as real as any land. When I was jealous of Tiffany it was because I felt less real than her, that my land was less real, because it was not so old and pure. But that's all wrong. Time isn't everything.

This land has no name that I know. There are names for the counties and towns, but there is no name for the land.

I will look for one. I will tell the land what it is.

Maybe if I listen, it will tell me what I am.