Seaweed, trees, rivers, veins. Skeletal structures, views from above, all spread outwards, thinning and succumbing to the foundations that support them. Rivers follow fluctuations in the ground, geological underpinnings and fractures.
Mine are stunted, it seems. Something stems the flow, slows it to a halt. I don’t have enough energy, despite my sleep, despite my diet – I cannot sustain myself. Gravity is not my friend. There’s not enough iron, or B12 or good bacteria to keep me upright. There’s too much infection or instability or bad bacteria in my gut.
Blood is taken, again. I’m poked and prodded and asked to touch my toes.
“Your blood tests are normal.” The doctor tells me, listing more things that I don’t have wrong with me.
I wake up feeling better, think I can climb mountains again. I can’t. I’m out of breath at the top of the stairs. This can’t still be altitude sickness, can it?
A giant etch-a-sketch, the beach is a perfect place for play. Everything will wash away and leave a new surface.
I wrote “The tide will take me” in wet sand with a piece of dried cuttlefish and it began to sink into the ground as I was writing. The sea was rising up from below as well as washing in from the incoming tide.
After months of visiting, collecting water and taking photographs, I finally made it to the beach with the intention of playing. A new beginning and chance to experiment.
Wading through shallow pools left by indents in the beach, the seaweed washes up to me. I want to replant it, the stem of one type clearly uprooted but intact. While it is wet it is also soft and pliable, smoother than my skin. I wind it round my leg.
Standing in the water as the tide comes in sucks the sand from under my feet. It begins to plant me in the beach too.
How long before I begin to grow barnacles I wonder. How long do I have to spend in the water before the sea claims me for itself?
Landscape drawings cut into the ground expose the bedrock beneath. Here, in East Sussex, it is chalk.
As with the sculptural forms of the cliffs just down the road, the brightness of the white and the contrast of the green hills and the sky has made me think about materials again. It has also made me think about light and texture. It has mostly made me think about the importance of doing and of making (and of not thinking so much). In recovering from and living with a chronic level of fatigue, doing things has often been beyond my capability. I have spent more time in my head, thinking, considering, imagining. I need to be outside, experiencing my own physicality in landscape.
I continue to walk to the sea and stare. I was reminded last week how many of us are drawn to the edge. The precarious cliff face proved just too tempting for some as they stood at the top of the cliffs on the South Downs Way. Here, at Birling Gap, there are regular cliff falls – always unpredictable, they are not unexpected. It’s the start of the summer holidays. The days are marked by the edges becoming more populated, with family holidays and tour buses.
Having intended to explore, to look for interesting things washed up by the sea, and to contemplate how to push coastal based projects forwards, I ended up doing what everyone else did – I got an ice cream, took a photo and left.
I was here.
