Dyffryn Gardens

Blipfoto
“The wild was never something to fear or hide from. It was my safe place, the thing I ran to.”
Raynor Winn : The Salt Path
Enough said that I was heading west to deliver a small package, a replacement timber slat for an Ikea bed. On the way I ‘accidentally’ tuned in to a R4 programme with someone talking about his condition (ADHD) and how he’d learned to cope with it and use the creative opportunities it gave him. Echoes of my experience when I jacked in the day job to become a freelance photographer.
Package delivered I headed off in search of a nearby Lakeside walk, but must have missed the turning and instead ended up at Dyffryn Gardens for meditation and lunch, a hot Cornish pasty. On the way back home there was another Cornish connection on R4, This Natural Life with Martha Kearney walking part of the coastal path through Cornwall, talking to Raynor Wynn, author of the Salt Path. I’d read her book Landlines about their 1,000 mile walk home from Scotland which was a later walk that they took. Not necessarily an easy read, but a rewarding one nevertheless.
The Salt Path is described as being about home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt and rediscovered in unexpected ways. Raynor described how she would resist the comment that we re-connect with nature – how can we, for we are just part of it, even though we may try to convince ourselves that we are above it or separate from it. This resonates with my experience, and also that home is not bricks and mortar, but finding our Sense of Place in the World. We do not find it, it finds us when we open to it – a reminder indeed of the quote by Rumi that I used on my last Blipfoto post here.