Creating "Real Nodes".
What do we choose to remember?
“We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensations of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places — retreated to most often when we are most remote from them — are among the most important landscapes we possess.”
Robert Macfarlane The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot
I realise there is some assumed agency in the title to this month's musings.
That choosing a memory is something that we actually, well... choose to do. That we do it cognitively, as if lining up all the possible contenders for our limited memory space and then make a rational, balanced decision after weighing up all the options.
But I don't think it's as simple as that at, and I'm beginning to wonder if memory and remembering is far less cognition and far more mysterious, perhaps more into the realm of dreams and mist and moonlit lochs.
Perhaps a better question is “What memories do we choose to nurture?”
Choosing to nurture feels more honouring of the unconscious act of holding the little vignettes of memory in our mind.
I have just returned from a short family break to the northwest of England; Liverpool and Manchester. I don't frequent cities all that often these days and this break reminded me of how much I love the bustle of city life.
On the Manchester leg of the trip I had two evening meet ups scheduled, the first with my oldest friend. We would have met at a playgroup when we were around four, making our friendship over 40 years old.
The day after that I was meeting one of my newest friends, someone I'd never met in person. Someone I connected with over a shared appreciation of place, poetry and trees over on Instagram.
The day we were meant to meet I had, surprisingly for me, my travel plans all sorted. I would drive to our hotel for around 4:30 pm, check-in, take our luggage up to the room, say a quick goodbye to my wife and kids and make the couple of minute walk to the nearest tram stop, to then complete the short 9 minute tram ride to Cornbrook station.
It literally couldn't have been simpler. But the best laid plans and all that...
Because it turned out that the Premier Inn in Salford Quays we were checking into did not have our reservation. Indeed, it turned out that we were at the wrong hotel entirely and that our reservation was in another Premier Inn a short drive away at Media City. No worries I thought, I still had plenty of time. So with the car reloaded with kids and luggage we drove over to Media City, where I encountered another problem. My car, fitted with a roof box, made it too high to be able to park in the multi-storey car park adjacent to the hotel.
Media City is a little like Canary Wharf in London, it’s all private land, and so there is no street parking anywhere.
So with nowhere conveinet to park and time ticking before my 5:00 PM rendezvous I simply had to drop my family off outside the hotel, with as much luggage as they could carry, and with 12 minutes to get to Cornbrook I made the quick decision to drive there - hastly punching the address into my phone’s map app.
Getting to Cornbrook it turned was pretty easy by car, however, parking anywhere around an urban train station is not often easy and sure enough it wasn’t here either, so in the end I parked up outside the locked gates of a breakers yard, hoped for the best, and slamming the car door was at last able to embrace my good friend Jez.
And remarkably I was pretty much on time.
Now I hate being late. Usually I arrive way in advance to compensate for the stress being late causes me. So I was very annoyed with myself that after many months of intending to meet and a desire to properly experience the place of Pomona Strand, a place that has captured the heart and imagination of my friend and by extension through his writing, me, I had arrived in a less than ideal state, one of external drama and internal chaos.
Alas, after stepping through a gap in a fairly formidable, spiked metal fence, a true liminal threshold if ever there was one, we emerged into the open space of Pomona. I was here!
After a couple of hundred yards I simply had to stop though, look around and take it all in, pausing long enough to take a deep breath and attempt to ground myself more fully in the place.
Intentional breathing is one of the main ways I regulate my nervous system these days, but on this occasion it only partially helped, because my mind still raced and drifted back to those loose ends:
Did Sarah and the children check in OK?
Was it the right hotel this time?
Will the car be OK parked where it is?
Did I lock it?
Will I find somewhere later tonight to park it close to the hotel?
Now I think I probably hid all this very well, I find with practice you get good at hiding this kind of stuff! But I wonder what the place and the resident geese made of this stranger rocking up, internally flustered, and partially distracted.
Fortunately, I wasn't completely unprepared for the occasion, because two days earlier I visited a lovely book shop in central Manchester and picked up a small poetry anthology called Wild Remedy, it was to be a gift for my friend but also to Pomona herself. A way of showing my appreciation. And after a short while I asked if I could read a poem from the book. I can't remember what it was called now but it was by John Clare. It spoke to me when I first read it in the bookshop but in this place, at that moment, read aloud, it seemed a little incongruent. You see it was all about ferns and as I looked around there wasn't a single fern in sight. I'm not sure what I was expecting but a poem about self-seeded rowans and pioneer birch would have been more apt!
So things were a little clunky to say the least!
But just the act of turning to poetry went some way further to regulating my body and over the next hour or so, walking, sitting, talking and observing the busy swirls of swallows, and the long arching flight of Heron, I slowly found myself being hugged by this place and back into a sense of stillness, until eventually, sat beside a place known as “Magic Pool”, I felt thoroughly at ease.
So there is much I have taken away from my first visit to Pomona, not least a deeper connection with my friend, but beyond that I am wondering about the memory I want to choose to nurture and for some reason I have found that it will be the geese I remember most.
They were Canada geese, though not huddled together as in a Fenland field, moving around, or pecking at the ground. Rather they were spread out like sentry posts, seemingly across the whole space, their tall necks reaching towards the sky. A few of them were on the move, “bossing it” I think they call it, but I recall that many more were stillness personified.
Still, calm, grounded.
Oh to be more goose, I thought.
So thank you Jez, and thank you Pomona – I will be back and next time I am getting the tram!
I'm going leave you with a short excerpt from Marge Piercy and a short poem from Eugene Issaus, pieces that feel right given my experience of Pomona.
Here’s Piercy from her poem The Seven of Pentacles:
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure. Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
And here is Eugene Issaus - from “Excursions to the Inner Landscape”
Life is vibrations
Catching the pulse of the day
To eat, to sleep, to walk, to play,
Reflections at midnight.
Clearing off the daily bustles,
Sedimenting the bumping thoughts.
There the hidden structure comes into light
New connections forming,
Conjuring colours along the path.
Of course Jez and I could have met online as we have done before, no parking issues, no trams to catch, but it's good get a little tangled up occassionally, to experience a little of the daily bustle, gather some sediment, and see what comes into light in those “real” moments, where those new connections can become more colourful and form memories worth nurturing, and they can then serve as nodes, connecting the paths that led us there with those that are to come, and that makes the journey feel more robust and real.
Finally, I should also say that in amongst it all I forgot to take any photos of my visit to Pomona, just the one above as I left, so I really am relying on memory here, and that feels great. But if you do want to see more of Pomona then go and check out
and see it captured through the changing seasons.Go well folks!
1. Delighting: Ultimate Calm, with Hania Rani
I have been a great fan of the BBC show Ultimate Calm, previously hosted by Ólufar Arnalds, but when I saw that Hania Rani was taking over the show for Season 4 my heart skipped with joy. I love Hania’s music, and this show has a very different vibe to the previous seasons, distinctly Hania Rania, whilst remaining ultimately calm.
Listen in HERE.
2. Reading: Of Thorn & Briar, Paul Lamb
I’m digging into my West Country roots and I couldn’t put this book down! Loved it all.
UPCOMING:
As mentioned last month I am co-hosting some free online circles for men between 6.30 pm and 8.30 pm and the next one is on May 9th.
A simple but effective format, a poem, or an old story, underpinned with the Courage & Renewal Touchstones, and with opportunity for each of us to speak to whats most alive or uppermost in our lives at present.
Please do join us if you can - email me for the Zoom link. Will@thewilljohnsonjourney.com
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An Invitation: The Rose & The Wren, A Mythopoetic Journey for Men
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I should edit this: because they were of course Sand Martins, not Swallows! 🤦♂️
Will, it was such a joyous thing to welcome you to Pomona, and also to read your reflections here. I sensed your inner ruffled feathers (thanks hypervigilance!) but also trusted that there's none better than Pomona and her creatures at smoothing these things out. Sometimes I think we just have to turn up in ways that don't meet our high expectations of ourselves, in order to be met and accepted by other beings in whatever shape we're in 💚 Thank you so deeply for taking the time to visit 🙏🏼
The Clare poem you read was "To the Fox Fern" and, despite your questioning, was a perfect poem to hear in that moment.