reflections

This post has taken a long time to type up and post. It’s one of those things that I wrote in the moment on the back of a sheet of paper while on a bus coming back from New York city. When I wrote it I had just filed for graduation (finally) and had realized how much I did miss being in NYC. There was this reflective calm that had washed over me and the over cast day added to that feeling. I began writing about why I love drizzly days and it semi reads like my version of the lyrics to “My favorite things”. I started to try to edit it so I could post it outside of the moment and make it relevant but in the end I couldn’t. I still want to share these thoughts with you because I think I need, in someway, to put them out there. So I decided to stop trying to make it “current”, add a preamble, and just copy what I had written while on the bus. I hope you enjoy it.

 There is such a comfort to me in gray drizzly days. Some reasons are obvious, others less so, and there are others still which I don’t fully understand. The obvious is England. I have spent more time, during my sessions abroad, in winter and early spring on the Northern Atlantic coast of Europe, than anywhere else or any other time of the year. France in February when I was 16, 3 trips to London (1 in January 2 in March), Amsterdam in March, even the 10 hrs in Iceland at the beginning of August was still gray. Drizzle reminds me of travel and train rides, green countrysides and warm houses, warm clothes and hardy meals, cups of tea, books, cats, snuggled bodies, and love.

There’s a muffled silence in drizzly days. A calming stillness that holds you tight but doesn’t overwhelm. It’s not stifling and oppressive like humid days that choke the life out of you. It stings your cheeks and the air cuts through your lungs filling them with a sharp freshness that lets me know I’m alive. And when the drizzle and gray come with a thick fog there’s a certain magic in the atmosphere. It holds a heightened sense of wonder of what the mists will reveal next. Marble faces of gods and giant windmills, boats could be carrying elves and lamps are made into fairy lights. Magic and wonder that remind me of childhood.

On days like this I get a quiet reserve in my heart. I can’t even begin to explain why. Drizzle just makes everything in my world feel right. To me it holds the promise of all the things I love. Chill weather, wool sweaters and coats, hats and scarves, cups of tea and yorkshire pudding, roaring fires and long hours of reading, and most of all seeing Jonathan.

The video below is footage of a cliff in Cornwall falling into the ocean. Very awesome to witness the changing power of nature at work.