Walking On Wondering Up

I have not really had the time to work out what this former blog of a certain 'Roaring Poet' was about, or its general direction other than being a cyber place I every once in a cheese-wheel moon posted various contemplations/musings/imaginative-insights.
But I think I know now what I would like it to be about. Walking the land and wondering up its interior where the faculty of imagination mingles with the jewels of memory planted everywhere. Where people in England have settled at some point in a history distant enough to have become only contactable via the weaving of imagination into the physical loom of the present landscape.
It is a process walking out into the land, of the body and mind as it engages with the contours of the earth and the mind with the contours of ones inner world. I feel most confidently that when walking and allowing the land, and thoughts come to you in a stream of sensory and mental interactions, that the assumed Cartesian separation of the physical/non-physical, mind/body is shown to be delusion. The walking naturally flows into a wondering, as modern mans' divided mindset is restored to the original meeting of Man and Earth, reintegrating us into the experience of being part of life: a part of its great Wondering Up. As walking on and wondering up act as the catalyst to reawaken to a real communion with the voice of the land, imagination unfolds like a canvas on which to catch the residue of the breath in the landscapes utterings and whispers. It makes sense to me to think the land has its own interior consciousness of a kind, as we have our own thoughts, emotions and dreams. Of course it would be a very different sentience from our own, pulsing to a vaster track of time and occupied one would imagine with far different matters as our own heads are daily caught up with!
I am fascinated by history and the layers upon layers of human lives that have all gone before us under our feet in England's well-inhabited landscapes. The reality is very true here that wherever we go in England somebody else has been there before. A mosaic of peoples populating the land stretching back to a time lost in the forgotten faces of primeval hunter gatherers tracking mammoth and other extinct megafauna through Englands shires. The richness of human dwellingness in this land is quite awesome. The soil of England is imbued with a deep loam of memory, remembering all who have come and gone, retaining some essence of whoever they were and whence they went.
We walk and the ancestors talk.
Humans must have always sought places in the land with which to communicate with their dead ancestors, whose own spirits have become one in the Earth and the mysteries of after death and before birth that are her most deeply guarded treasures. The voice of the multitudinous dead are alive in our footsteps, and in the trees, rivers, stones, plants: the whole of the Milky Way in fact is a street the deceased walk, a river of souls going on to Saturns gate. Observe the round of the seasons. No life is utterly extinguished it returns to the soil and like a miracle somehow comes back in spring. Death is necessary as winter is to thresh clean the land of the old, decaying and weakening. Life is as necessary as spring to bud and blow forth new shoots of life from the mulch of those who-have-gone-before.
Walking we can reengage with a time those doors open beyond now, to the before and the after, to the past and the future. Wondering we can connect with the deity of the landscape, the memory of the ancestors and are own myth-place in its evolving weaving out from under out feet.
Here's a poem I wrote this summer on a walk in Wiltshire along the Wansdyke to Avebury, where I plunged into its landscape-mythscape and Walking On and Wondering Up began.

Wansdyke Wander

Foot padding,

sole marking,
miles on the chalk,
on the white,
on the ghost semen path.

Land over land,
hill over hill,
head above sky,
in Wodens realm of heights,
in sky dreaming abode.

Walking on,

Wondering up.

A landscape of air-folded hills,
a timeless other England,
captures my rolling feet,
in the summer heat.
Ghosts of my ancestors,
white-hands, white-faces,
chalk-daubed,
hover and twist,
about the heavy air.
I’m following a serpents track,

a running barrowish hump,
ditch one-side,
and white lines run across the old earth bank,
a ghost river,
that flows up.
To Chair Hill,
and Tan Hill.
There where Beltane fires blazed,
casting the sacred herbs,
to Woden,

wind,

sky,

air.

Ancient voices chanted,

as the summer fire,
burned white-eyed a way over,
to spirit land.

 Footsore soles of chalk,

gently I climb down,
the flowing dyke,
to flowing water;
Honeystreet and the Barge.

 To sleep in the grass,

by a Saxon church,
below those sky barrows,
in memory of Woden,
battles,
round houses,
and summer wanders.

 Walking on,

Wondering up.

Robin Collins 2013