The Pool in the Forest
Where art and poetry meet.
Last October, in the warm Australian Spring weather, I plucked a ripe and sunny day from the calendar - carefully selected for colour - and I spent it descending a favourite secret canyon embedded deep in the mountains inland from our home.
I walked and I swam. I clambered over boulders and down waterfalls. I followed the water, enjoying a day alone in the wilderness with no-one to talk to and nothing anyway to say. I was just being.
But part of the joy is also the homecoming, and the tale telling when words reappear after a day of just letting it all wash in.
And Meg - artist, wife and lover - who could not be there with me, looked through my photographs and chose one to recreate, in her own way, as a lasting image of that day.
Today she is unwell, and has been so all year - what we thought was a torn shoulder ligament in January (my Post “Becoming The River”) turned out to be a neck vertebrae injury and she is in constant severe pain, while we wait now for a Neurosurgeon and likely surgery.
We are back home by our river though, which is at least a calm and healing place to be, and Meg’s picture from that happier day hangs on the wall near my desk, and seeing it again, after months away, made me love her all the more, and then write this….
How can I
be anything other
than a river,
always flowing
through.
Maybe love
is the the water,
deep as the pool
in this image
I brought home for you.
We are always
liquid, stone crashed
by life,
ever falling
forward.
We are pen and pencil, pastel,
paint and colour.
We are brush and we are paper,
Artist, Poet,
Lovers…
Thankyou so much!
What a lovely reflection, David. Thank you for sharing it along with your photos and Meg’s art. Best wishes to you both. I hope Meg finds some relief from the pain. 🙏