NINESPRINGS
This is my image of Autumn for this year. Before Samhain. Before most of the fall. Leafy and watery. The sun is still an influence, a soft one. I took the picture this morning whilst walking in Ninesprings (one word), the gem of the Yeovil Country Park.
I took a number of pictures and then had to stop and just be there. It’s a carefully managed area, hardly wild nature. But it has a long history in roughly it’s present form and is linked for me with positive childhood memories. It is a great place to visit again, and balm for the soul. And it is more than that. The English West Country is my motherland. This place represents it, in my consciousness a half degree lusher than where I live now. When here today – without turning it into too much of an exercise – I found myself entering rapport with the spirit of place and renewing the connection.
This is Wyndham Hill, Yeovil. I was born only a few hundred yards away, and I felt a close connection with it throughout my childhood. As representing ‘nature’ or the countryside, it felt safe when I was little and reassuring later on. It hasn’t changed much, and I am still reassured.
Above is the house I grew up in – the grey one. It was a pharmacy when I lived there, though it ceased to be that in 1973, three years after I left home at the age of 21. Its value as a retail site and community resource had long been weakened by a movement of people away from the old town and the building of a ring road within the modern town rather than around it. I don’t know about the later history of the house that brought about its dereliction. Clearly the house doesn’t now evoke the sense of safety and reassurance that it once did.
Contemplative Inquiry 