Yarncliffe, Longshaw Estate, Burbage and back
After a day in the company of machines, I feel stretched too thinly and I go running in Yarncliffe Wood in the late afternoon.
The thought of emails forces me into the car, where I get annoyed that I have to sit before I can run. My mood is for trees, but instead there are buildings. The weather doesn’t matter to me but the car’s controls need adjusting because of it. Emails, phone calls and other electronic demands have followed me out into the street, seeped into the car and live generally in the air. Muscle memory takes over and there’s a sense of being absorbed into a small, boring God.
Within the car, its lifeless apart from something that might be a fly. Music and the radio improve things, but mainly because they crowd out and bully away the other concerns, shouting at them until they sink deeper into what I suspect is consciousness, below where thinking is done.
To be around our machines is to be around millions of copies with the original nowhere to be seen. Our devices are often mechanisms for copying, emptying, and replacing, with a sideline in domination. They fill our lives with the voices and thoughts of others and even though the sun’s out, I contend that they take more than they give and that we live in a weird kind of emptiness populated by ghosts. Screens, satellites and apps soak up your energies and its a rare day when you get some in return.
The roads contain a smattering of cars which is good. The Tarmac looks grey and the machined white road lines are mesmerising and tiring to look at. By contrast the blue middle distances of the landscape in the car’s windows look smudged and unclear, but they make you feel like you want to be there and not trapped in this metal box of hypnotic roars, speed and watchfulness.
I am worried that all straight, device-made lines have the same effect. They pull your attention, monopolise it and replace it with themselves. Unclear, wobbling and fading lines on the other hand invite the mind to follow the eye into them and to make its own pictures and to make connections that weren’t there until a second or two ago. The living world is like this (there are no straight lines in Nature as far as I know) and its why I think we find it so nourishing compared to our existence in plastics, digital and invisible rays like Bluetooth.
By the time the engine is ready to be switched off, I want to sleep. I’m empty and I just want to sit and do nothing for a while. Time is short though and although the sun won’t go down any time soon, I want to get back home, to eat, read and maybe draw before its time to drift away properly.
This is the third time I’ve run around here. I like the area, even though the Longshaw Estate feels manicured and like a distant cousin of the straight lines I was consideringon the way here. Its busier, flatter areas are great running, there are Scotch pine trees which I love and the portion I’m about to run through is wooded, high and quiet.
I’m halfway into a quiet hillside section with winding trails and already I feel a bit fuller inside, just from dodging the roots and the rocks and looking out through the trees into the valley and realising how high up I am. The direction I’m headed in is mysterious but vaguely the correct one and if I hit a road, I know I have to look for a path to the right to take me up toward the Fox House.
Trees fill the mind in a much better way than emails. Emails take something from you (your thoughts, your time, your attention and quite often your temper), whereas a tree will fill you up with its size, the noise it makes in the wind, its colours and its seasonal changes. Even a dead one that’s been blown to pieces by lightning is better than an email. Its difficult to think like this for long, because the trails here are quick and flowing.
By the time the uphill sections start, Nature is seeping inside. The greens, the greys, the browns, the oranges, the blues and more are all taking up unnamed residencies inside somewhere and I feel better and alive. Even the focus-on-the-feet that technical uphill sections demand are wholesome in some way and the lungfuls of air that running needs are a pleasure in amongst the plants and the trees and blackbird calls. I splash through a tiny stream and wonder whether my ‘phone is beaming things into the ether and whether they go into space.
By the time I’ve composed some of this writing, I’ve arrived at the pub. The woods are gone and instead its grey, threatening skies that pull at mine and everyone else’s brain. Its not a classic summer evening but its still better than being anywhere else. There’s a cool wind that I like because I’m exhausted and some blue skies glow faintly to the east. The high trail from the Fox House across the top of Burbage is technical and almost painful in parts but I can see where I’m supposed to go and I can see parts of the landscape that are far, far away over the hills. I should know what they are but I don’t and that makes me pleased.
I want to call Carl Wark “Tabletop Mountain” and resolve to draw it. This is a sign that my imagination is doing things again and I’m happy. Running is automatic by now and there’s so much to look at and take in that it makes my head buzz and I feel hungry but full.
On the main trail down from Burbage Bridge my feet are being enfiladed with stones and I feel like I’m nearly back to the car, but its still another 3 miles. Tiredness hangs around like the black clouds on the horizon but its not the what-am-I-doing-here-20-mile-plus tiredness so I can remember most of the way back through Longshaw’s car-sized rhododendron blooms, sheep and snooker-table grassland.
I don’t recall the car journey home though and by the time I get back, Lisa has made dinner so its time to eat stop thinking like this.