3.10.11

Paper Planes and Hidden Treasure

(Oct 2011! Oops i though i posted this?!)
I've been on holiday, an escape to a different sea. While I was there I had a dream of flying to a strange city on a pearly paper plane. The kingdom was quite level, platformed on top of the tree. Tips of branches poking around each massive individual rock that had been picked up during the growing process, Some smooth, some like mini mountains others only big enough to have one building on. Every stone part of the city was linked by rope and wood bridges to allow for any movement. The base of the tree was trunk of thousand trunks, blurred now in to a singularity. It was almost a wide as the city on top.
The buildings them selves were shimmering bleached wood and stone built, some more wood, some nearly all stone.  Grey pools amongst the green.
This ponderous tree was set a the bottom of the waterfall which cascaded off a flat plateau. I circled around the kingdom and then woke before I had a chance to set down on it, but hope to go there again one day.
This beautiful tree comes close to the wonder of my dream...


I often dream of places of sanctuary, worlds within worlds, city's within city's and cupboards with cupboards with secret staircases that lead to ancient finds.
This re-occurring theme has followed me from childhood and is still interesting, from The Secret Garden to Neverwhere.
Some times I feel I'd forever be happy opening door upon door to a new room, welcoming the creeping dementia. Like most people at times (I think), I wish I could just disappear. Its not a morbid drive I feel just an overpowering urge that if I want it hard enough, so much so it hurts, it will happen. I will wake up there. It isn't always a reflection on my life or my loves. It is simply the never ending pull/call I have felt from as early as I can remember.
But I am well aware that if I lose control this pull quickens, so simply put I want to disappear in order to gain control? maybe.

I was beyond bless to have a place of sanctuary to escape to (grandparents cottage), by no means did I a terrible childhood, but like most, sometimes, some bits are hard. The entwined magic of the garden and house is 'the' place to find through all those doors.


The old house its self was the starting point of so many of those dreams, but it held so much history there in the black beams, un-even floors and strange shaped cupboards. But every now and then it would scare me.
That pressure of presence from behind me, that sent me skittering out of a room!
I remember every strange angle, every steps of the three stair cases! The smell soap and enamel baths, the soft moss under my magic pear tree, every herb in the garden and the broken pottery I spent hours studying that was set into the stepping stones that wound through the many types of mint, chewing on the end of horse radish leaves and happily making my nettle sting soothing potions in the old brick fireplace in the kitchen sitting on the oak stool (sparking my love of wild herbs). In over 15 years all this and more has never faded, remembering it now makes me cry.
I know a huge part of who I am was shaped by my years there, it is somewhere only in mind I am able to revisist. Part of me is always hopeful that one day I'll find that magic key, or stumble through that thick bit of woodland and open the door to that sanctuary again.

Neme x