Learning to Listen
I grew up in the west of England, UK, in a landscape shaped by chalk hills, long fields, and ancient paths worn into the land.
It was a place where stories seemed to linger beneath the surface, held within stone, earth, and sky.
Childhood photograph, 1970s
Some of my earliest memories are of walking. School holidays often meant long days outdoors, following old Roman roads or crossing open fields with little sense of destination. We carried cheese and pickle sandwiches in our pockets and walked until the fields blurred into one another. There were complaints, of course, but there was also a freedom in moving through space without hurry.
Living near Stonehenge gave those early years a particular quality. At that time, the stones were unfenced, open to curious attention and resting bodies. My brother and I would lean against them, pressing our backs into their cool surfaces, half-playing, half-listening. There was excitement and a slight edge of fear, the kind that comes with being so small beside something vast.
We made up songs, invented stories, and let our imaginations roam.
My father loved these places. He never explained his fascination, but I remember how he would stop and gaze into the distance, as if attending to something beyond the visible. When asked where we were going, he would smile and say, “Just follow the ley lines.”
We followed without understanding, trusting the movement itself.
Only much later did I recognise what those days were offering me. I was learning how to be with a place without needing to define it, how meaning can be carried through repetition and presence long before it finds language. These early experiences continue to shape my practice, returning me again and again to the mystery of place as something layered and alive:
Memory, I have come to realise, does not live only in the mind.
It settles into the body and into the land, held in paths walked many times, in stones that existed long before I was born, and in future transitions of light, texture, and colour.