Learning to Listen

I grew up in the west of England, a landscape shaped by chalk hills, long fields and ancient paths that were worn into the land: a place where stories lingered beneath the surface, held within stone, earth and sky.

My earliest memories were 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 where the fields had no boundaries. Of course, we complained, but there was a sense of freedom in moving through space without a map.

Living near Stonehenge, at that time, the stones were unfenced. They were open to the curious attention of my brother and I. We would lean against them, pressing our backs into their cool surfaces, half-playing, half-listening. There was both 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.

Years later I began to understand what the fields were teaching me. I was learning how to be with a place, and how both walking, and returning to the same ground, awakens a memory in the body; something that the mind never knew. These early experiences continue to shape my practice, returning me to the mystery of place as something layered and alive.

I have come to realise, memory lives not only in the mind: it settles both into the body and the land. It is held in worn pathways, stones that existed long before I was born and in future transitions of light, texture and colour.