Today I watched the sun rise from behind the Downs. It looked like some dual fuel cooker had broken free of its suburban prison, reds, blues, and yellows smeared across the sky, swilling syncopated flames. From my window you can see a clump of trees, only just peeking over the crest; I call it "my sacred grove" and like to imagine it guards a gruesome and ancient mystery. It's impossible to tell at this distance what the trees are, but they are straight and slender - a picket fence against the encroaching horizon.
Now it's winter their branches are bare, and with the early light bleeding from below and behind they glow like a warm fishnet stocking crumpled on the backbone of the recumbent ridge. I watched the light change through their twiggy latticework and felt drawn out of myself, pulled like chewing gum by a point just behind my breastbone, all the way into the sun in the trees and beyond, the sky, the purple cloud wisps, the sea...
This is a landscape that takes root inside you rather than the other way around, you find yourself wanting to belong in it. The whiteness of the chalk so tantalizingly just under the surface suddenly calls to you to be scratched like an itch. I want to stand a lasting mark of myself next to some cattle grid; a stone, a scar, a love affair.
One day I will leave my house and walk across the fields to my sacred grove. There I will find a parking lot, a picnic table, maybe some discarded lager cans; but for now I can look at it from my bedroom and silently perform my motionless morning ritual.