Raven Crag 11/2/24
An old song
This week I went to social group for people living with dementia and their carers, and we sung some old songs that I had never heard before, bar one. And that was the Happy Wanderer by Friedrich-Wilhelm Möller (in its present form). It felt like my song from the first verse:
I love to go a-wandering,
Along the mountain track,
And as I go, I love to sing,
My knapsack on my back.
I don’t think I have ever resonated with a song more. I felt like it was what my heart would sing if it could, and that I was connected to all the other wanderers out there in that moment.
I also remembered the ‘Valderi Valdera’ bit so I asked my Mum where I knew it from. She said she used to sing it to us sometimes when we were out walking in her hometown in North Wales whilst visiting our Omi (German dialect for Grandma) and Grandpa.
Singing this song alongside people living with dementia was a really heart-warming moment. Dementia may mean that you can’t remember me but you do remember the songs of your youth.
The lady playing the piano said that she used to sing it with her Grandparents, and it made me think about how songs have that ability to bring generations together. Nowadays the music scene is so vast and fast-paced, which I think is amazing in a lot of ways, but I do wonder if we have lost that way of connecting. We are all listening to our own favourite music, not the few songs that the whole family know, and we are certainly not listening together. Every so often maybe, but I’m not sure if it’s really the same.
My sister and me love a good sing song on a road trip, but Mum is usually sitting in the back reading a book. I think she quite enjoys listening to our cat wails, but I’d like to make more of an effort to screech together.
Do you and your family have any songs that you sing together?⬇️
Steel Fell to Calf Crag 10/2/24
A Poem
This morning I listened to a meditation by Tara Brach (link below), one of my favourite teachers, and she read this poem by Danna Faulds to close:
Trusting Prana
Trust the energy that courses through you
Trust, then take surrender even deeper
Be the energy
Don’t push anything away
Follow each sensation back to its source
In vastness and pure presence
Emerge so new, so fresh, you don’t know who you are
Welcome in the season of monsoons
Be the bridge across the flooded river and the surging torrent underneath
Be unafraid of consummate wonder
Be the energy and blaze a trail across the clear night sky like lightning
Dare to be your own illumination
I really love this. And her website, which is the kind that would make any business coach or graphic designer cry. But I really appreciate that she has chosen to have a really basic, no thrills website, and is just sharing a poem a week because that’s what she wants to do. Why do we always have to make things so complicated (speaking to myself here)?
Ascending High Crag 3/2/24
A book quote
This is from
’s ‘Foxfire, Wolfskin, and other stories of shape-shifting women’, which is just 👌:‘Does a snake in the desert gather up shed skins? Perhaps the skin you have just shed was a fine one, but there is no point in looking back at it. That skin is dry now, and dead. And you are growing new skin. It is a young skin, and thin, and it does not yet protet the flesh beneath. Which catches on corners sometimes and bleeds. But this new skin will grow, and will better fit a body which has shifted and changed. Learn to tend your new skin. Watch each day to see how it is becoming.’
I hope these serve you in some way.
Love,
Becca xx