I spent 72 hours in England once. It was 1989. Roshi had promised me years before that he would take me to Stonehenge, and this was it: I was headed to Germany to help him with his first European
sesshin, and we added three days in England to my itinerary. I landed at Heathrow, rented a car; went to Avebury, and Stonehenge, and the Nine Stones in Dorset, and back to Stonehenge. (Philip spent the same three days in Paris.)
Nine Stones is right next to an A road, but at that time there was a dense screen of brush along the roadside. I parked illegally on the verge of the road, and pushed through the vegetation, through the gate, into the small circle.
There was just me, and the stones, for as long as I cared to stay inside the circle. Unlike the mega- megalith sites, the Nine Stones are human sized.
Myself, standing next to the tallest stone
4 comments:
Oh MIRIAM! How I envy you! I'd give anything for that experience. Lytton visited Stonehenge while on a youthful walking tour back about 1905 or '08. He describes getting up well before dawn in order to climbed over and around the barriers to the public and stand in the midst of the megamegaliths. I'll bring the book tomorrow if I remember and quote a paragraph.
mb: What a wonderful way to take a self photograph. A silhouette!
Sam, I'm going to take another look at your Strachey paragraph. Interesting that you're involved with this biography. Years ago, I read something about the group... Bloomsbury Lions (?) or something like that. What an amazing circle of people.
I just looked again. Something so forlorn about the human-sized stones. As though they'd been persons turned to stone while fleeing some terrible conflagration.
I don't remember that they gave off a feeling of forlorness, or the memory of something terrible. Just thereness.
Karen, I used to have a little bundle of self-portrait shadows. This one from 18 years ago might be the most recent, and heaven knows where the others might be now.
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