Source, catchment, flow
Redefining a life,
alongside a river.
A synopsis, for a work
in progress.
How does one re-calibrate, on discovering fault-lines and falsehoods in long-term friendships and close personal relationships? How does one rebuild, given the light shed onto this new reality, and what does it mean for trusting in one’s beliefs, instincts and self-perception if received truths are shown to have been built on false premises?
Source, catchment, flow is a journey into just such a re-assessment.
Reaching my 60th year, it was time to address some major revelations. Disclosures during recent years from a small but significant group of people very dear to me, had made me doubt my powers of character judgement, had shaken my understanding of and faith in my modest, close, personal world and had brought into question assumed foundational truths upon which I had built my self-belief.
A friend who had had a deep, significant and lasting effect on my development as an adolescent and on into adulthood had gradually revealed their political turnabout from a shared Green liberalism to right-wing fascism; my brother’s totally unforeseen admission of alcoholism forced me to re-evaluate the certainty I had fashioned around him; my husband and children’s mental health challenges, faced due to neurodivergence and their subsequent journeys through diagnoses of autism, had dragged me through decades of perplexity and worry as a wife and mother; an estranged school friend cast her final blow; such experiences and engagements as these, coming at last into clear focus, all demanded I look back over the decades to trace where the warning signals of these seismic shifts, might have been. What were the signs? Why had I not read them? How could I have been so misguided by my own sense of heightened competence at reading others, and what kind of reality did this leave me in now?
In an attempt to reflect and re-stabilise, I chose to ground myself in walking alone along the 70 miles of the river Medway in Kent, upon whose banks I had lived my childhood and adolescence. Discovering the source of the river in east Sussex, following its turns, changes and progressions through Kent, witnessing its capriciousness, its serenity and changeability along its catchment deep into the Weald and finally reaching its flow into the river Thames and the North Sea, I was able to reflect upon the similarities with the variableness of human relations.
Learning to love the Medway’s at times sudden, and at others its more gradual transformations, I discover its bigger nature, hitherto unknown to me. From the young river I knew as a child, flowing deep within its overgrown banks, I follow its languorous pace matched with my own rhythmic footfall through the Weald of Kent and discover unimagined aspects of its nature as a fully mature waterway, carving through north Kent’s towns and industrial landscapes. I find a stability of sorts in the unpredictable and the unsettled; I learn the need to trust one’s instincts, even if flawed, while remaining impressionable to the agencies beyond our control. Meanwhile the river I thought I knew becomes a fuller, more complete story, while my relationships and friendships settle into the new shapes to which I must also become accustomed.
