Lakeland Dipper 20

Hurrah! My first dip of the year and continuing on from my 'dipper' series last year. I won't say swim because I couldn't swim my way out of a bird bath at the moment having not swum since then but the water was pleasantly warm surprisingly (with wetsuit ... I'm getting to be a wuss in my old age!). From the middle of the lake I looked around ... Loughrigg with it's geometic acute angle paths from the Terrace to its summit with it's protractor short cut curve from one to the other; Hammer Scar's green tree line to Silver How; distant Greenup Edge leading back down Easedale to Helm Crag; kingly inverse 'mountain', Dunmail Raise and up to the massif of Seat Sandal leading the vanguard for Helvellyn. I thought of Wordsworth's poems 'On the naming of places' and of how our naming of things forms our relationships with them ...

However, sorry Wordsworth, I know I've posted parts of the Four Quartets several times before but it has to be the poem of the moment for me ...


from Burnt Norton - by T.S.Eliot

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.