Clear Air; Be thankful now

The final meeting of the book club before the summer is usually celebrated with something a bit different - this time a holy well trip was requested! We gathered for a late lunch in the Heron Gallery, the sun blazing, and after having a mooch around the spectacular gardens headed off cross country to Lady's Well.  The spiel was delivered, water sprinkled and a few brave souls paid the specially tricky and rocky round. Then onwards along the Goat's Path, spectacular scenery, and up over the stile and down towards the cliffs to find the Blessed Well. The breeze was getting up by now and the clouds lowering across the bay (torrential rain forecast for the night) but more spiel delivered and then a wander down to examine the scant but spectacular remains of a promontory fort. 
Then Susie led a wild writing episode - she read us (beautifully) a highly appropriate poem: The Well by David Whyte: 
Be thankful now for having arrived,
for the sense of having drunk from a well,
for remembering the long drought
that preceded your arrival and the years
walking in a desert landscape of surfaces
looking for a spring hidden from you so long
that even wanting to find it now had gone
from your mind until you only remembered
the hard pilgrimage that brought you here,
the thirst that caught in your throat;
the taste of a world just-missed
and the dry throat that came from a love
you remembered but had never fully wanted
for yourself, until finally after years making
the long trek to get here it was as if your whole
achievement had become nothing but thirst itself.
But the miracle had come simply
from allowing yourself to know
that you had found it, that this time
someone walking out into the clear air
from far inside you had decided not to walk
past it any more; the miracle had come
at the roadside in the kneeling to drink
and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed
and the memory you held and the realization
that in this silence you no longer had to keep
your eyes and ears averted from the place
that could save you, that you had been given
the strength to let go of the thirsty dust laden
pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking
with her bent back, her bowed head
and her careful explanations.
No, the miracle had already happened
when you stood up, shook off the dust
and walked along the road from the well,
out of the desert toward the mountain,
as if already home again, as if you deserved
what you loved all along, as if just
remembering the taste of that clear cool
spring could lift up your face and set you free.


She then invited us to do our own bit of writing, just to let it flow. We had 10 minutes, accompanied by the wind, two ravens, a plummeting gannet, a lark and a lot of bees.  It was oddly cathartic. No one felt the need to share and then we wend our way back to the cars, finishing the day with cake (raspberry bakewell by the way) and strong tea in my conservatory - Himself had it all waiting. 
Thanks to Tessa and Pat for a couple of pix.