A Pattern Language

I’ve been dreaming of it for a long time, and now I’ve taken the plunge. I’ve bought a campervan and I’m using it as a base to work from in isolation. It has a wind out awning for shade, electric hook-up, a two hob burner, a 65 litre fridge (with a small freezer compartment), central heating - and it even has a loo.

Already there is a van culture developing which includes a satiating process of ebb and flow, of accretion and attrition. The van joins up the dots between the photo shoots; gets me cheek by jowl to twilight; helps me bask for longer in the golden hour, and conjures respite between stops. I’ve been on the road for several weeks: masked up, sweaty, sanitised, steamy glasses - clicking away. Then into the van - awning out, coffee percolating, risotto simmering, photos uploading.

I’ve had a typical lockdown for a creative - a ‘woe betides me‘ lockdown. It was tough, but not as tough as the re-boot into work. I’ve been experiencing a curiously resilient anxiety. It’s born from a shedding of old conventions, engrained perceptions, needs and wants - but not having anything at hand to replace them. I’ve shelved the planned get-togethers, the family gatherings, the projected months of travel to exotic places. The shedding and shelving is accompanied by a low-key mourning for what has gone and may never return. Most of the time the anxiety is barely perceptible, but sometimes it rises ripe and high in the throat with no forewarning.

The past is a distant memory, the present involves an anxious processing of reality, and the future remains uncertain.

One night last week, after an exhausting shoot in Worcestershire, I pitched up in a shrouded spot in the Brecon Beacons. It was here that the van showed me the past, present and future mapped out across the sky.

After an hour beneath the Milky Way, I had an overwhelming sense of immersion, of being dissolved into the firmament. I’ve rarely seen a night sky as clear as this, but I knew its language intimately: imprinted in the mottling of a quail egg, the pattern of a murmuration, the dappling of lichen on a limestone wall. I was reminded of some words from the author, Jini Reddy quoting a friend (Glennie): “I am the earth, of the earth and the earth cycles, the seasons are me too.”

When I become anxious and rise above myself with fear, I must always remember that I am of the particle that spins around the universe; that the magnetic, invisible forces at play in the billions of galaxies are also at play in me, that I am intricately and wondrously entwined in all of this.