Tour International Danubien

This is what I#m doing.......

For the next three months I will be kayaking down the river Danube, all the way from Germany to Romania. I lack the space and time to descibe exactly how I feel about this. Gibbering panic would be two. But inner steel would be another two. I won't go on. Blethering is something I've been doing a lot of recently.

So, when you come to my blog and there's nothing new here, it's because I'm out on a river, paddling furiously, or stretched out in a tent exhausted, or trying to reach round and massage my own shoulder blades. I will get occasional rest days but computer access could still be out of reach.

http://www.tour-international-danubien.org/pdf/Schedule_2011.pdf

Mindfulness of body

That's what I've learnt this week. When you spend 10 hours standing at a bench, poking holes in compost pots and delicately shoving in little strawberry plant spiders the body starts to tense, to tighten. Lift two trays of pots, place on bench, arrange, prick plants left hand, make hole right hand, plant pinch, plant, pinch, plant, pinch. Pick trays up, walk up the polytunnel, bend to floor, put them down, align with others. Strighten up, walk to pallet, lift 2 trays, sometimes from floor, sometimes from 5 foot height. Place trays on bench. Repeat, reapeat, repeat, repeat. And each step of bending and stretching anf lifting and planting must, I've learnt, be accompanied by an awareness of your body. Where are your shoulders? High and tight or low and relaxed? When they are high your lower back will hurt....breathe out, lower shoulder blades, stetch neck, plant. Move hands quickly along the row of pots, right hand, two fingers in compost, left hand plunge plant as fingers come out, both hands press earth. Then next. 8 pots in a tray. 2 trays on a bench. 500 trays on a pallet. 1000 strawberry plants in a box. Twenty boxes delivered each week.

A year ago I learnt mindfulness of place, to look at where you are now and be in it, not only think of where you will be when you move on, escape, do imaginary, as yet uncreated, better things.

Now, here, is mindfulness of body, it's smaller scale, it concentrates me minute by minute, it's helping a lot.

Where are the trays? Are they placed so you lean forward and put your weight on your back or closer to you so your arms are close to your body and your weight is in your hips and legs.
Where are your knees? Are they locked and twisting or relaxed and bending? When you turn to your left for more plants, bend your knee as you lean, don't twist the joint, it makes it ache.
When you stand with your shoulders down and your neck straight, try and tense your core muscles, stomach, womb, pelvic floor; it will help support your back and, in time, will strengthen these muscles.
When you walk from bench to pallet, take deep breaths and relax your body, shoulders down, head up. Don't hunch and stoop. Be strong, feel upright. Work.

Notes..............................................

A man walking the sun dried street with a cheap plastic wall clock, offering to sell it to passersby for 5 euros.

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A drunk man, hair falling in his eyes, lazy town square on a Sunday afternoon, trying to take my picture, giving me 10 cents. Fumbling for a lighter with a hand that has a needle stuck in the back of it.

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The sand is grey at the end of the world, charring winds have dried it to a crust.

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Festooned and forlorn with hanging strips of weed and rag, swinging limply in empty breath. Swags of green anchor down to the sand where they spread out like dead hair. Underwater dreamworlds that swim so freely, dry out and die when washed home on rocky shores.

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Children ran round the fire, through floating sparks that swam down through everlasting air. For luck, for bravery, for the future.

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The thing about travel is to go and be alone until you don't feel alone any more. Until your sense of the world replaces your sense of self.

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You see, the problem, my love, is that actually, there is absolutely no point at all. If you want one, you will have to make it yourself.

From a book

Accustomed as we are to live in a world of partitions and frontiers, modern man's mentality tends to consider as natural the appropriation and occupation of living space which is, however, something artificial, the maximum expression of the civilising process which one day detained the nomads and hunters and connected them with a territory.

To become sedentary and end their lifelong pilgrimage, which them from one place to another in search of the sustenance which nature spontaneously gave them, man was obliged to define and defend his territory, give it identity, differentiate it from the land occupied by neighbouring peoples and to lay down the foundations of a legitimacy which would dominate any conflictive issues. And man did this with such ability, and gave such value to the site of his home, that he eventually inverted his perspective, finally reasoning as if the starting point were the land, and not mankind; as if the earth had the responsibility of transmitting to each social group its identity, way of being and way of life.