Walking with Words

We have had all weathers at West Norwood Cemetery in the last month. Lashing rain soaking our pages, washing away pencil jottings, deep delightful dappled shade, uplifting wind filling hearts and skirts, scalding heat slowing us down. My four week creative walking and writing course is nearly over. One participant said, “I was so excited it was going to last four weeks, now I feel greedy and I want to go on and on.”
         The course has combined walking and writing, wandering and wondering. I wanted the course to be a way of opening to the imagination and the world of stories that is both outside and inside.
    “A walk is only a step away from a story and every path tells,” writes Robert MacFarlane in his multi-layered ‘The Old Ways – a journey on foot’. I wanted participants to observe, collect, imagine and create their own stories through walking.

I divided the cemetery into four sections, four walks, each on a different theme: the senses; beauty; time and trees, and the final walk – then and now. The walks were inspired by different areas in the cemetery. The theme of beauty linked to the Greek influence in the cemetery, from the many gothic graves referencing ancient Greek architecture, to the Hellenic Enclosure bought by Greeks in 1842 for Orthodox burials, with its own chapel, St Stephens, a mini acropolis, recently restored. We explored ancient Greek ideas about beauty, and Plato’s description of beauty as a ladder to immortality, that climbs from physical beauty, through “the great mass of mortal rubbish” to “beauty itself” where “beholder and beheld become one.” ‘The Symposium’.

I led the group down secret paths, passed: tombs of tumbled stones; carved women draped with stone cloth; squirrels sculpted and real; stone angels; green flash of parakeets; curling carved ivy; stone roses; bunches of carved lily of the valley; a lone fox who knows all secrets paths; stone birds; stone vases; stone masks, even a stone lamb. And some stones carved to look like metal, others carved to look like monuments from neolithic times, or obelisks from the future. There really are stories in every step and I wanted participants to “bodily enter a story by walking it” Rebecca Solnit writes in he inspirational ‘Wanderlust – a history of walking’. And so we walked our stories, as one participant said “A profound experience, the sensory walk in the rain, then translating it to page was soothing and enriching.”

Looking for stories everywhere is just a state of mind, and I wanted to give participants some keys to do this, through: observation; listening; collecting images; finding found words along the way; picking up fragments of text from graves; catching fleeting thoughts and memories triggered by strange architecture hidden among brambles, daisies and deep trees. I wanted them to listen out for stories, feelings, tangents, that pop up inside us all, and jot them down. Practicing catching the first idea, before it has gone, before it vanishes and other thoughts creep in, is always the best in my experience! Many participants had not done anything like this before and did not think of themselves as writers or storytellers. But with a few keys, they soon were connected to their imaginations, and moving, powerful, beautiful words flowed out. One participant wrote about the process, “such bright sun into decay – a great foray into the cemetery’s secret treasure – undergrowth, memory…”

Robert MacFarlane writes that a path leads “onwards in space but also backwards in time.” And walking the paths we imagined them arranged back in 1837, and then we slipped backwards to the meadows sweeping up the hill, and before that to the dense, mysterious Great North Wood that covered parts of south east London. Some 13 majestic oak trees in the cemetery are more than 500 years old and were part of that old wood. Solnit says that humans are words that walk. Walking corresponds to language, walking is a language, and in Walking with words we have walked our talk. “Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind and walking travels both terrains” says Rebecca Solnit. I have written my own song to West Norwood Cemetery and will post it another time.

The lush, hidden nature along the paths has restored us all. A participant wrote, “the path is full of life, invigorating the soul.” The cemetery is peaceful and rejuvenating, calming and energising, this place of death is so alive, so very alive.

Thankyou to Teresa Donoghue and West Norwood Cemetery and Thriving Norwood for funding this course so it could be free for participants, and for allowing me to be so inventive, daring and supporting me to create and lead it.