This week I've been in the Cabo de Gata-Níjar, a National Park smothering the most eastern, southern part of Spain. Still relatively empty, still very wild and impossibly arid. My language is slow and broken and awful, but it's interesting to note how much you absorb when forced to use it, just how many words you can pick up like empty snail shells; the small villages there often contained very little English, or none at all.
Much of the time was spent writing that which needed to be written, thinking that which needed to be thought, observing lemon trees, and decompressing after a very full-on few months—I was stuck in strange shapes and there was surprisingly little room for the kind of inspiration that shocks you a bit, having observed a routine for weeks on end.
ON THE JOURNAL THIS WEEK (AND THE LAST):
I'm as shocked as you are. I wrote down a few thoughts on National Book Day, which now seems a lifetime and a half ago, there were a few paragraphs from the heat (excerpt below), and a quote that puts it better than I ever could.
‘It is quiet, except for the occasional whine of a mosquito, the noises carried on the wind from the village across the valley. The sky, which has been alight with pinks and oranges so vivid I swear that I could smell them, is now bruised with 10pm clouds. Silhouetted is the mountain we climbed years ago; it has not moved, and although it is miles away it looks like I might be able to stroke it from here.’
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
I submitted an exciting proposal for a freelance project this past Monday, while away, and await news on this front. If you count Instagram as work (which I sometimes do), then there was quite a lot of action there, and I've been collecting pieces of thought and study and research which will be held up to the light shortly, in time. But perhaps most thrillingly, the day before leaving I signed and sent off 100 pages of contracts for my third book, heart singing a little at the potential of it all, everything that will happen between now and my deadline of April 1st (yes I know it's soon I'm panicking and it's wonderful).
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
This gouache on paper work by Caitlin Murphy.
The end.
I feel like I'm moving too fast, not even sitting on this chair correctly, but that's probably because I've barely arrived back (my luggage is still looking at me from the floor) and because for most of the day I have been travelling at about 400 miles an hour. It's odd, really, how you can appear to be in one place and actually have left most of your pieces 1004 miles away.
Farewell, see you next sometime.
Copyright © 2017 Ella Frances Sanders, All rights reserved.