An excerpt from my travel journal...

[Yesterday I bought a new travel journal, and as I am about to retire my old one, I thought I would snag the last entry I wrote in it before I put it to rest.]

Cornwall, ©Nikki Hodgson 

Dated: 29.11.2010 

Yesterday I sat on my suitcase in between the train carriages watching England slip past me in a series of verdant pastures scattered with puffy cloud-shaped sheep and sturdy farmhouses topped with smoking chimneys. Shaggy ponies cantered around in skittish zigzags amid uneven clumps of lush foliage.

I flipped the pages of a novel while munching on a homemade ham and cheese sandwich.

My life now is a complicated series of very simple experiences; humble scraps stitched together into an elaborate quilt.  

I thought of you and the haiku my life has become because of you. All fragmented thoughts and uneven punctuation. But beautiful nonetheless.

My entire life has been a love affair with the written word. My childhood spent climbing trees to read in peace. Then, as I grew older, escaping to coffee shops. Writing in hardbound journals and occasionally jotting thoughts on scraps of napkins; a modified poetic canvas.  

I stepped back from that dream, but I am not quite willing—it appears—to abandon it. Now I am caught in the cross-fire of what I wanted and what I thought I wanted. 

So I sit in a small cottage on the Cornish coast trying to reconcile the two desires. Tits and sparrows flit about the window—all feathers and sharp sudden bursts of flight. A robin perches on the windowsill, hopping back and forth, head and tail waggling. The sea is spread flat in the background—like butter on toast—the water smoothed over by an unseen knife.

The view sends me back in time, skimming the surface of Humboldt County’s grey lagoons, the lines running through the blocks as the wind fills the sails.

And the cormorants stand on purple rocks with outstretched wings.

Later I will stand on the shore in a similar fashion;

an open embrace for

an ocean seething

whispering waves of folded jade.