Fresh Horizons, Ways of Coping
The spring equinox arrives very soon as a point of balance - though balance can feel elusive in a world that often seems out of kilter.
With all that’s going on, on a personal level, I often feel hesitation over whether it is right to think about growth and enjoyment while elsewhere so much suffering continues. It can feel as though attentiveness to what is good risks becoming inattentive to what is grievous.
Yet my recent journey In Pursuit of Spring taught me that fully engaging with the world is not a retreat from reality but part of how we remain equal to it.
Because without perspective, beauty and replenishment, we lose the humanity needed to counterpoise the vagaries of the times in which we find ourselves.
My journey through spring offered an antidote - a way of recovering proportion and balance within a world that often presses in the opposite direction.
Before looking ahead, I wanted first to thank you for your company and encouragement through In Pursuit of Spring - a journey that became especially meaningful to me because it was the first extended journey undertaken consciously for Digest readers and members, with the sense that you were travelling alongside me as each day unfolded.
What began as a search for spring became something broader - a way of recovering perspective through movement, where movement and observation through land and place offered a slower measure than the one imposed by headlines.
A Small Film of the Journey
Soon, I’ll be gathering fragments from those days into a short film that offers something of the variety and beauty of Britain as it revealed itself during those travels.
Extract from the In Pursuit of Spring video
This will be shared with all subscribers shortly.
Spring Continues
Although that particular journey has ended, the movement into spring continues.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be travelling to some remarkable places - among them beautiful locations in North and South West Wales, Somerset and Lincolnshire. Some of these places are new to me, and some I am eagerly re-visiting as exemplars of regeneration, renewal and growth.
I'm particularly looking forward to visiting St. Twrog on Anglesey - which wasn't in the best state when I first visited (and sketched it):
These are often the kinds of places that restore proportion for me - reminders that the historic environment, at its best, can still offer shelter and perspective. Even within the depths of winter - there are green shoots just beneath the surface.
For those who wish, I’ll be offering to share my travels live again through my WhatsApp Channel, where I’ll continue sharing field notes, images and small discoveries as they arise.
York and Work Still Unfolding
Spring will also take me to York, where I’ll be working as part of an art project connected with York.
Holding Spring Open
I am determined not to let spring pass too quickly.
Close to home, in some woods that once formed the estate of a rich Victorian Industrialist, I’ve been working on a concertina piece - an unfolding record of the season as it gathers - filtered understory, first leaf, expectant nuthatch - small acts of renewal that ask very little of us except patience enough to notice them.
Sometimes it feels important simply to record and observe, in whatever way you can, nature’s silent liturgy - to that which holds its truth and still returns faithfully.
The Midden Project
Spring also marks the beginning of a new phase of the Midden Project in the Cheesden Valley. The beautiful hand crafted art book - bound from orphan book covers - is now ready for its first layers of paint - and through that conduit - a wider recognition of a people who have been forgotten in time.
Over the coming weeks I’ll begin visiting and painting artefacts found there - fragments, now surfaced again, carrying traces of use, neglect and endurance.
The midden itself remains, for me, more than a place of discarded things. It is a place where the ignored, sidelined and the overlooked begin to speak again.
A project page is now gathering these strands and will continue to grow as the work develops.
I’ll also be sharing more of the origin of this work - why it reaches back into something long held within me - the early and enduring sense that every human life is singular.
Perhaps that feeling matters even more now, when loss so often reaches us stripped of life - compressed into headlines, numbers, brief reports, and then displaced by the curated urgency of whatever follows next.
This work is aimed at helping me move beyond the triviality that modernity conjures: that sleight of hand by which serious things are made to feel disposable, where insult becomes performance, where human beings are diminished through casual language, where conflict is consumed almost as spectacle, and where even war can appear to drift across screens with the gamified flattened unreality of passing content.
Finding artefacts in the midden
The Midden Project is an attempt to draw something back from that drift - from the residue of what remains at Cheesden - and hold it long enough so that dignity returns, however modestly.
Then, through the creative act, to project again the value of every human life into fuller view - something for us all to hold onto.
For those wanting to know more of this project there is now a summary page here:
Andy Marshall
Member Powered Photography — New Places
Two New Places are being photographed for Member Powered Photography very soon.
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Andy
Kind Words:
To receive your Loci Digest is to take a long drink from a cool stream on a hot day. Your beautiful word paintings take me to places I'd forgotten. Thank you. (Email from a subscriber)
You're writing and photography are so beautiful - you have a wonderful skill. Thank yo ufor giving your insights ad helping us to really see. (Email from a subscriber)
Andy your work is becoming wonderful, remarkable. A so-called breakdown has been milled into its constituent parts, becoming profound construction: through perception, architecture, the lens and the pen. In your Repton crypt essay a deep description of our social anxiety - and our reason to be.... (Email from a subscriber)
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