Arriving in the Land of the Queen of Moss & Green

a travelogue, an old poem

I write to you dear readers from the early New Year in the Devon dark, disoriented and unsure of the season or time or up or down, as international travel tends to leave one stretched between continents and days. It is very wet and very green and dark very early in the evening and very late into the morning. Coming from California, I feel I’ve stepped backward into winter, not forward. The feeling is not a bad one, just a bit dizzying. My creaturely self keeps needing to smell the air and peer into the night to orient.

I think a part of me is still somewhere up in the long winter night above Greenland, and another part is further back, looking wistfully at the Pacific and thinking of my warm familiar fur-piled bed and family so recently left behind. I arrived only two days ago after a long journey across the United States from west to east, and then from New York to London, a journey that involved what felt like countless steps, due to the fact that my beloved dog Runa was with me, and getting an animal into the UK is infamously difficult. But we made it, and we are glad.