Where the earth reflects the sky

I know I’m posting out of order, but writing the Anne of Green Gables visit blog post is taking a while! After I left Anne of Green Gables House and the LM Montgomery Museum, I went out to the coast nearby. Oh I had so missed the ocean in Montreal. Given the soil is so red and rich and fertile it’s not surprising that the beach cliffs are red sandstone. Takes a moment to get used to it, but it’s so soft and crumbly and beautiful.

The cliff top foliage is just lovely. Hanging onto life. And it’s good not to go too close to the edge as the crumbly red earth really is constantly collapsing into the sea.

I missed the photograph that explained my title for this post. I sat in the car watching the waves like we used to on the Great Ocean Road when I was a kid. No thermos of tomato soup, but the gulls were huge and just as loud. As the waves stirred up the rubble the sand coloured the water, dissolving, merging. My immediate thought was “Champagne waves”, but really as I sat and watched and relaxed, I thought liquid topaz flowing into aquamarine. The colours swirled. Waves foamed and filled my ears with a gentle purr of continual movement. And you know how the water reflects the sky, well it seemed to me that impregnated with the red earth, the sea looked just like how I imagine it would look if the earth could reflect the sky.  Full of rain clouds and squalls that had drenched me, the sky was a steely grey, not harsh or cold, more sleek and silvered and smooth. So there was this bubbling champagne topaz sea reflecting a living quicksilver sky, surrounded and penetrated, swirled into an aquamarine setting. Just beautiful, and my subconscious did keep going back to thoughts of a rich topaz champagne, but you’ll have to use your imagination because I was so caught in the moment I didn’t photograph it properly. Sorry about that!

Author: Wendy's Out of Station

I write as a way of processing and reflecting on experience, and as a way of sharing that experience. When I travel I used to write email journals back to friends, family, anyone who’d read and risk immersing themselves in my reality for a while: writing for them was a way of writing for me. Borrowing from Graham Greene in a flip of Travels with my Aunt, I imagined writing letters to my nieces, as their travelling aunt. Crafting the sentences became a way of extruding the experience, giving it birth, drawing its meaning from my soul, nurturing it into something tangible with a life of its own. The aim of my blog is to open the world to my thought-children, to let them out of the safety of my friends and family and let them experience the world. And in the process I get the honour of taking a larger group with me when I’m wandering around India and beyond, or just reflecting on parallel truths, thinking thoughts that take me to new places new beginnings. Please journey with me View all posts by Wendy's Out of Station