The bends of the River Thames

Well…  I know I said I’d get political, but the way my life’s moving right now, I can hardly make time to breathe, let alone have deep thoughts and construct meaningful sentences with them!  Not that I’m complaining, oh no no no no no no no, there is no way that I would complain about the amazing heap of magic and characters and timelines and props and trains and love my life has turned into, but I am a bit tired, cos, let’s face it, everybody gets tired after a while, but my mind, heart, soul and spirit are still going strong and got battery for ages!!  Well, no, my brain is pretty shut down, hahaha, but the wheels keep turning no matter what I do!

So then, where was I?  Nowhere yet, right?  I was just starting…  So, there are a few bits of consciousness that I have had the fortune of accessing over the past few weeks, the most notorious one being the lack of the bend on the Thames.  Well, of course the Thames has a lot of bends, I am not saying in any case or even that it doesn’t, but I was referring to the bend I used to see to give me inspiration for stories…  No, that bend is still there, only that I cannot see it anymore…  Er- did I start speaking again without previously explaining *what* I was talking about?  Yes, I did, didn’t I?  OK, let me start over…  Deep breath.

Remember last week when I said that a girl was looking at me funny because I was looking through her window to try and catch a glimpse of a particular bend of the Thames?  Well, the bend I was referring to is the one that goes on a funky semi-loop around the Isle of Dogs (the first one, not the second), but I am sorry to disappoint myself: it cannot be seen from the train that I take from my house to London Bridge Station.  Thing is, I have seen that bend before, many times, but not from this train that I take so often lately…  In fact, you can’t even see the river until you cross it to get to Charing Cross!  But that’s two stations *after* London Bridge…!  As you must all be assuming by now, I have been mulling over this for a few days, trying to understand why it was that I recall seeing that bend over the past few weeks…  I’ve got many answers, and I think they’re all part of the final one anyway, so I’ll run them by you:

1)      I have taken a train that goes from the general Greenwich area to the northern part of the city, only I think that was the Overground I used to take before, when I lived in the artist’s house before moving further South…  It could also have been another train, taken during a random day or trip somewhere, and maybe the image just got stuck in a way that even now, by hearing the words “London Bridge”, my mind reconstructs that image and puts it in front of me… that it’s a real image I have, there’s no doubt about it, but I would need to take some of those routes again someday to figure it out, and remember to look outside as I ride!  Which brings me to reason number two:

2)      Yes, I’ve become a Londoner, indeed, which means that it’s time to move on, lol… (that was a very bittersweet lol, btw).  I put my nose into my book, my notes, my mobile, my computer even (at times), and forget that I am above ground, so I miss out on the beautiful sights that I had been craving for almost 20 years before I was able to move here…  One thing I learned the other day while looking for the Thames, was that from that train you might not see the river, but you get the Tower Bridge!  How did I miss that for the whole month I’ve been living there…?  Well, whole month is imprecise, given that I’ve spent so much time in Glastonbury and other bits in Newcastle, Manchester and Liverpool, and that some days that I’m in London I just don’t go out but stay in and write instead so I can catch up with myself a little bit…  But still!!  I’ve done that trip countless times, and the bridge is right there!  You can see the tips of the towers for a little while, and then all of a sudden the train lines cross the street from where cars cross the bridge, so the bridge is there, in all its glory, happy and crossable, with its greys and blues like it belongs in a fairytale instead of in the middle of a bustling city…  I have yet to see if you can see the Tower of London as well, which would be cool, but because the buildings are so tall, and the direction you’re sitting in has to be forwards and by the right-hand window, as well as the fact that the crossing has to coincide with a moment when there are no trains going in the opposite direction, it’s hard to really catch a glimpse…  (That’s probably why it’s been so easy to miss it in the past weeks…)  In any case, my womb jumped when I saw the bridge all ready to be crossed…  Yes, my womb, that’s what I said.  I don’t know, I’m just as baffled as you are!  I will go with that maybe it inspires so much creativity in me that my Sacral Chakra just goes boom, you know?  That’s what makes sense to me, cos a little afterwards, when I saw the Parliament really fast as we crossed the river on the way to Charing Cross, it was my heart that jumped, so everything was normal there.  That hadn’t happened in a while, btw, so I was happy to feel that little bit of my original excitement about this city…  That induces me to think that further on, after I’ve been living somewhere else for a while, every time I come back (for filming, or theatre or a bit of research or just because), I will feel the good-old feeling again…  Oh, the bend of the river, that’s right… I think all this links in because since I have fallen into the side of those that don’t look up anymore, maybe I was letting my brain fill in the gaps of what I knew I could see to get inspiration if I was traveling on another route, if that makes any kind of sense at all…?

3)      And I say that because from this particular train, you can see the Isle of Dogs for a really long while, but the rails are just neither tall nor close enough to see the river as well as the buildings…  Canary Wharf had been calling out to me since Doctor Who (so not that long ago, as opposed to everything else in the city), and now I use it for a bit of scrying every once in a while, because ever since I moved back in London, the three places I’ve lived in offer a full view of the isle as I commute, so it’s easy to look up and watch the buildings over impose each other and get a bit creative with the images they can produce.  Of course, I still prefer scrying with trees as I commute, even at night when you can only see the tops and it’s like a game of deeper shadows against the already dark sky, so that’s never stopping…  And if I’m talking about rivers, scrying in the flickers of light on the water can also be amazingly soothing and beneficial, especially if the water is slightly wavy or rushing…  Just suggesting ;)  Back to the river and the Isle:  that was the last place Mani and I went filming on January before I had to leave (close to there was where we filmed my Love, Loss and Life minisode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71R8M1dONFE), after I’d been nagging for months that I wanted to see that part of the city, so we keep saying that it was Law of Attraction and that now I have to see it wherever I live; so I believe that there’s something about the constructions there that is giving me a message, so I try to look up as often as I can… although I remain forever partial to the older buildings, the more historical the better, but that’s another story.

4)      And it doesn’t stop at that: it was a little over four years ago that I was able to come back to this country and I wrote a travel log to my family and friends, into which I poured my feelings and my tears (happy tears) from the moment when the airplane entered the island though the mouth of the Thames to when we were about to land, and my first tears escaped at the sight of the curving river, the tips of the buildings, and oh, the Tower Bridge!, with the London Eye and the Parliament shortly afterwards, and a few scattered buildings here and there that my memory did not let me recall which or whose they were, but I knew they were all the royal palaces in the midst of pretty parks and grounds (and some museums, I supposed, and of course the Tower of London).  That bird’s-eye view has stuck with me forever: Google Maps come alive (especially after some of the most technocratic dreams I’ve ever had involve me traveling places via Google Maps…  Going countries, visiting friends and family, flying through the air as I jump into my computer screen…  Oh, if only!!).

So, these are the bends of the River Thames I know, and I will gladly keep on revisiting them (and learning some of the others, cos I do skid a bit geographically in other areas of the city, lol), and drawing inspiration from that main artery of life that cuts this city in two…  For whatever’s worth, I know that now that those images are embedded in my mind, I can bring the Thames back into life whenever I need its healing, inspiration or just the flow… Yeah, and I also know that wherever I move next, I will also require a river running by, please!  Everything seems to be pointing at Newcastle, so there’s always the Tyne, which also heals and inspires me immensely, and afterwards, we’ll see…  I only ask for rivers, cats, a kind and gorgeous boyfriend, good charity shops, a Pagan circle, cozy pubs, nice cafés that host music and literary nights, and farmers’ markets in the place I settle in, is that too much to ask for?  Eep, apparently it is…  Oh well, I suppose I will have to travel back and forth for a while to enjoy the kind and gorgeous boyfriend, but some things are worth making the train and coach trips for!  …And gone on a tangent again!  Geez, Sandra can’t you just stay within the subject for once?  Um, no, I can’t, but thank you for asking.  I’ll close up with my best wishes, then!

Have you all a most delightful day or night! Till we meet again!

Sandra Tena ~ Dreamer, Seeker, Healer, Lover

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