A swirl of once-molten magma, Hawai'i
Now and again, I shuffle through the photos lodged unhelpfully in far too many folders on my hard drive. Photos of a past life, when work trips to places like this were the norm.
They are as disconnected from me as abstract paintings now. Bhutan, Nepal, Alaska, Chile, Asia, Australia. With frequent-flyer points no longer amassing in their thousands, I've been demoted from silver status to..well, brown class... But no amount of exotic travel can make up for feeling settled somewhere, for knowing what home is, other than as an abstract concept.
In this part of the country, they have a special word for this. And it's 'hefting'.
Derived in some way from 'heaviness or weight', it decribes the way that sheep flocks in the Lake District know exactly where their territory is. The natural instinct for knowing their home patch is passed on from mother sheep to their lambs with no real need for fencing on the fells.
I wonder if humans can be hefted as well as sheep. It feels a bit like it.
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