EVERYTHING'S IN MOTION

Another long walk today. This time I walked out beyond The Roebuck, along the river to Mapledurham Lock, where, just past the churning weir, I sat in the long grass on the bank and laid out beneath the blue sky.

It was bright and warm and windy today - in every sense the rough winds Shakespeare mentioned that 'do shake the darling buds of May' - rippling the trees and forming patterns in the grass. When the trees get blown by the wind, they ripple and roar like the sea.

It occurred to me today that you don't often see motion in a photograph. The shutter flicks open for just a fraction of a second and in that tiny exposure of light onto silicon, a whole world is captured in time - frozen and unnatural. Today was just such a day: a photograph couldn't have told the story of the leaves billowing or the blue water of the river racing by. It couldn't have measured the speed of the white clouds or the flickering evening sunlight through the grass.

I imagine a similar thing happens with portraits. You don't get to see the way Abraham Lincoln smiled, or the sparkle of Oscar Wilde's eyes. You don't know the bashfulness, the defiance, the dimples, the mannerisms of real people who lived and breathed the same air as we do, in full and vibrant technicolour.

Obviously you can capture some of that. Really good photographers are able to describe motion and emotion, just as any skilled artist can. But for most of us, a click of the camera only tells a microsecond of a much greater story.

I stayed there for a while, arms folded behind my head, feet crossed at the river's edge. The grass tickled my elbows and the sun warmed my face.

Everything's in motion. The whole planet moves, and even the thing it moves around is moving. You can't freeze it or capture it in time - all that's left for us is to live it, knowing the power of the moment and knowing the power of the motion.

The thing the thing that revolves, revolves around, sank behind the wavering treeline, and long shadows fell across the golden field. The grass waved, the river hurried by, the leaves fluttered and the branches swept the leaves from side to side. I was glad I'd been there to see it.