An East Anglian Sky
- David Brand
- Feb 16, 2024
- 4 min read
I’ve been privileged to visit a wide variety of different places on earth. Each of those places – without exception – has a very special place in my heart. Everywhere has beauty and goodness in it, even if some are more difficult to see.
There are a few places I truly adore, though – places that nourish and feed my soul. Places that invigorate, energise and motivate me. Places that mean a great deal to me due to their heritage and significance, whether communal or personal.
Above all others, there is one place that is my oasis – my place of peace, calm, comfort. It’s my place to go to when I’m in need of stillness and quiet; the greatest perspective and vision.
I adore East Anglia.
Big skies
To explore the coast of north Norfolk is to bathe oneself in tranquility. To stroll from Wells-next-the-Sea town along the river out towards the beach is to experience time slowed-down.
The sky is big. It seems higher, deeper and more expansive than elsewhere. The bright blue of a summer’s day has a richness that helps one dream big dreams, to see with clarity a brighter and more hopeful future.
At night, a clear East Anglian sky provides a pure and crystal-like canvas that brings forward the beauty of the stars like nowhere else I’ve experienced.
A few minutes counting the stars is time well-spent – this practice makes you feel small; it helps make your personal problems assume their correct perspective relative to God, the Higher Power who is responsible for putting all these stars into space.
The coastline at Wells and the nearby villages at Brancaster, Holkham and down to Mundesley are like drinking-in the purest of life-giving water. The sweet, clean smell of the pine trees that give way to maram-grass on the dunes and finally vast swathes of golden sand and intricately detailed shingle – it makes every breath inhaled fragrant, cleansing, life-giving and joy-bringing.
One breathes in peace, one exhales stress in north Norfolk.
Singing with expectancy
The quietness of this flat, gently undulating at most, landscape known as the ‘bread basket of England’ affords the immersed person a congruent sense of bucolic yet fruitful equilibrium.
The wildlife is plentiful, the wildfowl and birds majestic. Just listen, sit still and take in with all your senses the world you’re part of for the duration of your time within this beauty. Be mindful you are also just part of this world’s overall goings on, simultaneously uniquely cherished beyond measure by the one-and-only creator of this mesmerising beauty.
To cycle along the lanes of East Anglia is to be in heaven. The vistas, the quiet, the tufts of grass growing unobtrusively through the centre of the roadways. The hedgerows that – especially on a warm and dry summer’s day – sing with expectancy and abundance of life, as if cheering you on your journey.
To travel by bike through East Anglia is to appreciate with the most vivid of clarity that life is about the journey and the destination, and that the only place to experience the eternal prior to earthly-death is in the precise moment you are right now – the gift you are in perpetual receipt of.
The sweet spot of natural frequency
To travel inland is to experience space; a healthy, grace-imbued pace of life. The rhythm is unforced, like a community that has found and stayed in its sweet spot of natural frequency.
The beauty, elegance and at-once intimate yet grand surroundings of Norwich; the tranquil, fragile rarity of the Norfolk Broads; the weathered, learned togetherness of Southwold; the endless, sophorific completion of the waves’ journey washing onto the beach at Runton; the stately-glide of the traditional wherries gliding along the waterways, released into the sea at Gorleston; the morning, scented-dew in the forests of Sandringham and Thetford; the setting-sun over the fields stretching beyond range of the human eye, filled with abundant crops of wheat, barley and fruit – this wondrous region is not one to which my words can do justice.
A pilgrimage to paradise
One must be immersed in East Anglia to truly appreciate this region, to feel it, to truly saturate your being in its goodness.
In North Norfolk lies the village of Little Walsingham. It’s a place of personal significance for me and for so many as a site of Christian pilgrimage.
This tiny village has a vast range of styles and denominations of Christian worship present within its tranquil setting. It is just beautiful – it’s a village that symbolises heaven-on-earth to me; unity-in-diversity, authentic community, mutual-support, trees of life-giving abundant fruit – all under the one, infinitely-deep, hope-filled, peaceful and joy-bringing dome of the East Anglian sky.
It’s one place, one life, one love.
David
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