sent from: London, UK. destination: Long Beach, California, USA

We went for a long, overnight bike ride this past weekend. I wont pretend it was easy or fun the whole way – the heat depleted us and the first hill of any consequence left me with a puncture and M out of all breath and nothing left to give. Still, we persisted, and were rewarded with story-book English countryside in the Downs and their rolling hills.
All the while, I couldn’t shake this tune, ‘Silent Noon’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, set to music by Vaughan Williams, the finest renderer of England’s profound beauty. I’ve quoted it before, but I have no shame in returning to these beautiful words I cannot ever part from…

“Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: —
So this wing’d hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.”
– Dante Gabriel Rossetti