Mid-summer day

What could be more uplifting than watering the garden early on mid-summer morning?

We have a smallish lot but this year have been reshaping and extending the small, straight bed we inherited from the previous owners. That's also meant that we've divided perennials and planted them again, sometimes in different places. So this got me thinking about landscaping design, and the idea of rhythm in the garden. You know, echoing a planting elsewhere, or creating a kind of symmetry and how that could work for us here.

And then I started thinking about rhythm in language. It seems to me that the way writing is taught today discourages rhythm, even in poetry. I can see what's gained, a certain taut energy. I always read a little before going to sleep, and I remember reading Hemingway and finding him too stimulating, to the point where I couldn't drop off. So I soon restricted him to daytime. But surely, if we write without rhythm, we also lose a certain quality connected maybe with breathing and feeling. To take a very simple example, it sounds very different and surely has a different effect whether I write, 'he began to walk' or 'he walked'.

So maybe the key has to be what I, as the writer, want to convey to my readers. And of course, if I wanted to present an idea and only an idea, the technique would be different again.