The book I took to read in Scotland, waited patiently until the end of the week. I’m a firm believer that, much like people, books come into our lives when we are ready for them. This book was a sub-let. It was loaned to a friend, who figured I would read it more quickly than he would. Perhaps he understood that this was the time for me to read it.
The book in question is Geoffroy Delorme’s Deer Man (and I heartily recommend it).
Like everyone else, I am entranced by books that talk of how people have turned their backs on modern society, to a greater or lesser degree. I read them to remind myself of the reality of such decisions, which is far from the romantic notions we might otherwise have.
In Delorme’s case, he was a strange child, home-educated and lonely he was strongly drawn from a young age to the non-human world. He could not concentrate in school, but at night would often escape into the nearby woods and focus with intensity on what he found there. I’m sure that there are those who will quickly reach for words like ‘autistic’ – I would choose another one: ‘privileged’.
I envy those who have that pull that strongly that young, and who find the courage to allow themselves to be drawn.
I am not one of them.
One of the things I love about Delorme’s book, is that he neither downplays nor overplays what it takes to survive in the woods. He describes his diet matter-of-factly, talking of snacking on leaves and roots and whatever else is available…but he also makes no bones about the fact that this takes its toll on a body used to modern living. Tiredness. Cold. Lack of sleep. Bear in mind this is in a forest in France – he’s not in the Amazon or the high Andes. He has access to the modern world. He simply chooses to limit his use of that access.
Coldness, tiredness. These lead to hypothermia – which again he simply describes, without emphasising how frightening those symptoms must have been.
He talks about all of these things for a purpose: his aim is to tell us that we can adapt, and (but) that such adaptation takes a long time. He speaks of ‘years’ when describing how he learned to tell plants apart by touch – and remember that these are fully immersive years – not weekend jaunts.
I read books like this to remind myself who I am not.
And yet in doing so, I learn a little more about who I am.
When I committed to honouring my writing – in my own haphazard ways – I naturally became much more aware of my words-focus, of how I think in words and sentences rather than in images for instance. I always said that I don’t want my joy to become my job. I don’t want to be ‘always on’ in terms of everything being material, always having a pen and paper to hand. To be fair, most days I prefer to carry a camera – because I know I’m an even worse photographer than I am a writer, but still, occasionally, I catch something I really like. More often though the camera serves as notebook. It allows me to step out of my word-brain for a while.
Over time, something else has happened. I have found that I don’t need the camera, to turn off the words. There are times when a walk is just a walk. Or I sit outside somewhere, not writing, not photographing, not even thinking.
Early in the book, Delorme says this: “Alone in the forest with the roe deer, I don’t think about anything, I don’t define in words that I see, hear or breathe. I am just happy to be there, with them, and to feel nature rather than to strip it bare. I speak very little, in order to leave room for intuition.”
When he says he ‘speaks very little’, I suspect he is also talking about internal dialogue. I have long said that I wrap words around things, so that I can see the shape of them. I think the need to do that is fading. I think I am beginning to learn how to feel the shape of things, without the cloak of words.
It was a very wet week, and I did not stray very far from the cottage. Had the trains been more frequent, I might have wandered further. Had the village had a shop, I might have remained even closer to base. As it was, I did little enough. I cannot even say that I "walked". I strolled about the beach and the lochside. I sat beside the river. I stepped into a church with a roof clearly constructed by boat builders, and wandered a tiny cemetery that holds the remains of Sir David Stirling (founder of the SAS) but to me was more fascinating for the fishing theme of many of the
headstones.
I carried camera and notebook, but many of my hours were 'quiet-mind' hours…non-thinking time.
The cottage owner lived next door, and most days he knocked to ask if he could drop me anywhere and to apologise for the weather. He was being helpful and I wished he wouldn’t. He was worried about me and the weather and the isolation, and he had no cause to be. He did not know me. I knew he was being kind, but really I did not want the intrusion. I resisted the temptation to say: look just go away and let me be.
Let me be.
That is what I found myself doing during that week: not doing, just being. On the last day, I noticed how quickly the week had gone and how little I could point to as having 'done' in that time. I had a few poems in progress. Even fewer pictures that came close to how things looked on the day. Perhaps the best thing on a personal level was that I had kept up my tai chi practice and garnered a few insights from taking that outside into unknown places, onto unstable ground.
But mostly, there was simply quiet. Internally as well as externally.
Delorme goes on to say that “Adapting to the natural environment is a long process that demands patience. Your metabolism changes. Your mind changes. Your reflexes change. Everything changes, but slowly.” I think this is true in the wider sense of adapting to the environment of our lived life, even if we do not choose to do something as dramatic as becoming a forest monk on the other side of the world or living with roe deer for seven years in our native forest.
Our lives are changing all the time, and change is slow, so perhaps we let it pass unaware. Only when the life shift is sudden or dramatic, do we come up against the slowness of adaptation. Either we expect everything to return to normal and are somehow surprised when it does not, or we expect to be able to shift gear quickly and easily and are somehow surprised that we cannot.
Part of my own dramatic shift was of my choosing and part of it was not, but I still recognised the opportunity and reached out for it. I neither expected nor wanted a return to the pre-existing norm. I was insistent on moving forward rather than backward. It was only when I hit a notional boundary – the five year anniversary – that I came up against my own slowness of shift.
Looking back, I can clearly see that I am not who I was, but I also still feel that I am not quite who I am becoming, so much so that I can’t even see her clearly.
The things I learned during this week of solitude and slowness were threefold:
- That we can never see who we are becoming because the change is necessarily slow, there is rarely a before and an after, there is only ever process.
- That we cannot refill the well if the outflow valve is also open. There has to be time for just being in and with a place, alone and quiet and without purpose. There has to be time in which the slow things can be allowed to happen.
- That they lie when they say that ‘the mind never shuts up’. I know for an absolute fact, that is not true. The mind will quieten of its own accord, if we just let it, if we stop being afraid of the silence.
I am planning to go back to that quiet place, and forward to other ones. I still have more to learn.
