It was the day after I had walked around the bay to cross the causeway and climb up to what is no longer a monastery. I thought that after that day, I wanted to sit in the sun with my pen to the page. It turned out that what I really wanted to do was walk through the shallows for a couple of miles, taking pictures of seaweed.
When I shared this thought with friends through what passes for postcards these days, I added the notion that it probably tells you all you need to know about me. If it does, you can stop reading here.
In fact, it opened up new lines of enquiry – about myself, and about seaweed. I’ll start with the weed. I’m sure I’m not the only person who remembers, as a child, actually being frightened of seaweed. I can remember my brother picking up handfuls of the stuff to throw at me – and me running away screaming. There’s a strangeness right there, because he was the one who – given the choice – would be in the dinghy or a kayak, close to the water, but above it, whereas I was always the one who wanted to be chest-deep in it. Safe enough to touch bottom, because I know enough about the sea to be wary, but deep enough to swim. I was always willing to be in waters rough enough to throw me over, provided they were calm enough to give me time to stand up again. I'd not mind them cold enough to take my breath away, provided they were warm enough to let me catch it back again.
I have always loved being in the water, but I always had – and by "always" I mean until very recently, I am only just now dealing with this ‘thing’ – always had a ‘thing’ about seaweed. It’s always been something I did not want to walk over on the beach, something that I would avoid in the water, something that at times would actually stop me going into the water altogether. Why?
Honestly, I have no idea. I walk barefoot on the earth, on the grass. I hack my way through paths overgrown with brambles even it if means I come out bleeding. I stroke moss (which come to think of it might not be very good for the moss). I hug trees. I stoop to smell flowers, and pick them where they are abundant. I am fascinated by lichen and fungi. And yet, for a long time, I have felt myself repulsed by seaweed.
Repulsed is possibly a better word than frightened. I don’t think I ever thought the weed my brother was about to fling would do me harm. I was just disgusted by it and did not want it touching my skin. It has been a work of consciousness to get over that.
I might even call it spiritual growth. The work of deepening my connection with the planet includes questioning all of my pre-held mindsets. This includes learning to like the taste of things, I thought I didn't. Trying to break through this belief that I have lost my sense of smell. Re-aligning my relationship with the dark. And addressing the question: “why don’t I like seaweed?”
Having failed to come up with an answer to that question, I decided upon a different approach. I asked a different question: "how can I get to like seaweed?”
My starting point was the mantra “It is just another plant.” Further down the line I might find out that this is not strictly true, so please don’t write in, I’ll figure it out. For now, “it is just another plant, not unlike grass or moss,” I told myself as I walked into the shallows. I did this often enough to start believing it.
Confession time: I still haven’t got to the point of wanting to pick up handfuls of it and take it home, but maybe that’s a good thing. I have, however, got to the point where I will go into the weed-strewn sea and that’s definitely a good thing. More than that, I have got to the point where I am curious about sea weed.
I recognise that beyond bladderwrack and kelp, I have no reference points – and I want to learn. I want to know what I am looking at.*
So I have started to look. I hope that this will lead me to looking more closely and understanding the what and why of different weeds – but I rein in my enthusiasm and recognise that I have similar yearnings with regard to flowers and rocks and lichens and fungi – and I am late to these endeavours. There are times where I think that in another life I will be a botanist.
In the meantime, however, I can and will look more closely and photograph the beauty that I find.
That’s the first step in my seaweed journey. On a day when I intended to just sit on the sand, I was called to the water's edge and then I had no choice. I needed to walk among them and take photographs, because of how beautiful they are - and how alien.
While I tell myself they are “just plants”, there is another part of my brain telling me otherwise, namely that they are special and mystical and layered and entwined with the unknown stories of the sea. Some of them look more like stranded creatures, aliens screaming for whatever they should be breathing instead of air. I see shapes that look like faces.
To be honest, I want them to be more than land-based plants. I want to get used to walking and swimming among them, but I also want them to remain something ‘other’.
~
I stop by the first because it looks like an outpost of kelp forest. In these waters, out there, is a drowned land forest. Closer in and still alive is a kelp wood. I wonder if trees are re-born as kelp.
Another looks like a mutation of squid, with a silent scream.
Long strands of mermaid hair lie dark green upon the sand.
Floating lettuce leaves are the colour of clearest emerald.
Delicate strands of salted rosemary, maybe.
Coral weed, dead and bleached, if that is what it is, and what happens when it dies. An echo of haw-frost growing on dead branches. A presentiment of a white crab skeleton that I find later, more translucent.
I’m reminded of Jackee Holder telling me these things are water altars. Each scattering an embroidery on the fabric of the sand.
~
There’s more investigative work to do to find out what I looked at.
There’s more creative work to do to share the beauty of the images that delighted me, and kept me walking through the waters all the way back to St Michael’s Mount. I had been there the day before, and walking the causeway barefoot through the water was the deepest part of my experience. At the time I thought that pilgrim feeling was to do with walking to the monastery, completing the path barefoot, completing it in water, the tide not yet out.
Now I wonder. We always think of pilgrimage sites as destinations. What if that is not the point? What if they are meant to be starting points?
If that were so, my pilgrimage started at the landward end of the causeway, the previous day. I walked the old stones, some of them recently relayed, through the water of an outgoing tide. I stopped to breathe in the beauty of the light and the water and how the two danced over the
road. I wandered round the island, not enjoying it because of the numbers of people and the noise they made. I sat for a while looking out to sea. I spent time with the flowers in the precipitous gardens, and then I walked back slowly on the sand.
My mind was empty, when I would have expected it to be full. And the following day, when I thought I wanted to write, I didn’t, I wanted to walk back the other way and really look at what was at my feet.
I think the second day, the seaweed day, was the closer to pilgrimage. Part of my wider, deeper, more encompassing Camino.
~
They say the earth-forest is still there beneath the waters, that divers find trees still rooted in the sand. They say the land is tilting in a way that means our island will sink to the east, rising on its western shores. Perhaps the forest will come back to the surface, perhaps trees will prove to be even more formidable than we already know. Or maybe not, but if it does, what of the seaweed then?
