Sometimes I imagine my life as a drystone wall that runs along lanes and over moors and fells. It branches off, diverts, joins, divides, remains interlinked with other walls. Who is to say where one such wall ends and another begins? I imagine how strong this wall is, how stable it is, how it weathers whatever is thrown at it.
Of course it crumbles in places, individual stones fall away, gaps appear, slumps and slippages, but the wall remains and, unlike Humpty Dumpty, it can be put together again. The pieces can be collected and re-inserted into the whole. When we lose a part of what we think of as our life, it is not necessarily forever…it may just have slipped to our feet and be waiting to be picked up again. We should look closely before we lament its passing.
Then again, maybe not all of the stones that have slipped out of my wall will be re-used.
Unlike other types of construction, the bricks and mortar of city dwellings, the drystone wall is not fixed. It is infinitely flexible. For something made of stone it is remarkably organic. It can grow and recede and yet still remain undeniably itself. I am not a wall of brick or concrete. I am not a defensive structure or a prohibitive one. When I see my life as a wall, a drystone wall, I see it as a kind of river that snakes through the countryside, containing, protecting, delineating, but never being impassable or impermeable.
Go and look and such walls and you will see how they gather unto them mosses and lichen; in places they hold soil and allow plants and flowers a bedding down. Go see them in the wet days and behold how they glisten with all the colours of their many stones. Go see them in the dry and see their settling and waiting and all-is-well-ness, even in their dullness. They stand. They protect. They wait. And they slither across the land, an ancient serpent, arrested in motion. Because we do not see over such long timescales, as such walls are built and change and meander, they seem fixed.
But are not.
Just as the shape of a life seems fixed, but is not.
The shape of my life, like the shape of my imagined drystone wall, has been built by eye, not by measuring rod. It has evolved and grown in response to the shape of the stones that were to hand. Those stones were fitted in, or discarded to wait a time when maybe they might be relevant. They were rarely chopped or broken, merely turned and considered, tried, and used or reserved. Such are the experiences of my life. Not all fit into the spaces. Some were let go, or got washed away or carried away, or just left to be taken by the land at my feet. Some remain there, waiting in readiness for the moment when they are exactly what I need to remember, to put back in place.
Likewise, when repairs are necessary, when my life fractures, tumbles, or sheds a little of its solidity, then the making good is also done via the look and touch and feel method, the experiential, the experimental method. The original builders of my life, those who took the stones and laid them upon the land that was my birthplace, my home, my family, who touched and turned things so they could be integrated into the person I became, they are mostly gone now. Gone from the world largely, gone from my everyday most certainly.
The builders who come afterward – and we may think of these builders as our teachers, our friends, our significant others, our circle, our tribe – the builders of this day see things differently. No stone will be put back into the exact place it fell from. All of the still-standing stones have also shifted in their seats, settled, moved, been eroded, or grown coats of green and gold. All of my former life still stands upon my landscape, but it is not what it was conceived to be. It grows old. Slowly. It becomes an amalgamation, an aggregation.
We build a wall and it settles into the land and becomes itself. We give birth to a child and it walks across the land and becomes itself. There is no difference really.
