As the week continues, the weather doesn't improve, and neither does my practice, but I am reminding myself that the first rule of any discipline is to consistently show up.
Day 4: Still raining. I while away a morning taking a train ride to look at the scenery. Call it an age thing, or an unfitness thing, or just a nothing-to-prove-anymore thing, but I’m really not up for gearing up to head out into four or five hours of cold and rain. I came up to Scotland with only one walk on my ‘want to do’ list and even that one is likely to remain un-ticked. Let’s call it an excuse to come back up this way some other time.
One of the lessons I recall from The Forest Monk is this: it is not about how efficiently we can do this, it is about how we will all feel afterwards.
The question, then, is this: do I want to do this particular walk, this particular week, sufficiently to spend not only the walk itself, but a couple of hours after it, out in the cold and the wet? How will I feel ‘after’ if I do that? How will I feel ‘after’ if I just bank it for another month, another year? Today, I don’t try to answer those questions.
Instead, I wait for a little break in the weather and head down to the cemetery. I’m not hunting out graves, I just have a fascination for funerary art. I find stories for another place. I pause to look at the view. Many of these buried were fisherfolk, they’d have headed out to sea, and yet they’re lain to rest looking down towards the loch, not out towards the ocean. Perhaps they’re lain looking
homewards.
I continue down to the shore and follow the road.
The rain returns. I take cover under the birches where the small boats shelter. "Why not here?" I think, as the shower becomes real rain, and all the skies darken. Why not on this scrap of a bay, under the trees?
The answer turns out to be: too small a space, too shifting the pebbles underfoot, too many trees to fall over and bump into.
The lesson is: patience. I wait…and watch the swifts swooping almost to the surface of the loch, feeding on the wing, dancing in the rain, one or the other, maybe both. I call them swifts; they may be martins. I give up trying to capture a moment of them in flight for later identification and decide I don’t care what they are, I only care that they are, and they are here, and delightful, going about their business with no thought of me.
The lesson is: trust the process. Even as I have that thought, I look into the wind and see the sky brightening over that way. I step out into the still falling rain, and trust that it will now, shortly, give over. I find a scrap of a beach, a scrubby patch of sand and weed and rocks…and with my waterproofs still fastened, notebook and camera weighing me down, I go through the moves.
My practice is as scrappy as the beach. I stumble and fall into transitions. I’m upright when I should be low. But I am smiling. I repulse monkeys backing uphill towards the trees, and wave hands in clouds sliding down to the water’s edge. A young family, bundled against the rain, watch from the jetty too far away for me to hear any comment. If I get lost, then I fudge it, I do not pause, do not start over.
I still have a weather eye on the sky wanting the rain to stop.
It does, a little while after I give up and decide to head back to the cottage.
Day 5: We’re approaching the Full Moon. Perhaps that’s why the jelly fish were swarming. Such a swarm is called a bloom, which sounds like a beautiful thing – but for the creatures themselves
it is a dangerous thing. I don’t know whether it was the full moon, or whether the high tide was the problem, or the westerly wind that blew strong enough to uproot a tree on my route down to the beach…but the moon jelly fish, Aurelia Aurita, swarmed too close in shore. Hundreds of them were left behind by the receding tide.
They are eerie on the beach. Alien. Looking like they might yet survive.
A couple of blue Cyanea Lamarkii had washed up with them, and one (possible) Cyanea Capillata had followed them in, either trusting their sense of food-source, or hunting them. Can a thing without a brain hunt? Or have we just not fully understood what a 'brain’ actually is? The Capillata was small, maybe young, or maybe just under-fed in these cold and straitened waters.
It was a sad beach…and the first sunshine in days did little to change that. I was watching where I put my feet, rather than looking to the sky.
Even so, I found a white-sand cove, north of the village. Tree-lined. Kelp-held. Someone had left a knife behind. Perhaps the one they had used to draw the balanced seesaw, with figures so crudely drawn that I wondered why I saw them as clearly male and female.
I deliberately faced south, and stood to settle. This is my North. No matter how many times I repeated the formula, the magnetometer in my skull or my soul, whichever, rebelled and reminded me otherwise and I had to concede the compromise: this is my North…for now.
The sand was firm underfoot. The waves were too distant to hear. The sun was warm on skin too infrequently bared this week. I faltered less often, for all I had one eye on the incoming tide.
My learning this week has been a simple reinforcement of what I already knew: how uncertain I am of my balance and my footing.
It is one thing to practice on firm decking or internal floors, but life is lived outside on shifting sands
and boggy hill-sides. I’ve always known that once I have the sequence more-or-less embedded, I will only then start to go deeper…but I had thought the deeper was about the philosophy of the Family, the embedded essence of the Form and its meanings. I am beginning to understand that deeper is also deeper into self, into the place in our own life, of whatever it is we are learning…and how we can carry it on our own shifting sands and uncertain hills.
