One week is not enough, especially when it has been three years in the waiting. Hopefully, I will have longer next year. I am a believer in the power of words and so I can’t help but feel that there is significance in the fact that so often I refer to Guernsey simply as “the island”.
I have no claim upon it. It is not my homeland. I don’t have aspirations to move there permanently. And yet there is a sense in which it claims me: a sense in which it is my island. I haven’t quite worked that out yet. All I know is that I get excited about getting there, it feels like home when I arrive, I do not want to leave at the end of my visit, and as soon as I land back in my real life I start
planning my next trip.
Guernsey was where I went at the intersection between my old life and my new one. It was where I went again a year later to fully reflect on where I was and where I wanted to go, who I had been, who I was, and who I wanted to become. It was where I intended to go the following year to… to do who knows what, because in the meantime the world went mad and no-one was going anywhere.
I had another trip to somewhere much further afield in planning at that time, one that is still on the books, but even now I’m not sure I will take it, for a whole number of reasons. The world has changed since I booked it. I have changed since I booked it. But somehow those things didn’t impact the same way on my long-awaited return to the island.
This jaunt had been a long time coming, and I have changed in the interim. Whatever I had intended this trip to be when I booked it, in the interlude it had morphed (in my head) into being a ‘writing retreat’. I wasn’t going in order to explore, or to introspect, or to recover, or to walk, swim, read, eat. I was going in order to write. Not even to research, but just to be, and to write whatever came up.
However, the island has its own ideas about what we need from it. It would seem that writing was a little lower down the agenda that I had thought.
I did write, but mostly fragments that will or will not become other things. Some are already finding their shape; others are just laughing me off the page. I figure that if F Scott Fitzgerald could write for the bin, then so can I. And at least I am not self-censoring enough to care. There are things that will never see the light of day, but that were nevertheless fun to write. There are things that I like just because of what they teach me about me, and No, I’m not sharing those either. That’s the thing about writing…not all of it is meant to be shared. I agree that no-one writes without the hope that it will some day be read, but some of what we write we kind of hope won’t be read until long after we’re past the point of being embarrassed by it. And by “it” in that sentence I probably mean the nature of the thoughts just as much as the quality of the way we express them.
Back on the island, what I needed this time, it seems, was indeed to swim and to walk. I needed to get out of my head and into my body. Something I am regularly told by one of my teachers. There is a time to think, and a time to move. Don’t confuse the two.
So I swam. I swam in the pool, for exercise, for technique and breathing practice; I swam in the pool for getting up and getting going in the mornings, for reinforcing the home methodology and ritual. And then I swam in the sea for meditation and healing and being held by the world. I swam in the sea for being with seaweed and gulls and rising cliffs and the light on the water. I swam in the sea for memory.
And I walked. Every day.
I remember a little while ago saying I wanted to walk “more and differently”. That was what the island brought me back to. Walking as in strolling rather than hiking. Walking without a route in mind. Walking down a lane because I couldn’t remember where it led, and then finding out that the reason for not remembering was that I’d never known, never walked down that road before, for
all it was so close to home.
I walked every day. I walked for hours. But if you measured it on the map, you’d find I didn’t really walk very far. And never very far from base. In fact, I stayed closer to ‘home’ this time than on either of the previous occasions. This was walking as a modality, a way of being rather than a way of achieving.
I got lost, a lot.
Well, maybe not “lost” as such. It’s a small island. You cannot, actually, in the true sense of the word, become lost. At all times I could have shown you on a map where I was within a few hundred yards of my ground position. Except: I didn’thave a map, or a compass, and the sea light shone from all directions and I had no idea of how to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. I kept coming upon roads that I knew and expected to emerge onto, but from an unexpected direction. Lanes circled back on themselves, and I lost my bearings. A short walk rambled for a couple of hours or so. I fell upon remembered by-ways. And saw familiar sights from unfamiliar angles. And didn’t find the ones that, vaguely, I thought I might be looking for.
I walked every day. I walked for hours. I didn’t really go anywhere.
But I have been drawn back into island life, into the warmth of its stone walls, the labyrinth of its lanes, the embrace of its people. I have been drawn back into its courtesy, the way traffic pauses to let you cross the road, the smiles and helloes of strangers, the scattered light, the sound of
night-rain, and the cloudscapes of morning. I have been drawn back into its stillness. I have been drawn back into a place with a reputation for being ‘expensive’ but that still knows how to offer produce at the road-side with an honesty box for payment, or for swaps. I have been drawn back into the knowledge that I might be woken at 6:30am by a tourist plane landing, but I can go a
whole week without hearing a siren of police, fire or ambulance. I have been drawn back into quiet coves, where all you can here is the water.
And at the end of a week of it, I knew I needed more of the same.
I have been back to the island three times now, and I still have not ventured to its northern shores. I haven’t sat on its western beaches at sunset. I haven’t swum in the rebuilt Victorian bathing pools. I haven’t eaten in a single restaurant. I haven’t bought a piece of local art. I haven’t walked the whole round-the-island path. I have been into all of the museums. I don’t know a fraction of the place’s history. Or the people’s. I don’t yet know its folk tales, or sea shanties, or patois.
And I haven’t yet gone down to the harbour, got on a boat, and set sail for its neighbours, which was one of the things I set out to do on that first trip several years ago, before life changed.
There is part of me that wonders if I don’t do these things, simply to give myself an excuse to return.
As if Ineeded one.
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