Day 6: A tumultuous sky had hunkered low over the waters between Mallaig and the islands. This was the final day on which my one planned walk of the week might have happened. I wasn’t optimistic enough, or motivated enough, to make it so. Instead I watched the ferry plying waters that were calmer than the clouds above them, and wondered how long it would take me, if I were to settle here (which I won’t), to learn how to read those skies.
Later in the day, I’m back in Morar, and decide to find my way to the opposite shore of the river, to the fabled silver sands. The rain has come and gone, in fits and spits. The sun sneaks in and out. Fickle weather that cannot make up its mind.
The sands, when I reach them, are not as deserted as my brother remembered. Despite all the signs that say this is not a camp site, there are people enough who beg to differ. Scotland has different rules to England, though, and wild camping is not quite so much frowned upon, if it’s done responsibly.
A couple are doing hand-stands to amuse their children.
A man is building a tower of balanced stones. He had got to shoulder high with it. I liked that, but when I came back it had fallen away and left no trace.
The sands are silica, silver in the light. Wind-blown into intricate patterns. There are jelly fish here too, though not so many, and different ones: large, opaque. Just as the crabs are also larger, and red, whereas on the Morar shore they were tiny and pale.
The river has sculpted coves, and out towards the breaking waves, I have my pick of them. The most beautiful, I decide, I cannot risk, for I don’t know how fast the sea runs here. It’s on the flood and I have seen how there are banks and channels. I know from Norfolk to respect the water and its ways.
I find another space. Soft sand and a view across the wide expanse that will very soon again fill with the sea. The earth’s own Yinyang flow, holding and releasing, giving and taking.
To have that one eye on the rising tide, is to fail to concentrate. Allowing, once more, the external to intrude upon the internal, to hamper intention. And yet, I respect the tidal waters, ancestors to us all.
My orientation is good today. I have selected true north as my north. Still the land-shape upsets my balance. My mind is as fickle as the sky. I want to swim, but it is cold and wet and there are jelly fish that may or may not sting. I stay out of the shallows, but feel their pull. I am only a few moves into the Form before I lose my way.
Start again.
A hooded figure walks past, determined, back-upstream from the sea’s edge. She is masked against the world. Against whatever germs she fears may be swimming in this salt-cleaned air. I pity her loneliness and her fear, because both would be assuaged if she would but open her self (body if not mind) to this space, to these winds, this spitty-spatty half-hearted rain.
I look into that mirror and take my own advice. Settle. Recommence. Open to what is.
Of course I am off-balance, but that seems to matter so much less now. I simply reclaim my footing, pause, and go on from there.
And I breathe in the sea and the rain and the sky. Which, sometimes, might just be the whole point of the exercise.
Day 7: Finally, the sun comes out…and I’m leaving. Before catching the first of my trains back south, I look upon the station carpark and find people actually using it to park their cars and bikes and minibuses in. In truth it’s not that flat anyway. It would be deceptive. So, on this last day, I am cramming my practice into limited time and even more limited space: the tiny garden of the cottage that has been my home for the week.
The grass is rough, the ground uneven. There are bushes to negotiate and the path and the gravel and the picnic bench. I remind myself that life is full of obstacles. We can allow ourselves to be discouraged by them, to be put off from our intentions, or we can remove them, or we can work around them.
Today, I work around. I talk myself through the process, silently, because there are people about. I focus, until my host for the week wanders over to say farewell – and to apologise for the umpteenth time for the weather. He had been praying for rain, he told me, because it had been a dry May, the burns were empty, the sheep were struggling. I joked that the problem was he hadn’t known when to stop with the praying, because now they have too much water rushing down off the hills, it’s causing different problems.
The truth is none of us ever know when to stop with our asking for things. We forget that there is the interlude between the asking and the receiving. Ask. Trust. Receive. That is the order of things. The middle step is omitted at our peril. If we keep on asking, then the receiving may be greater or other than we hoped.
When I’m left alone, I simply go through the steps. This is body-work only. I am not ‘feeling’ flow or anything of that sort. I am simply showing up, doing a little, because as my teacher often reminds me: a little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.
It counts. It gets me my tick on the calendar. The week has been a strange one. Not what I had hoped for and yet, in other ways, possibly a little bit more than I had anticipated. I did not come with any expectation of taking my practice down to the river or out onto the beaches. I am pleased that I have. I know that I have not progressed this week. If anything the opposite might be true. But I have shown up every day and that matters. I haven't done the one thing I came to do, but I think I have done the thing I much more needed to do, which was simply to stop for a while and just be in an unfamiliar place, taking it as it is.
