On my last full day on the island last year, I had intended to go down to my altar at Jerbourg point. It didn’t work out that way. I got as far as the top of the steps before realising that I’d left my walking pole behind. I looked at the drop and wondered whether I was up to risking it unaided, and decided I wasn’t. I thought about going back to the apartment, then retracing my steps but there was something “insistent” about that approach which didn’t sit well with island life. Island mentality told me: ok, do something else.
As it turned out, the something else also involved heading back to base briefly, but not to get the pole. Instead I changed into my swim-kit, packed a different bag and headed down to the beach.
To be specific, I walked down to my favourite cove at Fermain Bay. It was empty. The tide was low enough, only three or four people on the beach, only a couple of boats at anchor. I made a note of that, because that September had been hot and sunny and every beach was still crowded, every
bay full of sailing boats. This quieter incarnation was closer to my memories of visits in other years.
Memory and change were my starting points for that day, just under a year ago. I thought back to my first visit, and how pleased I was to find that rock formation that looked like an altar, or a throne. I have been back to it on subsequent visits, but not that one. Last year I only looked at it from above. I’m back again, but I have no idea what I’m going to do this year.
The things I needed six years ago are not what I need now.
Maybe even: what I needed twelve months ago, is not what I need now.
I do still clearly remember the first year, sitting with my back against that rock reading Viktor Frankl, and coming to the conclusion that searching for meaning is the mistake we make. Our lives only have the meaning we choose to give them, the meaning we create. It isn’t something waiting out there for us to find. It is something in here waiting for us to release it. At the time, back in 2018, that was a life-anchoring insight.
Anchoring because I was adrift – and didn’t yet know just how badly – or how much effort it would take to regain my course. Nor that I would, in fact, plot a completely different one.
Six years is a long-enough time in anyone’s life for everything to change. If I had a plan back then, in the summer of 2018, I am fairly sure it did not involve me returning here every year that I could manage. I hadn’t then discovered Del Mar, my now regular haunt. I hadn’t figured out that I was thoroughly bored with my corporate existence, that I no longer had anything to prove in that world, not even to myself. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what the answer was to the simple questions: What now? What next?
I came back a year later and spent a lot of time answering a lot of internal questions, most of which ultimately boiled down to that fundamental one: “what now?”. I called it taking stock. I remember writing every afternoon. I still have those notes somewhere. All the monotonous detail of who I thought I was, where I thought I wanted to go, and how on earth I was supposed to set about getting there.
I still didn’t know. So I planned to come back and try again, but then the world went mad and no-one was going anywhere. It would be three years before I could get back here. Three years in which I started living my way into the questions even if I wasn’t really finding any definitive answers. I read somewhere recently, that that is precisely what we should do: live the questions, rather than trying so hard to find the answers.
As soon as the world started finding its feet again, I came back. That would be 2022. Then last year, I came again. And now…here I am.
The island itself has become an anchor for me. I find it interesting that I use the word ‘anchor’ rather than refuge or haven. For all I talk about these annual pilgrimages as ‘writing retreats’, I’m not sure that’s strictly true. It does feel more like anchorage.
If I were a land creature I would talk about rooting, grounding, earthing.
As a water creature, what I need is the ability to anchor – it is the same thing – but different – as sturdy and sure – but less permanent. An anchor is thrown into the water, to grab hold of the land: it is a plea for help: it says: let me stay afloat, and let me sail away again, but please, just for now, hold me still.
I am Wood Water – so I need both. I need that rooted place, where I know I am permanently held. And I also need that anchored place, where I am held for a while and will then be released.
I say that Guernsey has become my anchorage as if it is and will be the only one. I am not sure of that. St Mary’s held me just as confidently. There are other islands I want to explore. But I suspect, that this will remain my home port…the place I will always want to come back to.
People ask what it is about the place that keeps drawing me back. I do not know.
I keep telling myself that this is a writing retreat, that I am coming here to write. I am beginning to suspect that it is just a retreat, that I come here to recover.
The first time, I was newly bereaved and I poured my heart out into my journals.
The second time, I was stock-taking, trying to figure out whether I’d moved on and if not how to do so.
The third time…I don’t know what I did.
Last time, I know walked further and wrote less. I mostly wrote about the walk routes: very little philosophical thought and virtually no poetry.
So here I am again. People are still asking me why, and I still cannot tell them. Because I do not know. Maybe it is something different each time. Maybe, I am different each time I come and I ask something different of this place. Maybe this will continue until I have nothing left to ask, or it has nothing left to give. Maybe. Maybe not.
I suppose I intended to finish my circumnavigation of the island. I suppose I expected the weather to be as good as it was last year. I suppose I had some kind of plan about this actually turning into a ‘writing retreat’ this year.
I suppose a lot of things that turn out not to be true. But who knows? I’m writing this at the beginning. And whatever I thought I might do this time – and believe me my journal is full of all the things I want to / could do / should do / maybe, but ifs – having landed and breathed in the salt air and spent a night in a familiar space, a night in which I hardly slept at all…I’m listening deeply.
I am literally going to play this one by ear. Take each day as it speaks to me.
I didn’t write up the last leg of my unfinished round-island walk. It sits in my draft folder, two paragraphs in. And the gremlin on my shoulder is telling me I need to walk that bit of the route again, so that I can write it out.
And only then can I continue round the coast…and you know what? Let’s just say: maybe not.
This is a different year. And we have different weather. And I think that, again, I am a different person. I think this year I really do want to actually devote a lot more time to writing.
Even if I don’t know what I’m trying to write. Even if all I’m doing is putting words on the page by way of practicing how to string them together.
The universe appears to agree with me. I went to bed early last night. When I couldn’t sleep, I drug out the maps and guide books and worked out plans for the first few days, and second-guessed why they’d be tricky. All that did was fill my head with ifs and buts and maybes. How exactly was that supposed to help me to sleep?
I poured another glass of wine, cut off a chunk of carrot (hey! We midnight-snack on what is actually in the fridge!) and read a few more chapters of a novel about elephants and grieving and memory and ghosts and being abandoned. That didn’t help my sleeping either.
I woke up to torrential rain just after 6a.m. Thunder. Lightning.
Eventually, I figured returning to sleep was not a thing today, so I found the alcove where I can sit outside to write, even in that weather. I made coffee. I picked up my pen.
I listened to the silence of the morning. Watched the trees breathing cloud.
The caretaker came to uncover the pool. There was a sepulchral silence still, so he whispered ‘hello’ and silently set about his daily cleaning, netting away the occasional fallen leaf or dead insect, scrub-brushing the floor of the pool. He smilingly shrugged at the weather, and I whispered back that it was beautiful anyway.
I could hear the grumpy waking of children in the apartment across the way.
In the distance, the solitary note of harbour fog horn. When the rain started to clear, the cloud came down below roof level. Shrouding. Damp.
It would be much later in the day that I realised this was how those cliff-hanging trees live: they drink directly from the sky. The can hold onto the rocks and allow the rock-soil to support other smaller plants, while they sup clouds, drink in sunlight that doesn’t reach the ground
The next squall rode in. I watched the rain dancing on the surface of the swimming pool.
After a while, I recognised that there are things that pull me into something akin to meditation. They take me out of my momentary self, and grant me focus on something mesmeric. Waterfalls. Snow falling. Waves on the beach. Today, it was rain creating pool-splashes and interlocking ripples on the surface of a swimming pool.
If I were a better poet I could distil it into words. I’m not. I can’t. Put simply: I sat under the over-hang, hugging a large mug of half-cold coffee as a sheet of rain moved across this space, and paused to tap-dance on the deep blue water of a small swimming pool.
In a strange way, it felt like a welcome. It felt like the island had stopped needing to pretend for me…that it was saying Ok, you want to keep coming back, you take me as I am.
I do. I will.
As the day wore on, I abandoned whatever half-backed plans I came up with in the unslept hours and did the only important thing. I walked down to Fermain Bay. And I walked into the sea. And I swam.
And then I knew I was home.
