I am returned. With a handful of change. From weeks of meandering along different paths. Some literal and some less so. Two pound coin. One pound coin. Fifty pence piece. Still, love, a, fifty, pence, piece. Twenty, ten, five and one pence coins. No two pence coins, as it happens. One euro coin. Fifty cent coins. Twenty, ten and five cent coins. A single, diminutive one cent coin. One cent! Close to nothing. So many shapes, colours, sizes and kinds of change. Representing something that has changed. Changed hands. Changed location. Changed form.
This little collection of parts were gathered and carried with me and now sit here, more as a reminder, a keep sake, a memento of the changes in me. The inevitable change that comes with living and in this case travelling. I am returned but I am not the same.
A-handful-of-change – Gavin-Birchall
An opportunity arose in our twin worlds and a calling to walk became a plan to walk. We chose to start from our front door. No better place to start. We set off for the train station with heavy packs and arrived near the source of the River Ribble some hours later. Some days later we had found a whole new world of experiences that come along when moving through a landscape, together, on foot. Winding our way along the rivercourse we walked home. We walked each other home. At least a good proportion of the distance before our usual lives needed us back. The change was profound, immense and, for me at least, everything.
In the heat of this Summer another adventure soon arrived. A solo journey into community and the mountains of the Sistema Central in Spain. Thirty or so of us precipitated at an old country Palacio with countless acres of wooded mountainside. Four foot thick walls, a covered courtyard and an antique pool shared with whatever chose to live there kept us cool as the air burned. This place was thick with change but soft and of a shimmering, magical kind. No agenda, just three meals a day and seeing what emerged. It is astonishing, the change that can happen when we stop trying to orchestrate and control everything. Deep, warm, liquid, flaxen, immersive, revolutionary change. I have not yet fully resurfaced. I doubt I ever will.
Finally, for now, a family holiday to a small villa on another wooded hillside in the Tuscan hills. A car big enough for our oversized suitcases and a little too big for the tiny, winding roads. Wildlife literally spilling and thrilling over, under and on every surface. Occasional visits by white-knuckle car or snake-infested foot to medieval hilltop villages and an accidental visit to a Catholic hermitage for candle-lit, cliff-cut, cave meditation jewelled the baggy time on the hillside. The slowest, most delicious, days of pristine togetherness unfolded and felt like they would never end. But they did, as all things do, and we all returned. We are not the same.
Trips to Bristol to visit the University open day and to Cambridge to attend a meeting about global system change were shorter but no less reshaping. Each in their own way. Each with their own moulding hands. Hands full of change.
What wonder and gift these days are and how humbly grateful I am that this is my experience in a world offering every manner of joy and tragedy.
These weeks have felt endless. Endless because of the change. The change that wasn’t forced and didn’t need encouraging, managing or trimming. Just experiencing. They have felt like more lived evidence that time isn’t time at all. It is how we notice change. Such a huge amount of change in what, when we look at clocks and calendars, seems a very short space of time. Participating in life through our bodies with movement and sensations helps us notice change and expand our sense of experience and duration. Travel is a particularly powerful way to participate. It involves movement but more than that it is encounter with the unfamiliar. Specifically and deliberately so, to greater or lesser extents. Even if we travel along the same route more than once, the experience will be different. We are required then to fully and dramatically engage with an understanding of the world that we have built up and recorded to that point. Fresh information challenges and inevitably reforms what we thought we knew. Reforms us in the process. The novelty of travel removes us from the known and invites us into the unknown and we are back, we are there, we are at the raw, rolling frontier of our experience again and we can’t ignore it in preference of what we think we know. We have to be present. We have to be present in our life. We are again present to life.
I am returned. To a slower pace of change. To the more familiar. With a handful of change. Which itself represents actual change. At some point, in some way, somewhere on earth, something of value to us was changed and we imagined capturing that to bring about the presence of these coins. Stored value. Everything is change. Even that which appears static.
I feel like the loose change the Universe has jangling about in its pocket. What a joy to jangle.