Carrying on with the theme of change that has suffused my words in recent times we venture here into a hot, arid land. A handful of change carries more than one story and this is the second of three tales about condensed change last Summer.
Know that it was adventure, it was space and it was hot. Very, very hot. Enough to melt a Celt. An old Palacio nestled on the side of a hill, with its back to the wilderness and its heart literally made of the Sistema Central mountains. Just outside Avila in Spain, at a little over 1,000m altitude it might have been cool on other days, but during the three days we spent, expanding into the endless sky and countless trees, the atmosphere had other ideas.
I mention the heat because despite being invisible, insubstantial and in all but one way, extrasensory it was a massive presence for me. By day three, whether it was the heat or the landscape, or a series of fortunate events, I was close to collapse. This was condensed change that was not easy on the body. But it was worthwhile.
One of the loose ideas circling the group who had gathered there was that this visit could involve being ‘closer in and further out’. Closer in is always a feature of our days together and finding new ways to explore what that means is always present. How we could do that by being further out was one of those new ways. With 650 hectares to explore there was a lot of further out to venture into.
Somewhere along the way, it is hard to recall where ideas begin and end when at the Palacio, someone suggested a sunrise walk in the wooded hills that stretched beyond sight behind the stone walls of the homestead. Avoiding the furnace of the day.
Stunned-into-silence – Not-this-image – Gavin-Birchall
After an evening of eating and talking in the way that Spanish air brings forth and drumming on the side of the hill, lit only by starlight, my body fell into the canvas tent that was home for these few days. A second night of less sleep than I am fond of followed.
Nevertheless, waking very early to precede the sun, I crept as best as I could, out of bed, into my clothes and through the heavy zip separating inside from outside. Leaving my tent mates to their slumber, a new and fresh and serene world met me as I stood, rising through layers of sleep.
S i l e n c e.
No others seemed to be stirring. As a specifically un-organised idea, there was no guarantee I would have company on this walk. I wandered to the front of the Palacio.
I waited.
A companion appeared. The one, who now that they were there, I remembered suggested the whole endeavour. Of course they did. A walking, talking quantum fluctuation. Possibility made flesh and remade as possibility again. Before my eyes. Often.
As we prepared to depart, with few words spoken, a third member of our party arrived. Stepping out of the courtyard, through the grand old doors they came. Always one to seek and to find the full extent of experience. Courageous enough to test where the edges are and play with them. Whispered mornings dissolved in the vastness of the pre-dawn and told us that our usual, animated conversation was not for this occasion.
Stunned-into-silence – Nor-this-image – Gavin-Birchall
We set off. We walked. Gently and steadily. Along the bottom of the hill. A track that led away from the huddle of buildings and took us elsewhere. There was enough light to navigate by and enough darkness to appreciate it. We moved but there was great stillness. We didn’t speak. Each of us, without conferring, understanding that this was a ramble without words.
Rising around the back of the hill we were as deepening wilderness. The sky grew lighter. It seemed to grow higher and wider. Our footsteps the only sound as our surprised but willing bodies brought us towards the sunrise.
For some time we continued. I had no watch. I did not look at the phone I carried. The time didn’t matter.
With what felt like a handful of kilometres in my body we arrived at a flat plateau. Cow bells rang in the distance and early birds began to call. We paused. A sense that the world was turning towards new light and that it was about to shine.
We stood still. The world rotated. There was nothing else to be done. Then the light of our star broke the surface of dawn and the world was remade.
I felt the spin of earth and I was the same. The silence of before was now full of harmony and richness and deeper still.
The moment stretched and elongated and us three witnessed, side by side, without voice, our celestial nature.
We gave no hyperbolic commentary. We watched, we felt, we knew, and after being filled, we continued.
Further down the path. One foot in front of the other.
Before the sunrise, walk with wonder. After the sunrise, walk with wonder.
Homewards bound now. To the nurturing familiarity of the courtyard and hot drinks and our gathering friends.
I had lingered at sunrise for a last few photons, so my companions were a little further along. It was then that I turned my head again to gaze at the light. Between the trees and across the shrubs to the horizon of folding hills.
There something met me that I was not expecting. A sight and all else besides. No words can transmit it from my heart to yours. Yet you know it already. My body stilled as it faced into the view. I was no longer volitional. I was wholly taken by a view of such beauty that I was actually, literally stunned. Unable to move, respond or turn away.
Stunned-into-silence – Nope – Gavin-Birchall
My eyes had happened upon such elemental loveliness amidst the waving grasses, trees and vapours of the early Spanish morning that I knew nothing else was needed. I stopped. Everything stopped. Fear and loss and meaning and time stopped. That which is beyond and within all that we know, flowed deep and rich and took me into its warm and infinite heart. No beating except the beating we shared. No breath other than the breath that is.
It may have been forever or it may have been instantaneous. I could not and would not be drawn away and yet I found myself letting go and the feet under my body found the rhythm of the path returning.
I didn’t talk. There were no words. I knew my two friends understood. They were endless themselves. There is no way out of this except our forgetting.
Nor did I take a photograph. Stunned is stunned is stunned. Shaken from a need to record. With only an experience of wordless, thoughtless, formless wholeness. I have never felt so completely, physically paralysed by the unlimited, sacred beauty of existence. I was arrested to a halt. No photograph nor these words could hold the warm welcome, the liquid, golden-honey glow or the transparency of matter swaying and thinning in the receding hills.
Stunned-into-silence – There-is-no-image – Gavin-Birchall
When I caught up with them, on our descent to the Palacio, my friends had started speaking about the history of the area and very quickly I was happily lost in the scope of their knowledge. I bobbed, weightless on the surface of their language. A brief stop to listen to some of the music that brought us together in the first place and we were reunited again with our boisterous, colourful, lively friends. Even at breakfast.
The beauty and silence of the shimmering, living air was displaced in the embrace of the courtyard, but not lost. It lives inside us all in every moment.
Coaching is about coming to know our experiences and ourselves with depth and insight.