I am not a completer finisher. Thankfully this is no great shame as nothing can ever be finished. Not in the way we imagine when we use those words. Yet, there can be what appear to be conclusions to particular happenings before they flow into something else. That is what I am writing about here. Two conclusions. Which continue and carry with them the beginnings from which they emerged. Before the (UK) Spring has fully released its grip and Summer has wrestled the initiative away, it feels good to allow these tales of last Summer to be told. Lest the coming Summer sweeps them away to be lost forever.
As the day made its way towards the night, the bravado of an early rise made itself felt. Being stunned into silence stays with a body. I had been wholeheartedly taken by the beauty of a sun-risen existence. I breathed through the hours after, beguiled and willingly taken by the moment I had lived. We swam in an ancient pool, joined by whatever lurks beneath the green waters. Not daring to touch the bottom with tender, pink feet. Like Icarus I longed to be closer, despite knowing that nothing whatsoever should be clung to. Or perhaps more like Daedalus. I wondered, hopeless, if I could return to the view that had fallen in love with me.
Hoary-Holm-Oak – Gavin-Birchall
Regardless of the heat and exhaustion and another sleepless night I rose early again. Before first light. Timing it so that I met this days sunrise. I ran back up the hill, the way we had descended the morning before. It was further than I remembered but I arrived sooner than planned. A few moments before the bright disk appeared above the gentle slopes of my mind.
An ancient Holm Oak stood near the track in the brush. I climbed into its boughs. Wanting to witness this enduring, repeating moment of a new dawn, that has not changed in this place and for this tree in over 500 years. Just as the tree had witnessed it. I sat, balanced and held by its strong branches. Bare skin next to bare bark. For a brief, endless slice of celestial motion we anticipated the rolling of the land into the cascading light of our star.
Bare-skin-bare-bark – Gavin-Birchall
In perfect silence, deep with the softs sounds of the land waking, the seal of the night broke and the day flooded like rich, sweet wine into our world. A second day witnessing this moment for me. For the tree, somewhere around the 180,000th day. As the tree knew, I then knew. Like travelling through time, riding on the life of this gentle giant. The same time, the same location, atmosphere, motion, senses and dance as the days before. Yet it was not the same.
We cannot return, despite our most earnest of wishes, even if we contrive to reflect a past experience as closely as we can. This, most still of places, only visited by animals and watched by much longer lived beings. Even here where timelessness feels close and alive. Non-change is only the appearance of non-change. Everything exists in everything else, always and everywhere.
I tried. I tried to return, after climbing down from the tree, to the same spot and time of day that had stunned me into silence only twenty four hours before. It was spectacular, yet it was not what it had been. Because I was no longer what I had been. Nor the tree, or the land, or the universe.
Between-the-tracks-or-on-the-track – Gavin-Birchall
The hoary Holm Oak is still there today. In constant, still relationship with the sunrise. Each occurring before and with the other. And, although now far apart in space, I am with them and they are with me.
Already the precision of memory fades. Linearity stumbles. Now I am holding images and sensations. Turning to feelings which always appear and rise before language. For me at least. Our long walk home had seen most of its life. Yet there were two more days of activity in stillness yet to wander through.
Earlier, in the extreme heat of a Lancashire Summer, we had discovered the containers we live in and how they can invisibly and beautifully explode when we walk beyond their imagined edges. Just that, walk, and we find that they aren’t real. We had noticed that we live in the idea of a space as much as the three dimensional expanse. A house, a shop, a workplace. These two days brought home to us, as we walked, step by step, along the River Ribble, towards our own home, a deeper truth still.
Ospreys they said, these two men, who we met on the path. A grand curve in the water backed by a steep slope and high trees. We strained our eyes to look into the sky and saw gliding shapes, large with confidence.
Curves-and-triangles – Victoria-Birchall
Cows. There were cows in every other field. We are not fond of cows after having been chased along a very narrow field between barbed wire and surging river. We escaped with our lives, just, and a wariness to carry along the valley. We braved the first three fields where the herds meandered, with patience and our best courage. Arriving, with more energy spent, at the fourth encounter of the day – a regiment of uninterested bovines hard up against the gate and along the path – we succumbed. A detour found us walking along the busy A59, up and down, on a verge that was not a path. Choked by car exhausts and stepping back as trucks flew past. It still felt less harsh on our nerves than cows. Unpredictable, immense, unhuman cows.
Descending towards the river, a quiet road tucked between deciduous trees, we found tangles of blackberry and tasted the sun in their tart juice. At the river we met a pub with benches next to the water. Busy with people enjoying the sun, we sat and drank them dry of gluten free beer. They didn’t have many but the last mile of that days walk was a jolly affair, before we reached our beds ready for little else.
A-little-drunk-dry-and-done – Gavin-Birchall
After many steps our bodies ached, but our dinner was in a pub a short walk away. So we left the teahouse, in fresh clothes and walked into a town that modernity has missed. Having eaten well we made our way back we wandered into a sunset that glowed like honey. It showed us the best of the Ribble Valley as we came towards the final moments of our long journey home.
The-best-of-the-valley – Victoria-Birchall
Along the flat, winding through paths that felt like burrows and burrows that felt like warrens, we stayed close to the river like we shared consciousness. Turning a bend, a stream of uniformed youth became a flow we waded through. The narrow width of the path swamped by the entire population of the local senior school, in a line, that stretched further than we could see. After some minutes of chatter and bluster and socialising, like only youths can socialise, the flow ended and we were alone again. Another container traversed. Or perhaps it traversed us.
Still will the sun beating down on us, we arrived in the Roman settlement of Ribchester. We passed the tumbled ruins and wound with the river towards a medieval church. In the heat I undressed to my shorts and ever so carefully stepped into the freezing flow of the river. Standing hip deep, watched by children with brightly coloured fishing nets, I dropped into the cleansing waters up to my neck. Then beyond, so that, for as long as I could hold my breath, I became the river.
On-the-way-to-immersion – Victoria-Birchall
In the swirling, diffuse world beneath the surface came the notion that the places we inhabit are not only physical, or even the intellectual ideas we conjure to conceive of them. They run much closer to our being than that. There is not a whisper between them and us. We are our environments and they are us.
Yet we use our thoughts to project order onto what we encounter. We have ideas about our experiences. The water and the walking and the journey all shared their wisdom. It is not as simple as ideas remaining safely where we believe they belong, in our minds. Ideas are not only thought. They are not just conceptual. They are sensory, relational, somatic and more. They are everything we experience and share. Ideas are stories. We live inside them and they inside us. We ourselves are ideas the universe is having. It may be that we are here to be as good an idea as we can be.