Recently I wrote about change. The kind of change that comes along whether we want it to or not while we are getting on with our living. Because change is our living. This story is a deeper immersion into small changes accumulating.
I am conscious that words can flow from my mind, through my fingers onto the screen in a deluge that might flood. So often we are overwhelmed by the swelling insistence of what appears within our machines and the idea that we are expected to keep pace, that I do not wish to further that feeling. I will endeavour to keep this missive brief and refreshing. Like a Sun shower.
We walked from our own door, with our lives on our backs, past the third tallest church spire in the UK, from which a family of Peregrine Falcons watched, to arrive at the train station.
As we changed trains at platforms that grew smaller and smaller the landscape became wilder and fuller. We alighted. At the foot of Pen-Y-Ghent. Then we started walking home.
The-path-weaves – Gavin-Birchall
We followed the course of the River Ribble, nestled within its catchment and guarded by the surrounding watershed. Within the valley, from close to the headwaters, we stayed as true to the river as the path allowed.
Four days we had planned, for our legs to carry us towards our home in Preston, near the mouth of the River, where the estuary becomes the Irish Sea and neither know they exist at all.
One single act was all that was called for. To place foot in front of foot. Eventually, if we did this well, if each step was strong, we would be somewhere else. That was it. Nothing more.
Together-we-burrow – Gavin-Birchall
Moments passed through landscapes passed through mornings onto riverbanks, hillsides, along afternoons and beyond forests and there were no borders I could see on the land.
We paused where we wished, when our bodies were tired or just to watch and listen and be taken by the run of the water and the days and the valley and the sky.
Pubs featured a fair amount. Some very old ones. Which revealed their original purpose as stopping places for those travelling at the pace of muscle and will. At living pace. We refreshed, rested, ate, slept, washed and met some people we never would have met in them.
In-between-spaces – Gavin-Birchall
I am already letting the flow or words get the better of my best intentions. Feel free to leave our watery, ambulant meandering if so minded. There are other things to be getting on with. Or, if you want to carry on, let’s sink deeper still.
I was not alone on the path. My wife and I walked surrounded by abundant life. As we walked our togetherness became richer. The static world as it was fell away and without any fixed place that we might imagine belonged to us, we came to belong to the place we were in. We belonged where we were. Which was everywhere.
In our togetherness, our belonging to each other expanded to fill all of the available space. There was a lot of space. The whole of the Ribble Valley. The whole of Lancashire. The whole of England. The whole Earth. The entire sky. I have seldom felt such togetherness. I was home.
A-horse-and – Gavin-Birchall
On our last day we walked into a town. Clitheroe. Watched over by Pendle Hill. Across fields and along tracks and gradually, so gradually into parkland and up towards the town itself. I swear there were no edges to be found.
It was a scorching day and we were weary. We bought a picnic and sat on the grass below the ramparts of the castle and we ate, snoozed, read, played with a puppy and mostly watched the town towning.
People came and went and eventually we also moved on. In a new way. We arrived slowly, at living pace, on foot. We left, slowly, at living pace, on foot. Something nudged for attention.
Light-is-force – Gavin-Birchall
All of the usual containers had exploded. The containers we live inside. Our houses, then into our cars, then into a car park, then into a shopping centre, or restaurant, a workplace, or surgery or football stadium or someone else’s house. All the while within our devices in our minds. Then reverse the pattern and we are back inside our house and our devices. All of this was gone. Every container exploded. Gently. On the bank of a river.
It became clear that these containers, that seem so real, don’t exist in the way we imagine. Yes, there are buildings and machines that we get inside. But we also get inside the idea of them. Which all disintegrated on our long walk home.
This was the change that we came to experience. Walking, for days, without borders, into landscapes, and serendipity and conversations and through them all, revealed that the containers we are within aren’t hard limits. We don’t have to be in them at all. Their sense of enclosure provides a feeling of safety but we forget that we have exchanged this for the thrill of exposure and participation.
Falling-into-rest – Gavin-Birchall
On this wander the sense of freedom and togetherness was profound. Our relationship with each other and the land became our container, our vast, rolling container and moved with us, flowed as us, across the surface of earth, much like our guide, the river.
It was far more beautiful and connected and human and loving and expansive and honest and truthful and sustaining and mutual and blissful than anything we might conceive to manufacture. Anything could have happened and much did.
Our first long walk ended. My mind had run dry and my heart was in spate. Fluvial change had washed through me and left behind a fine and benevolent silt that I can’t, nor wish, to name or remove. We thanked the river and knew that our lives would not be the same again.
But I have not kept to my word. I have asked too much of you to read this far. To have given this much of your life. To have journeyed with us through the heart of the Ribble Valley and felt the weight of a pack and the heat of the sun while the heaviness of every day life vanished like the mirage it is.
Walking and talking is one of the ways I work with people while coaching. It is amazing what is found on the path together.