The day had been cloudy. I’d swum in the rain. I’d spent an hour listening to a poet* talking about the perilous path of love. Be it love for a person, a place or a path, it is perilous, he says. So I come to it again: that the old words, the archaic and literary words must at times be the right ones to choose, for all that we are advised against it.
Perilous. What image does that conjure? Heroes. Storms at sea. Landslides or the battles between giants in the mountains. Journeys into deep caverns where rings are found or cast to destruction.
We could say ‘risky’ rather than ‘perilous’ but it isn’t remotely the same thing. Risky means you might lose your investment, your home, your job. Maybe your loved one(s) will leave you.
Perilous means you might lose your life, or your soul.
We all take risks. Every day we get in a car or cross a road, or strike a match, or cook a meal with food we have not grown ourselves. We breathe poisoned and polluted air. We approach a stranger or pick up a child. We swim in a chlorinated pool or an effluented sea. We fall in love. We tell someone exactly what we think. We reach a hand out to a stranger. We walk across a room. To be living is to be taking a risk. Every minute of every day. It is so commonplace a thing that we have no idea that it is there. Taking risks is a thoughtless, careless, normal thing.
But how many of us willingly enter into peril? Ah. Even there, do you see? A risk is something that we take, as if it were something we can control. Peril we enter into; it is all enveloping, beyond anything we can influence. How many of us step across that threshold and enter in?
I have a feeling that I have done so - even though for much of the time I'm not entirely sure what it is I have committed myself to - a person (maybe), a place (not yet), a path (undoubtedly).
After the poet, I stepped outside. The skies were clearing to the east. I gathered a shawl – another old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned thing. You might call it a scarf, except it’s too big for that – wider and longer – and yet it isn’t quite a blanket. It was given to me as a gift one birthday, years after he’d acquired it. I doubt he knows how much I love it, even though it no longer carries his scent. I doubt he even knows that I use it – that on nights like this I drape it loosely around my shoulders to begin with, and that later I will wrap it tightly around me, not for any notion of his protection (I have other rituals for that) but simply because it holds my body-warmth well enough. Maybe I feel a little safer, for being a little warmer, or for being a little more tightly wrapped.
The sky was clearing. Perhaps the full eclipse of the full moon – the corn moon or harvest moon – would be visible after all. If so, I could stay put. It would be visible from Del Mar. But I had a hankering to see it over the sea. I decided to walk down to Jerbourg.
I imagined a solitary and mystical moment.
Maybe there is a different kind of magic at work, when you find nearly a hundred people sharing your desire to go to a particular spot, to go look at the moon over the water. Nearly a hundred, or maybe just over. I counted, several times, got different answers, but thereabouts.
I had not expected this. At first it was surprise, then, slowly and at depth, I was pleased. There must still be a kind of mystery in the world when so many people seek out a headland to look across the sea and wait for a hidden moon to rise.
Skies had cleared from their earlier wall-to-wall gun-metal, but there was still a bank of cloud over Sark and Jersey, maybe France. Shore lights glimmered, out there, but above them was a dark haze. No red moon rising.
People waited. There was a stillness. A quiet. A sense of anticipation. Like the last remaining faithful awaiting the return of a prophet.
Away to the west, Scots Pines stood stark against the glacial pallor of the evening sky. The descended sun still throwing light up from beyond that unseen horizon.
Meanwhile, on this side of the island, across the waters, the cloud thinned a little more.
“There," a man close-by whispered, raising an arm to point it out to his wife. I sighted along that arm from just behind his shoulder. “Yes,” I kept my own voice low. “Just above that horn of the cloud…” The thinnest sliver of a moon was creeping shyly into view.
There were no gasps or exclamations. The silent presence continued. People stood and watched. But somehow you can feel a smile, sense it rippling like the gentlest breeze on a pond as it spreads through those around you. More and more people found the mark, the spot above the cloud-bank, the tiny slinking moon, and smiled.
We stood and watched the sunrise on a distant piece of rock.
Of course we pointed phones and cameras and telescopes and cameras with telescopes because this is the 21st century and that is what we do these days. But also, we did something more ancient. In between trying to take the perfect picture, and probably failing, we stepped aside from
our tech and let it be. We took a few moments to step back through eons and watch what was both moonrise and sunrise. Our moonrise but sunrise on the moon, on that piece of rock two hundred and thirty nine thousand miles away. Give or take.
Maybe some were considering that once upon a not too long ago time man (men) had set foot upon it. Maybe more, like me, weren’t really thinking at all. Just watching the earth shadow retreating, watching the moon catch enough sunlight to throw it back to earth and create a path of silver on the sea.
A thread from the sky to the water to the earth below our cliff.
Not thinking. Just being there. If I thought anything at all, I guess it would have been that, after all, I was glad not to be alone. I was obscurely thankful that so many others thought it worth coming to bear witness to something – something beautiful – something unorchestrated by man – but something which actually happens quite regularly.
It speaks to a need to connect to something beyond the commercial, the crass, the human. It speaks to a need to recognise that there is all this other stuff going on and we are, actually, a part of it. Simply bearing witness is a way of saying a less-angry “me too”.
We started to drift away. We didn’t get the full reveal. Another bank of cloud provided a falling curtain. Moon retreated upwards. If there was a message in the fact that we didn’t get the beginning of the show nor the end of it, not the full red moon totality, not the full Harvest Moon in brightness, it didn’t seem to matter. There was no sense of disappointment. There was no rushing away and on to the next thing. There was simply a quiet, thoughtful, drifting back towards the world.
No doubt each person took something different away with them. No doubt some took nothing at all.
I took a sense of connection, of peace, of depth.
I set off to walk La Route de Jerbourg, La Route des Blanches, Le Coin Colin and Les Maindonnaux back to Del Mar in the increasing dark. I’m a city girl. I’m not used to country dark.
There are street lamps. They are old and dim and widely spaced. They made me think about a time eighty to ninety years ago when this was a much more dangerous place to be. I imagined walking down these lanes, dressed much as I was in cotton trousers and sandals and a shawl, but with the planes overhead being less friendly, the lights of traffic coming up from behind being more dangerous. I noticed the houses in the dark. Few had lights lit. Back then probably even fewer…unless they were billets and there were parties. Perhaps this lane had been less quiet then. Or more so.
On this night it was busy with cars coming away from the headland. I kept stepping into driveways. It didn’t occur to me to wish I had a torch, but I do remember thinking that next year I will bring my
high-viz vest – which suggests to my surprise that I might want to wander the lanes in the dark again.
It is a way of touching a place – as it is a way of touching a person – to meet it in the dark, when sight becomes the least important of our senses. In the dark, we listen, we scent the air, and yes, we touch. We touch the present and the past and something beyond all of that.
Sometimes, perhaps, we need a reason to go out and do so.
* David Whyte
