I’m in Scotland primarily because I wanted to ride the Caledonian Sleeper again. It’s a weird reason to book a very expensive holiday in a non-descript cottage in an isolated village, but it’s the only one I can give you. I wanted to see Rannoch Moor again, if only from the train. I wanted to that long early morning trail into the highlands beyond Glasgow, and I wanted a cottage close to a railway station. I wanted somewhere I could walk out from, or get on a train from (in order to walk out
somewhere else). I wanted somewhere I could write. I wanted somewhere I could cook. So I ended up in this station master’s cottage, next to a line where trains only run four or five times a day at obscure hours…and the one that doesn’t stop in the steam train that I really want to get on.
I came with a plan. One walk that I wanted to do. The rest of the week was open. I came out of thirty degrees of humid heat and parched earth. I landed in 15 degrees and rain. Forecast ‘continuing unsettled’. If I’d come with more plans the weather would have scuppered them anyway.
I also came planning to keep up with my practice. I have softened my approach to it. I can no longer say that I do the softening exercises on schedule. My experience with vertigo has shifted my approach in that regard. I can, however, say that I have not had a day without some practice since Brighton in February. A hundred and some-odd days, I can no longer remember the count without looking at the calendar. The count is no longer the focus…but ‘no breaking the chain’ is still a thing.
It is such a thing that the day before I came away, I had gone to bed early with incipient heat exhaustion (thankfully curtailed) – but then got up in the very late evening having awoken with the nagging notion of not having practiced that day. I went out onto the deck under a waxing moon and focussed.
Travel Day: departure was in the early afternoon. There was packing to finish, there was garden work that would have to wait, there was house work that couldn’t be left – and then there was time to get back out on the deck… and SETTLE… STAND… WAIT… BRING THE ENERGY DOWN…. WUCHI…
It’s still hot.
Breathe.
I flow through what I ‘know’ of the Form – just the once – slowly, but fluidly. Sometimes practice is about focus, sometimes it is about the simple discipline of showing up. ‘Know’ remains in inverted commas, because of course, I don’t know it at all. Not "The Form". I’m still working on learning the sequence, moves and stances and a little of the nuances and the meanings. Only when I have what I choose to think of as sequence, will I truly be able to begin work on learning The Form. And at that point, my commitment to the softening exercises will need to be redoubled.
Then I travelled south, in order to travel north. There is something a little bit tai chi about that.
DAY 1: I walk without an end in view. I walk out with my sense of direction skewed by 180 degrees. I still manage to find my way to the head of the loch. Loch Morar is the deepest body of fresh water in the UK and it feeds the shortest river. The River Morar is only half a mile in length, between the loch and the Sound of Sleat.
Thinking about the loch and the river and the sound and the ocean makes me think about the yinyang at each of those boundaries. Where does loch become river, where does river become sound, where does sound become sea or ocean? We think of rivers flowing down into the sea, and forget that the sea flows up the other way as well.
I find a beach, hemmed in by trees, that invites me to put down my camera and notebook, take off my jacket, and forget the flying biting things eying me up as breakfast.
I start to do the Form. I lose my way quite quickly. Stop. Start over, firmly pre-fixing ‘my North’ – which as I’ll discover later is actually south – maybe that was my problem. I know that the rule says, that wherever you start is ‘your north’ and the rule about flow says non-attachment to other conceptions of reality. But still, the celt in me seeks out ‘true north’ and fumbles with other variants.
I start again, and this time it works, as far as I can go, which is no further than the beginning of the kicking section, and as well as I can do in clumpy walking shoes on sand, under the trees, to the lapping of water. Any teacher of the true Form and discipline would no doubt be disappointed in my
showing. Any teacher of earth connection might be more forgiving. I was happy enough.
The sky was beginning to clear. The temperature was beginning to rise, and with it, under the trees by the water’s edge, the notorious midge was awakening.
