I’ve been islanded for a week and have walked very little.
That might be relative. I have in fact walked every day. For an hour or two or more, each day. Down into town and back up again, the steep winding road on one occasion and then eventually the cliff path, when I’d finally admitted that my Leki was unlikely to be found and I replaced her with something not quite as sturdy, but enough to get me up and down those steeps and steps. Down to the bay to swim and powering back up that road to prove to myself it is easier than it was a year ago.
I’ve walked local lanes, forever finding ones I haven’t been down before. Losing my sense of direction. Looking at the cottages and the gardens and the walls and the fields and everything that grows. It’s September so the flowers are starting to die back now. The agapanthus are finished. The lilies suffering from a dry year, even though it’s been pretty wet since I got here, but every now and then I find another clump to lift my heart and set my mind back to the myths about how she came to be: the Guernsey lily.
The pedestrian back-cuts are already crunching with fallen leaves.
I walk so much, so often, so ordinarily, that I don’t always register it as “a thing” that I’ve done on any given day. Often it’s just me getting from here to there and back again. Then at the end of the day I might feel that I haven’t “done” anything, because the minutes or hours of putting one foot in front of the other get discounted.
And they really shouldn’t.
Disliking the word ‘should’ but I really shouldn’t discount the walking that I do in my day-to-day, because it is an opportunity I don’t always take up – an opportunity to tune in to the everyday awesome – and because if nothing else it counts as small good things that I do. Good things towards my own health, fitness and well-being – walking supports each of those – even when I’m not paying as much attention as I could. Good things towards not wrecking the planet any more than we are already doing. (Full confession, I walk because I can’t drive and don’t have a car – but even so.)
I really shouldn’t discount it because walking is always more than mere transportation.
Sometimes that is deliberately so, like when I take my camera out to play, like when I go out with a notebook and a writing prompt (or a mere hope of finding one).
More often it is incidentally so. I have a regular route to my local sports centre where I go to take a Zumba class or to swim or both. The last part of that walk is under ancient trees. Trees that were here long before the SportsPark, long before the university. And also trees of much younger growth. Saplings and spindles. Hedges.
Among the older are the Oaks, Scots Pine, Beech. Two oak trees in particular touch me every time I bother to look up and acknowledge them. I am reminded of a song that Chiara Gilmore sang one time on a Resurgence Earth Gathering. The words that lodged for me: I behold you, beautiful one. I behold you, child of the earth and the sun.
Over the months I have forgotten the rest of the lyric, but recall the beauty of her voice and her spirit, and quietly or silently sing those two lines back to my oak trees. I like to think they hear me. I like to think they understand the importance of that word “behold”. Most writing teachers tell us not to use “archaic” or “literary” words when more simple ones will do. What they miss is that sometimes the more simple ones simply will not do. I could tell the oak that I see you. I notice that you are here. Is that the same as ‘beholding’ the essence of a tree? To name it as ‘oak’ – is that the same as connecting with it as “a child of the earth and sun”?
I don’t think so.
In the Spring I will notice the flowers along the uncut verges by the roadside. In the late Autumn I will start to seek out wet logs and interesting fungi. Noticing. Seeking out. If I have taken my camera out then I will do these things actively, intending to catch them, halt their ephemerality - but I find myself doing it anyway, just in passing, just in my getting from A to B.
Those are the moments that I would burn into my soul. The ordinary walking to a class moments when something strikes me: the frost on leaves, the dew on a spider web, the flower I always think of as ‘morning glory’ but isn’t. The first bluebell, the first crocus, the last daisies, the first fallen chestnuts, the colour of the sky.
Also the human moments. The people whose names I do not know but who always speak. They call me ‘darlin’ or ‘sweetie’ or ‘Neighbour’ or ‘dear’. There was a time that I would have railed against that assumed connection. A time when I would have physically recoiled from terms of endearment not earned, or simply because I didn’t like the words they chose. Now, I know better.
Now I know that it doesn’t matter what they call me.
I actually love the implied respect in the title ‘Neighbour’ – well, it’s better than ‘Auntie’ – respect for my presence rather than my age.
When people whose lives are and have been clearly harder than mine stop to ask how I am, to return a smile, to talk about inconsequential things, I am beginning to understand how and why these things matter. These are the things that neighbourhoods are built on…simple noticing of who you haven’t seen for a while, or have but notice they are not their usual cheery self, and maybe
asking if they’re ok.
This is also beholding the children of the earth and the sun.
When my Leki was eventually retrieved – with more gratitude than you might imagine for something so simple, so replaceable – I celebrated (strange choice of words but there it is) by walking the cliff path again. Further this time. No short-cut back to the road. An extension even. I’ll just wander on round to Jerbourg and go back in that way. In my head it was a short detour, because I had forgotten the nature of coastlines, their tendency to weave in and out and make you walk down and back up and back down and…you get the idea. I had forgotten about that long steep climb back up to the Jerbourg Road, even though my path would bring me out about a third of the way up it. I won’t pretend that one is easy yet. There was stopping. There was remembering how to open the chest and breathe more deeply. Only at the top would there be a removing of a hat to discover just how much sweat it had stopped dripping into my eyes. I had also forgotten how long that lane back into the village is.
And yet, and yet, and yet…it was a celebration. To be walking again, in what passes for me as ‘seriously’ walking – open-hearted, striding out, looking at what there was to see.
There is a depth of happiness in doing all of this. I often wonder if the feeling I get from this, is what other people get from meditation. A sense of being fully myself and connected to things beyond myself and something else again. A mind freed to do whatever it wants, but gently, repeatedly pulled back to the job in hand. In this case moving me forward and, preferably, keeping me safe in the process.
I remember other times I’ve walked this path. In other weather. In another version of me – the one I’ve left behind but still remember. I remember the first time I walked out from the Jerbourg Hotel into St Martins. It was misty. And so was I. The field that has been cleared for construction still had cows on it, not liking the damp cold any more than I was. It was June that year. I tend to come in September now.
I start to think about people who do not walk. I wonder why they find walking boring and how to change their mind, as if it were mine to change. It is not. But still I want to find the what, just what, I can say to change their perception. I can only speak of what there is.
Hummingbird hawk moth. A long three-creatured name for the tiny whizzing thing that halts me in my steps. It’s a red admiral that insists I stop by the cliff wall and look, but it is the hummingbird hawk moth that steals the minutes, stretches time in line with its rapid heartbeat, invisible wingbeat, dart to dive and fly to dart to dive. Seeing and sucking and drinking deeply.
Later, a sudden view of light shimmering on the water. The romance of a single white-sailed yacht on turquoise seas, with the islands behind. Famous artists painted these views. Famous authors wrote about them. They are still here, for the taking.
But we have to take them, because they last but seconds. Walking is all about movement and all about the still moments between the steps. It is the knowing that this view is so unutterably personal. No-one else will ever see this. Even if you’re with someone. Even if you photograph it or paint it or write about it. This. THIS! What you see, and what you feel at the momentof seeing. This is something the earth has given to you alone.
If you are one who ‘feels’ the given view, whether it’s the ocean or a backyard tree, then you know what I mean. If you are not, then maybe there is nothing I can say.
Nothing I can tell you about the way adrenalin spikes because you realise how sheer the drop and how uncertain your footing – or because you’ve lost your sense of direction and your memory map is playing you false.
The child-like delight when you spot the tiny white flowers of sagina subulata – heath pearlwort – growing among the sphagnum on the fallen walls and start wondering about the walls: who built them, why did they abandon them, what are the stories hidden under the trees?
Or that precise shade of green of light filtered through this leaf, and how it is different from that one.
Or the gold of dying bracken caught in full sun, before it fades to bronze.
Is it not something to notice your own body in motion, to exert it to the point of breathing hard enough to fully appreciate the simple act of being able to breathe – to focus on not exceeding the knee on those steep-stepped descents – to feel the long stride on the flatter stretches where
the woodland never fails to remind you of the Ardennes twenty-odd years ago?
Streams to greet as old friends when they surprise you at a turn of the path.
The faces of ghosts in ravaged trunks of long dead trees.
And oh! Did cold clean water ever taste so good as when you finally make it back to the
road... even if you know you’re still a long way from home.
Every walk is simply its own reason, and also the reason to walk again.
