Posts tagged with "Dystopia"
I cross the threshold, a now familiar feeling of beginning, of opening to possibility, a joyous not knowing.
The morning is monochrome, an Ansel Adams and when dawn breaks the colour bleeds back into the landscape slowly, ochre yellow, moss green, burnt heather.
The bleating of the sheep is curiously rowdy and I realise that they mistake me for the farmer as they come running off the hillside at first in twos and threes, then in their tens. I am confronted now with the expectant stares and tumultuous bleating of over a hundred sheep. I am an accidental Pied Piper. I think of where my deep gladness at being on this hillside meets the deep hunger of the sheep and I find myself wanting. I would swap my flask of hot coffee for a bag of sheep mix now, it’s been a hard winter. They follow me hopefully but soon give up following this imposter Messiah and continue to wait for the Chosen One!
The sun rises, the colours intensify, baby pink, steel blue, citrus orange but language feels inadequate in the naming of this palette. I recall a voice from our work earlier in the week and I contemplate the scarification of the landscape. I am not walking on a track but a tract of burnt heather, a Paul Nash painting in miniature. Facing forwards, up the hill, the sun is appearing over the horizon and it’s consuming magnificence is a kind of utopia.
Turning back, looking down across the hills of burnt grouse moor and torn up woodland, I see dystopia too.
Forwards/ backwards…inside/out…long-shot/close-up…surface/deep…utopia/dystopia…
So many of the threads of the week unravel and weave again in my mind.
The wind has dropped.
I’m sitting against a post and wire fence that demarks the edge of the spruce plantation and realise I may have found my railings for today. I wonder how long I will be able to be chained here willingly and with joy. I realise that I have chained myself willingly to my purpose for the past twenty seven years. I know what my deep gladness is and I think I understand where it meets the world’s deep hunger. It begins to dawn on me that if I am to continue with my purpose, I may have to willingly chain myself to the railings of my core beliefs and leave others to the unshackling…at least for a while, for as long as it feels necessary.
A stoat in ermine with a black nose and a black tipped tail scoots across my path and into the plantation. I remember the rush of joy that an unexpected visitation can bring.
I walk again to warm up.
I have an interesting encounter with a field of bullocks – I’m the Pied Piper again – this time the Messiah arrives on a quad and we are all grateful.
I am so familiar with this place. I decide to revisit the cottages, the glasshouses, the Douglas fir, the Giant Redwood and I wonder at our human need to re-visit. Today the pull is very gentle, a quiet curiosity to see how far I’ve travelled since then, what I have carried with me, what I have let go and I am warmed by what I find. There’s no desperate yearning for the past here, there’s an open-armed embrace of the future.
I find a place for the second ‘long sit’ of my solo. It’s remarkably close to the site of my earlier solo this week, but there’s a tempting rock to support my back and it’s in the full morning sun.
I think of how different the practices of walking solo and stillness solo are. Today the walking frustrates a little and I long to be still, to wait, to see what comes up, to revisit my intention. I organise myself. Some things flood in from my very first solo, chiefly my love affair with my sleeping bag (I resolve to give it much more use in the future)!
I am very comfortable. The sun warms my face. I close my eyes and the red triangle, a personal image that has been so strong this week, is very present here. I am generating heat. I am a warm red triangle vibrating outwards, rooted in the earth. I know what I need to do and I have the resolve to do it.
I am becoming.
