Photo credit S. Rosbottom
The shape of this year’s holiday
break
For the second
year in a row, I’m spending nearly full two weeks over the Christmas break
tucked amongst the creaky drafts of an old house that stands braced on a
hillside overlooking Carmarthen Bay.
I have hungered
for this retreat from city crowds and work deadlines, but now that it is here,
I resist the slowing that this place calls for in me, with its large horizons
and small settlements, the subtle beauty of its muted colour palette, the
grey-greens and grey-blues and grey-browns that offer unblinking contrast from
the neon brights of Regent Street, where my everyday commute-path so recently
took me.
I – did not – expect
– this.
I expected to
transition effortlessly, gracefully, into unscheduled expansiveness.
It was, after
all, whilst hidden here last year that I started really paying attention to how it felt to take time away from my
blue-light screens and nerve-end-twitchiness of constant deadlines and to
drift, aimlessly purposeful, through that large, cold, damp sand-landscape.
Reader, it felt great.
I found a
dawning conviction that spending deep, unhurried time in nature changes
something in humans (in me!) that desperately needs shifting if we are to move
away from lifestyles based on casual, unthinking gouging of the environment
that we depend upon and which sustains us.
As a wanna-be
organisational change practitioner, I also had a conviction-that-looks-a-lot-like-a-hope
that this change can (and does and will) lead to better decision making, better
outcomes and better quality of experiences as individuals and networks and
communities and organisations.
So I was looking
forward to resuming last year’s cozy communing, but with the benefit of the
work and wondering and wandering that I have lived in the meantime. Apparently it doesn’t work like that; seems
that you can’t start where you were,
that you have to start where you are.
Where I am, this
year, is finding that I unexpectedly miss the un-picturesque little loops of
paths, tracks, parks and pavements that I have strolled and traipsed and
marched through in my corner of East London in the last twelve months. And thus
it came to pass that over Christmas 2018, I have called upon my most precious,
efficacious super-power, gifted to me by my Irish great-grandmother by way of
my Welsh mother: the gift of bloody-mindedness.
Reader, it has
been less of a joy and more of a grind, but I have walked, faithfully, every
day, anyway. In the spirit of “eat-your-veg/do-your-homework”, I’m betting on
persistence paying off in the long run.
Beach-side high fives
Every day, then, as the sea-water creeps back from the land, revealing the
wide expanse of the low-tide beach, I have donned wool socks and plastic shoes,
a rucksack or shopping bag, and of course, my faithful iphone to tick off the
footsteps (if my app doesn’t track a walk, did it even happen?) and set out.
Sometimes I walk alone and sometimes S comes with me. Our front door to St
Katherine’s Island and back is a solid 4 miles but can only be completed when
the tides permit.
It has become an informal family tradition that we pick up plastic litter
from the shoreline as we walk. Every time, I marvel at how an apparently
pristine beach yields up so much rubbish once you start tuning in to looking
for it. I also bless our fortune, with every footstep, that being situated on a tucked-away corner of the planet
that is not opposite the sloppy sprawl of some great city, we are chasing the detritus left by tourists and
trawlers but do not have to contend with the plastic avalanche of so many
consuming bodies. [But the ghost of the
Sea Empress oil spill whispers in the air as I type this.]
Every day has
been a walk just for the sake of walking; every day except one. Christmas Eve
was my dash-of-shame into town, alone, for some last-minute Christmas presents,
but the miles still called me.
I shrugged the
loaded rucksack onto my shoulders, clinking with Christmas gin. A large
shopping bag in each hand, I set off for the western edge of the beach, one and
a half (ish) miles away. I trudged across damp sand, bags flapping when the
wind occasionally caught them. Tenby “mist” settled on my face and on the
shopping bags as the lowering cloud stooped down to touch the beach – but the
bags weren’t heavy and the presents seemed to be coping ok with the gentle
overlay of rain.
It’s
a long and, relatively speaking, featureless expanse of beach that serves as
part of the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, after walkers drop down from the clifftop
path on Giltar Point. People travelling in opposite directions can see each
other approaching across the full length of the beach, slowly expanding from
small dark distant specks to fill out human stature as we finally draw towards
passing each other.
An older couple were walking towards me,
well-kitted-out for the weather conditions. Mindful of the season, I made eye
contact as we reached a passing point; then, to my reserved, British
astonishment, the lady started towards me, smiling. “I just wanted to say”, she
said – “what a surprising, lovely sight you make. A lady who has done her
Christmas shopping and is carrying it home along the beach, looking for all the
world as though she is heading off into the middle of nowhere. Well done, you.”
A smile and a brief exchange of
Christmas greetings and she is gone. “High five!” she didn’t add – but I can
see how, in another context, that would have been the obvious sentiment.
It was a
memorable moment for me, not just given the shock of experiencing two British
strangers finding it in themselves to chat, unprovoked, to each other, in
public, but also because I was genuinely taken aback to be seen as doing
anything out-of-the-ordinary. Just me, just walking home. Just carrying my
hasty last-minute shopping because I’d been too disorganised to do it sooner
and bring it down by car. Of course, I had the advantage of knowing that there’s
a village just beyond the sand dunes at the non-town end of the beach (assuming
that the lady I was speaking to isn’t a Pembrokeshire local).
Hope and heartache mingling on
the sea edge
I suppose the
other thing of note here is that – chore or otherwise – I don’t really
experience the beach as empty or ‘other’. This beach seems full – teeming with
sea-life, sure, but also full of hints and vestiges of the long life-story of
the earth that has created it.
I look at the
sand of the beach and I remember the long ages that ground rocks to make it –
and the longer ages before that where the rocks themselves were formed from the
ancient life of the more ancient seas. I see generations of living things
cycling through millennia to this moment, and cycling away from now into a
vast, remote final future.
I find myself to
be tiny and brief in context of this tremendously enduring earth history, which
is immensely humbling of course, but also strangely comforting, somehow, that
after all that has happened – that human consciousness exists at all, that I,
specifically I, have arrived into my moment in the story, along with my friends
and family, community and nation, and the wider nations that surround us.
Our problems are
significant, but the earth will endure (until, in the very far distant future,
it doesn’t). Maybe there are ways I can’t see yet that will enable humans to
endure and continue along with it.
The edge of the world (January 2015)
I went down to the edge of the world to watch the passing of this age.
The sun spills
amber liquid on the wet cleg underfoot.
I feel the hug
of the ground.
I hear the
soothing shrieks of feathered sentinels overhead.
I see the end of
days written on the rock teeth that still seek to consume,
Clutching at
Caldey in the maw of the sea.
I see a time
where the stars burn up and the clouds sigh into nothing,
For there is no
more rain, and the pale blue atmosphere has boiled into the black.
I see how vast
my now-beach is, and how tiny,
wrapped around
with waves, and cliffs, and birds, and stones, and shells.
It contains the
tiniest moment
And yet the
whole big universe is here with me, also
Waiting on the
beach for night to fall.
All together, we
wait – witnessing.
[As stated above, all the photos are Paula's unless otherwise indicated.]
