You are the light

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good.

As we approach the Winter solstice, the nights draw in, the days are short and dark. Harvest is behind us and Winter just ahead. The trees stand like skeletons against the cloudy sky, as Nature hunkers down for the cold months to come.

Now as the old year comes to an end, we look forward to the new year, we light bonfires, beacons, candles, we keep vigil in readiness for a new beginning; in Church we light Advent candles for the one whose birth brought a new beginning to the world.

Back in May, things were very different for me. Bright, crisp early mornings, making way for warm sunny days, as I made my way across the North of Spain, through the Spring-coloured countryside along the pilgrim trail called the Camino de Santiago. It was day 26  - one of the longest legs of the journey, at 28½ kilometres – going from Villar de Mazarife to the city of Astorga. The walk was utterly beautiful but long and hard. The rough orangey track cut through the forest up and down slopes in an unbroken line for mile after mile.

One thing you soon realise when making this pilgrimage is that it forces you to confront your demons, even ones you didn't know you had. Before starting the Camino I had quit the voluntary work that meant so much to me, on a matter of principle. Now I was hot, exhausted, and racked with self-doubt. It was at this point that I arrived the the 'Oasis', a rest stop for pilgrims, with bottled drinks and fruit to eat in exchange for a donation. I sat down in the shade of a makeshift shelter, trying to muster the physical and mental strength to carry on. When I looked up, I saw that previous visitors had written on the wooden boards, and directly over my head was a simple depiction of a candle with the words “You are the light”. From my perspective, at that time, this was a message to me; I was guided to this spot; I was supposed to see it; that was all I needed. As I walked on I wondered: was it help from above or just a lucky chance? Then on my left I saw a concrete pillar some 30 feet high; beautifully drawn on the concrete, a hand reaching down from from the sky to grasp another hand reaching up, as if to save someone from drowning.

This Winter, when all around looks dark, remember this: You are the light of the world.

Smoke and Mirrors

Autumn has officially arrived. We had the equinox, we heard the thunder, and now that Summer is over, the sun has come out. English weather.

I'm lucky enough to live in Wiltshire. Most people couldn't point to Wiltshire on a map; it's just somewhere you go through on the way to somewhere else, so Wiltshire retains its mystery. Everybody knows about Stonehenge and the Avebury stone circle, but there is ancient history in the soil, in the folds of the hills and in the white horses etched onto those hills. There is strangeness in the prohibited areas on Salisbury plain, the deserted village of Imber which can only be visited once a year, and in the loud thumps and bumps that can be heard from Marlborough to Warminster as the army plays with its toys on the Plain, while everyone carries on as if it were some grumbling volcano waiting to erupt.

In 2009 the four district councils of Wiltshire were amalgamated, bringing North Wilts, West Wilts, Kennet and Salisbury under a unified administration. Perfectly sensible no doubt, but it conceals the fact that, under the surface, they really are four quite distinct and different places, which rarely interact with each other.

So indeed it is with Autumn, running from the equinox to the solstice, but effectively sliced into two halves by the cross-quarter day known as All Hallows (or All Saints, or Halloween 1), or Samhain. Early Autumn can be characterised by still, sunny, misty mornings, trees in shades of green and gold, the smell of bonfire smoke, and flowers in the garden, after a final flourish, beginning to die back; a feeling of busyness following the lazy days of Summer. From November on, there is a distinct change. The earlier friendliness in the elements has gone; there are strong winds, rain from grey skies, cold mornings and cold nights, gathering darkness, a sense of closing in, stocking up ready for the freezing wastes of Winter.

In between these two states of being, we find ourselves in a no-man's-land, a hiatus hovering half-way between the in-breath and the out-breath, between the bright and the dark, between life and death. This is a threshold, a liminal space, a magical space, a dangerous place, a doorway into the unknown, to disaster or rich rewards. This is the time for heroes to abandon the safety of home and set out on bold adventures, to watch as the sun sets in red and rust, and to feel the call of the wild like fire in your blood. The veil between heaven and earth is thin; spirits roam out in the material world, voices in the darkness calling your name. At night you may look long at the logs burning in the hearth, the solid wood turning to ashes as the smoke rises, and you think about those who have passed through your life and now are gone.

The people of day come and go, do their work, talk and laugh, while just below the surface, the old mysteries stir in their sleep.

1 There is a technical difference which I will ignore

Pilgrimage

Pilgrimage

That night, I put away my belongings,

Unlocked the doors to my existence,

Carefully folded up the walls and roof of my life,

And carrying only a bundle of clothes

On my back, I set myself free.

My way lay over the far horizon

Every step a step into the unknown

Fired by wind and water and birdsong

And laughter, kind hearts and wisdom

Of those I passed among.

The landscape spread before me like an ocean

That I could take my voyage upon,

I climbed big waves like hills and mountains

Trod small ripples like rocks and stones

That nestled in pools of green and gold.

The land I travelled gave me of itself.

Rugged as the rocks and tall as the peaks,

With eagle's eye I saw my life

What passed for my life, furtive and dark

Hiding among my worldly cares.

And so I reached my final destination

Santiago, where the mythic saint washed up.

My staff I leant against a wall and with fine food

Good wine and celebrations I laid my head to rest.

But still the road sang to my heart

The song of lovers torn apart.

The Tree Of Adventure

My mother and father under the tree

At the bottom of the back garden of the house where I grew up there stood a tree. Not a very big tree, about 25 feet or so, but I and my brother could climb up and sit on a platform, which was a bit of wood we had found and fixed between two branches. From there we could see up the garden through the apple trees to the kitchen window, or the other way over the fence and into the park as far as the wood. Looking sideways we had a view over the neighbours' fences and into their gardens as they stretched along the road.

There was a knack to getting up there. First we had to get one foot in an easy foothold a few feet off the ground, and then stretch up and grab the one branch that was small enough for our small hands to grasp and pull ourselves up into the air high enough to reach out for the next branch across. Then we could scramble up to the platform, holding tight in case we fell down.

The day came that I had grown that little bit too much. I reached for the branch and pulled but it suddenly snapped, sending me sliding and crashing down the trunk to the ground.

This sounds ridiculous compared with the giant redwood tree that Julia Butterfly Hill climbed in 1997. That tree, which she named Luna, stood not twenty but two hundred feet tall, and Julia stayed high in a shelter in its branches not for half an hour, but for 738 days, through rain and storms, tossed this way and that.

The wood where I played

My tree was an alder, not a redwood. Alders are supposed to grow by streams, and I always wondered how this one came to be in my garden, until one day my father was digging and found the remains of a well next to the tree. That made sense - there was a stream running through the wood where I used to play, and that stream must have run under my garden.

The stream and the wood and the garden are still there to this day, and that makes me happy. I have moved to the West Country, my brother now lives 150 miles away and my mother and father now tend a garden in Paradise. I think we all outgrow our tree in the end, but nonetheless a part of me is still a small boy, perched breathless and excited in a tree 60 feet away from home.

Forty Years On

Forty years ago I stood at the altar next to my beloved, repeating the marriage vows after the minister, surprised to find they were different from how I remembered, somehow finding just enough voice to be heard down the aisles, full of trepidation, full of confidence anyway, with my life spread out in front of me like a pile of presents waiting for me to unwrap them.

I wrote my speech on a scrap of paper on the way to the wedding reception. Jenny the bridesmaid, aged 4, ran up and down between the tables shouting while I strained to make myself heard. My new bride and I slipped away to the nearby canalside to have some romantic photos taken by my old school-friend Tim. Eventually we said our goodbyes to all the friends and relations and were driven to the railway station, thence to Devon for the honeymoon. When we changed trains at Exeter, the friendly and sharp-eyed train guard made sure we had the carriage to ourselves.

Two weeks later we were on our way to Gadaffi's Libya, where I would take up the post of English Language Teacher at the Petroleum Institute. That was followed a year later by a similar assignment in Saudi Arabia. Those two years changed my life. Returning to England I retrained as a computer programmer, bought a house, and brought forth a child.

Twenty years later my children had flown the nest or were about to, my parents were dead, the computer work had finally dried up, my house was sold, and my dream of becoming a Church minister was history. At this point my life as I knew it came to an end.

I bought myself a canal boat to live on and the next twelve years were spent wandering the watery wilderness. As the old song goes, “Life goes on, long after the reason for living is gone”. Probably the only reason I can sit here writing this now is because my wife never gave up on me, which I suppose proves I married the right one, no-one else would have stayed the distance. I survived as best I could, taking whatever work came my way – shop assistant, driver, chambermaid (yes!). Canal life was beautiful but hard. I remember one night searching for firewood in the pouring rain so that I could light a small fire, as there wasn't enough money to buy fuel for the stove. All through this – and more – my wife stuck with me, keeping me going, because I just didn't care any more.

There's a great passage in Ezekiel where the prophet is taken in a vision to a valley where the bones of Israel's dead warrior's lay strewn. God asks: “Man, can these dry bones live?”, and all Ezekiel can say in response is: “Only you can answer that” (my rendition). That was exactly how I felt about my life, and so apparently did God. Because bone by bone, piece by piece, he reassembled my life.

It hasn't been easy. I'm older and I hope wiser now. Almost all the older generation who witnessed my marriage have gone from the Earth, Gadaffi is dead, my best man (and best friend) won't talk to me, my children are forging careers in art and music, Jenny is managing a holiday business in France, my photographer friend became director of a well-known company, left (to run a hotel, lost it) then made a heroic come-back. Time passes.

I don't know what the future holds in store for me, but I hope I will live it authentically, and I hope I never stop until I get to the very end. This weekend the two of us will celebrate with a quiet couple of days on the coast and a meal out. I think we deserve that.

All Is Full Of Love

Isn't it annoying when you've got a tune going round in your head and you can't remember what it is? It happened last night as I was listening to the internet radio station Chill FM. Slipped in between two tracks of angelic ethereal beauty, one short piece that I know well, and almost certainly have on CD. Is it Nitin Sawhney? I picked my way through Prophesy one track at a time; not there. Moby? So I stepped through Play as if crossing a stream on stepping stones. What a lovely stream, how it flows! But the mystery music did not swim by. Transglobal Underground? I followed that cavern down to the end but failed to hit gold. Was it on the World Chill compilation? World Chill on Chill FM? How cool would that be? But no, the trail was getting colder.

In the end, I found a lot of things that I was not looking for. I found the Lost City Of Atlantis, the Lost Chord, I discovered the source of the Nile and the proof of The Trisection Of The Angle, I unearthed a sledge called Rosebud, found Lord Lucan and Shergar but that track got lost in the undergrowth.

I had listened to some fine music along the way though.

So instead I looked up the third of the trio of tracks I had heard. It was a remix of Bjork's All Is Full Of Love.

“All Is Full Of Love...

Maybe not from the sources

You have poured yours

Maybe not from the directions

You are staring at”

That's when I realised my failed search had been successful, because without it I would never have listened to all that great music. My CDs were All Full Of Music which I had not been looking for.

Last Friday I was walking on the edge of Salisbury Plain near the Westbury White Horse. It was a clear sunny Good Friday and a fair number of people had come up the hill – walkers like me, motorists and their families, army jeeps, a trail motorbike, hang gliders, model plane fliers. Everyone appeared to be enjoying themselves. The wind blew steadily up the North side, keeping the hang gliders and model planes aloft; children ran around up and down the grassy slopes shouting and playing. I had got out of the house, stretched my limbs and breathed the fresh Spring air.

Before I reached the White Horse I stopped walking. I was no longer a hiker, but a listener. First I heard the silence, a stillness stretched over twenty miles of secluded fields and trees, virtually uninhabited bar the odd army quarters. As I stood still, the quiet slowly receded and the sound of the breeze softly stirring the grasses sang in my ears. Suddenly a bird started up behind me, and then the music of the skylark fluttered down from the sky with a sound like water rippling over pebbles. That skylark - and for all I know, farther and farther, all the birds of Somerset and Wiltshire, for it seemed as if all time and distance existed in that moment.

I'm sure everyone up at the White Horse got what they wanted on the hillside that day. I had my walk and a pint of Cornish beer at the end. And if that was all I was looking for it was all I would have got. But like someone crossing the road I stopped, looked and listened. All is full of love, and we pass by without noticing.