me down to earth with a bump. A little patience will reward me with the sight of the tiercel flashing in the sun, bringing in a kill, the metallic screams of his approach lifting the falcon off her eggs and rising effortlessly on flicking wings to accept his offering in mid-air.
As rough-hewn as the rocks of the cliff, a pair of ravens lurking just round the corner have two troll-like chicks: fat, noisy and appropriately satanic. In the disused quarry below the loch, with wings as silent as snow, the barn owls have a nest in a crevice once used by rowdy jackdaws, who have now moved out and taken up residence in the dark caverns of a boulder field high above the quarry’s rim, from where their merry, bickering chatter echoes across the valley like women at a jumble sale. And down at the house a pair of pied wagtails have loyally returned to nest in the garage roof, every move warily impaled on the jet, unblinking eye of a mistle thrush who has engineered her muddy cup into the fork of a Douglas fir.
Many of these events are predictable; the same or similar sites used year upon year, decade upon decade. After so many years of familiarity the season’s scenes and sequences seem to repeat like floral patterns on wallpaper, warm and comforting so that I am relieved to see them back again after the long winter. If our peregrines miss a year I worry, wondering what mishap has kept them away. Instinctively I find myself checking out all the well-used sites on my walk, and in the process I always find a few others, like the robin that I discovered this morning in a ridiculously exposed position in an old yew stump only two feet above the ground, the hen so smoothed into her moss and horse-hair cup that only the glint in her eye gave her away. It will be a miracle if the pine martens don’t find her.
My page is crowded with notes. Just now there is no time to think of purpose or meaning, to ponder the creation or the unfathomable web of interdependence that somehow manages to hold it all together. There are long winter days for all that. For now I must be out and seeing, jotting and scribbling, hoarding gems for later delight. I am just happy that spring is here at last.
3
Dreams in a Jar
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
– T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Long ago I used to think that dust dancing in a sunbeam was a direct product of the sun, that these motes of weightlessness streaming into my childhood bedroom were particles of the sun itself, and that the brilliant stripe slicing across my pillow, searing me into squinting awareness, was intended for me alone. Awakening and forcing my eyes to adjust, I imagined that those sunbeams were a downward draught of bright air silently blowing my way, delivering their gleaming flecks from some unimaginable solar smelter. They burned and then vanished, like sparks. I tried to capture them in a jam jar, shutting them in with a firm twist of the lid. Then I would rush them under the bedclothes to see if they still shone.
It never occurred to me that dust was everywhere. If sunlight was just bright light, I reasoned, why, then, did it have sun-dust with it? The light bulb didn’t issue a visible fallout, nor did the precious little torch I had been given for my sixth Christmas. I was convinced that whatever I had in my jam jar was real – a gift of pure sun. I became a heliophile, a secret sunbeam worshipper. They infiltrated my dreams.
If I braved myself to face the window and opened my eyes, even for a split second, and then ducked beneath the blankets I found that I could take the whole window with me, the frame, its astragals and square encasement, branded, no matter how tight I screwed up my eyes, upon the soft pixel-palate of my consciousness. ‘Why me?’ I mused. And what could be the meaning of this fierce reveille? Was I hallowed? Had I been singled out for one of those epiphanies I had seen in graphic illustrations, Holy Ghost descending in a shaft of brilliance, which were liberally sprinkled into children’s bibles of those days? It seemed I had.
Nipping down the passage to my sister’s room confirmed this beyond doubt. She lay in gloom. There were no heliographic signals of any kind, divine or otherwise, illuminating her room. No, the sun was signalling to me and me alone, and it was private. It had picked me out and I was in no mood to share its favours. I kept my jam jar hidden in my sock draw. When pressed by my mother for what, precisely, it contained, I ducked the issue, knowing instinctively that grown-ups wouldn’t understand.
May 10th ‘Remember that you come to each day anew,’ chides the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, ‘and hallow the everyday. All real living is meeting.’ That’s where I am; a new day to hallow and some real living to be done. I’ve taken this walk a thousand times, but even after all these years every stride adopts new form, lit anew by shafts of virgin light, another priceless joust with Providence, fresh garlands to be won. On a hallowed day like today I can step out of the present and feel the future roaring at me, seeking me out, careering in to greet me, one more self-propelled plunge into the great ocean of unknowledge in which we all blindly swim.
Desk work dictates that today’s walk has to be in the middle of the day, so I’m breaking free too, springing away to the Avenue with the mischievous gladness of real escape. It’s hard to hallow the day when the phone is ringing. But now I’m out, hungry for some living and meeting.
The sun is high and mine all over again. From 93 million miles away it seems to have a gravitational pull of its own. I feel I’m being hustled along by the glow of the year’s turning. It has spent the morning elbowing through clouds to reward my truancy with a dome of hard, metallic blue. Leaves are translucent, so that once among the limes and chestnuts I stride through a viridescent haze, wading among tiger-stripes of brilliance, breathing deeply. This is it – living again; this is why I come. I’m heading out, hallowing. Every stretched pace is a triumph of living, of just being a sun-struck mote dancing above the awesome planet revolving beneath my feet.
Great tits are insisting. The shrill ‘Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!’ repeats over and over again, refusing to let go. Others answer distantly, all staking claims. The waistcoat of a cock bird, as bright as a buttercup, is split wide by the black stripe which heaves and parts as he throats his pride. His purpose is infectious; today his tiny presence on this Earth is as huge and strident as my own.
There are a few more certainties in life than Mark Twain’s ‘death and taxes’, even in our uncertain world. They are the sparks of recognition riding the sunbeams’ current, the flecks of familiarity that hold us all together and tell us who we are. I know this bird has a mate and at this moment she is snuggled into her ring of moss and felted down feathers, deep inside a nest box nailed to one of the limes. She is fluffed out in her dim hollow, baring her 90°F brood patches to the five ovals of her future, pressed close. Song resonates above her, new life stirs below. I push on, still anxious that I could be called back.
At the wooden bridge over the burn I begin to unwind. I lean on the handrail and bathe in stillness. This is what Yeats meant by ‘peace comes dropping slow’. You can’t rush it; breathe deeply. I’m emptying down, draining dross like bathwater. The burn murmurs confidingly, like inconsequential chatter with an old friend. Wrinkled ripples shine and burble behind the birdsong like a melody constantly repeating. I’m out of hailing distance and, more importantly, no one knows I’m here. I feel like Huck Finn: the bridge is my raft, the burn my ‘big ol’ Mississippi . . . ain’t freedom purdy’.
The sun is strong here and I feel the urge to sit. The grass is friendly – winter’s lifeless mat impaled by bright new growth – yet chill to the touch. The year’s first gnats dance over the pool. Cock chaffinches are bellowing in the willows and birches. A wren trills deliciously. Far away, high over the moorland, a curlew floats its sad notes into the
