Playing hopscotch (across the great abyss)

JOURNAL ENTRY

1st October, Thursday

“The thick darkness
 Of a mole-blind morning.
 Feet slip on gravel and tiredness.
 Racing clouds lower themselves
 To the earth in rain.
 No moon or stars,
 Just waterlogged sky
 And the wind among the alders.

But that is alright,
 For I have Stars enough
 And that wind-song among the alders.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It's an almost perfect autumn night. A soft warm evening, drowsy with late summer bees and starred dandelion yellow, has ebbed away into the rose and mauves of the gloaming. And the skies now darken with a sprinkling of stars. The water mirror bright with night holds its breath as a waning moon entering its last quarter begins to rise on the north-eastern skyline. 

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of an Octobering night to you wherever you are. 

You made it! How are you? I hope you are well. The night is calm and gentle but there is a dampness and chill in the air. If the forecasts hold true there'll be a near frost by the morning. So, why not come inside where the cabin is warm and there's a chair is waiting especially for you. The kettle is on. The biscuit barrel is full. Mind you head on the hatch as you come down the steps and welcome aboard. 

[MUSIC]

PLAYING HOPSCOTCH (ACROSS THE GREAT ABYSS) & CABIN CHAT

Tonight, things are going to be a little different. This last month has been challenging timewise with most of it being taken up with work, and this last week, even more so. I initially thought, I would need to skip this week, but these times and this special place, right here, sharing the darkness with strangers who are friends, are important.

And maybe it’s time anyway, that we just spent awhile, not talking of anything much, but just sitting down and quietly enjoying the soft, dark eddies of the night. We live in a world that invests so much energy an expense in trying to keep the night at bay, as if it were either an inconvenience or a danger to be avoided, that it is easy to forget its special beauties and the medicine it brings.

We are made for times like this. Times when we become aware, in the dim glow of afterlight or the flicker of flame, the stilling of the world. The quietness that is neither silent nor still, but brings with it its own gift of stillness and silence. And in this unstilled world of noise and tumult, there is nothing we need more than that. Perhaps that is why we floodlight the night; to pretend it’s not there; to convince ourselves there is no space left to sit in stillness. Our fingers grow fidgety to tap on screens, the moon is lost to blue light, the stars to urban wash. The other day, I came across the term ‘light trespass’. It is a quasi-legal term to describe unwanted artificial light that spills across property boundaries and shines into private spaces (like bedroom windows). Our nights have become so trespassed with light, we forget that it is night and live as if it was still daytime. And all the time our minds, our bodies, our hearts and our spirits (whatever we mean by those terms) scream out in their craving for it.

I know I am not the only one to say it’s been a tough few weeks and months. And on top of all this, the news gets more and more overwhelming until you feel like you are drowning in information that we can do very little about, apart from shout or register a voice of protest among the enveloping tsunami wave of other voices, but at the same time we cannot unsee, unhear, or unknow. Like a sucking tide it can create a false sense of intimacy into situations and crises beyond your capacity to handle or change by drawing you in with a sense of responsibility and complicity that is both unfair and creates a burden that is not yours to bear. What is going on here, is something much deeper than standing up and saying what you think is right. The sheer scale of horror that we now face daily from across the globe is something one human has never been created to carry. We weren't born for the twenty-four hour news cycle, or to process endless tragedy and discord on the eternal scroll of doom. It is so very, very easy for a sense of utter despair and paralysing helplessness to creep in.

We need times like this, listening to the dark as night falls. Times of stillness to let the horizons of our world once again settle, to find our place once more. Oh, there may be battles ahead to be fought, and there are conflicts to navigate – as, in life, there have always been, but these can only be done with a clear head and a calm heart.

It’s why these times and these spaces matter and should be nurtured. For the only failure is to allow yourself (or let others) to make you become less than you and to forget in all the horror and anger, the wonder of our lives and the lives of those around us. And the night offers us these times of reflection and grounding.    

I mourn the loss of the milky way misty trail and a hundred billion stars from my night sky, as I do the all the voices that made the dawn chorus of the past so rich, but in looking up, I slowly find myself engrossed in the beauty of the stars that can still be seen – light stretched across lightyears of time, hanging suspended in the infinity of night. And the scuttle and chunter in the undergrowth as ducks shift position reminds me of lives lived close that are precious and full of such complex mystery. And I remember the rooks, sleeping in the feathered cauldron of their roosts and the heron, silent and hidden, who must be somewhere nearby. And on the hill above us, the autumn dandelions closed in moon-time, awaiting the touch of sun and warm-light to open again to a fresh new dew-filled day.  

And I remember. I remember that I am here, flesh and blood alive and breathing, for a short while, skipping stones across the stilled waters of infinity and playing hopscotch on the stepping stones across the precarious great abyss. The great adventure of life, and what a wild and beautiful and truly miraculous adventure it is. And how hard, and painful it can be too. Each of us, walking blind into the darkness. Trying the best to find the right way, sometimes just trying to survive. It’s not surprising that at times we can feel so battered and torn, weighed down with burdens that were never ours to carry. 

Each of us lungta, placed mountain high, alone in Himalayan sky, living life as only we know how. Lungta or ‘wind horse’ is the name given to Tibetan prayer flags – the colourful sky-ribbons of flags:

·       Blue – sky/space

·       White – air/wind

·       Red – fire

·       Green – water

·       Yellow – earth.

Hung high for the wind to catch them and carry their blessings of peace, compassion, and good fortune across the land.

It’s a practice that traces back into deep history, before the arrival of Buddhism. What a strange but beautiful idea! How did it emerge, this idea of unsounded, wordless, windborne prayer? A sense and understanding of prayer deeper than religion, deeper than humans, running deeper even than phylogenies. A wild calling to wild, a yearning to yearning. ‘The deep calling to the deep’.   

Are they us, in another form? For we too can feel like wafer-thin, tattered rags, hanging exposed and vulnerable to the elements: wind battered, the colours of our youth storm blanched and sun bleached.

That’s something to celebrate, though, isn’t it? In a culture that values the pristine and the new, how radical it is. A pristine, new, lungta is one that has never been used. The blessing of its existence remains unfelt. The vibrancy of its colour and print, the perfect straightness of its edges point to its uselessness in the purpose for which it was created.

If your edges are frayed, and your colours bleached and faded. Thank you. If your threads coming unravelled and it feels as if the words of your life are no longer visible to even those close by – maybe even to yourself, thank you. Thank you for being a wind horse, for letting the unsounded, wordless blessing of your existence be carried on the very winds that unthread your life across the wild and inhospitable places where it is needed the most.

High above the abys of existence, we play hopscotch across its stepping stones, knowing not where it will take us. The wind lifts and takes us and it feels as if it is the end of the world. I am glad you are here. Your preciousness is measured in your unthreading.

Maybe that’s enough.

Sharing our darkness in the friendship of strangers.

Yes, we need times like this.      

I need them. Thank you for being here.

[CABIN CHAT]

NIGHT VIEWS (THROUGH YOUR WINDOW)

With thanks to Ana McKellar

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG