Unsettled at the Still-Point (Of the year)

JOURNAL ENTRY

16th June, Monday

“Cresting
 The eternal now
 The carp and I
 Share the summer sun”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It’s Midsummer’s Night, it’s late – or it feels late, but there is still plenty of light in the sky. Even the night seems not to want to contend with this sticky heat. Little gusts of wind, sun warmed, rattle the drying leaves and making our fenders creak.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the shortest night to you, wherever you are.

Thank you so much for coming, it is really lovely to see you. The bow and stern doors are wide open to the night, as are the windows and duck hatch. Let’s enjoy the cool begin to flow through the boat, there’s plenty of room and there’s always space especially for you. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS

The temperatures have soared this week. This always makes boat life a bit of a challenge. It’s always much, much easier to warm up a cold boat than to cool a hot boat, and sun shining on a steel tube – even when the air temperatures are not that hot – is a highly efficient way of making a boat hot. This week, the thermometers have climbed into the 30s (that is the high 80°s in Fahrenheit). Outside, particularly in the alders’ shade, that has been very nice. However, if we’re not careful, that could make the inside of the boat unbearable – and dangerously hot for Maggie. But we’re prepared and by using a range of fans and air coolers strategically placed around the boat, we’ve kept things, if not exactly cool, they’ve certainly not been uncomfortable. More importantly, Maggie has been able to keep cool.

The fans are good, but once the temperature rises to a certain point, they start to turn the boat into the inside of a fan assisted oven, making things even hotter by just blowing hot air around. The little usb air coolers are great though. They don’t so much cool the boat down as stop the temperature from rising. We have learnt to start them early in the day. That way, the boat stays comfortable. As we run on solar, requiring so many things to need electricity, isn’t a problem.     

Sensible thing is to moor up in a nice cool and shady spot. But the problem is, when the air temperatures are so high, you still need to run the coolers, and shade means that the solar panels don’t work so well. So, you find yourself working with compromises – trading off cool shade with sun's glare but with solar.  But today, the heat is breaking – a couple of cold fronts have been sweeping over us from the west, bringing with them, either the tease of rain or a few spots.

The hedgerows have taken on that hazy dusty look – once glossy leaves filmed with gritty dust and pollen. Shabby chic. Wabi sabi. The air hums and buzzes. Yesterday evening, I could hear someone flying a drone nearby. I wasn’t surprised. It was a good evening to film the scatter of wood and patchwork fields below. Evening sun and long shadows. I kept looking up, but could spot nothing. It continued to zizz and zip, climbing and then descending – and then I realised it was a bluebottle fly – all bumbling eyes and lightning flash blue.

The sun and the heat have meant that the fish are rising. The minnows and young fry. Small, bustling shoals of black pins, that flick and dart among the weeds. The carp, large and bovine, drift and hang suspended in the tobacco-coloured waters of the shallows as damsel flies flash and hawk though the sedge and reeds.

The grasses beyond the hedges and field margins are getting a little parched now, but they are still growing. And each step gives rise to the soft wing brush of small butterflies and moths. In the morning and late evening, the waist high grass fronds feel velvet soft and deliciously cool with shadowed earth-damp when I plunge my hands deep into the green sanctuary of their shadowed refuge.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

UNSETTLED AT THE STILL-POINT (OF THE YEAR)

Things for me have been rather unsettled and consequently unsettling for me this week. I’d got something all lined up for this week’s podcast, something that I have been working on and mulling over for I think it must be well over a year now. But that ‘unsettling’ has got to me and I just can’t find the peace to finish it off.

I know that I must be not the only one to feel this way. After all, we are all living in very unsettling times and it can be difficult to know quite how to live in them. What should our response be?

And this week, this year hangs on the solstice high-point of the seasonal arc – the still-point; that one brief moment of stasis when the sun appears to pause on our skyline – before the swing of seasons rushes back downwards and then back up, up upward to the peak of the still-point of winter. The rush between two poised points of weightlessness and freefall.

There’s something about swings, isn’t there. Even now, honestly, on finding an old tyre strung from a tree branch or when visiting a deserted playground, who can resist that giddy rush of wind in your face and the strange almost itchy feeling in the pit of your stomach – and then the little voice that whispers in your ear, dare you go a bit higher? Do you remember the swing boats at village or town fairs? Shuggy boats, they call them up north. Carnival painted in sweeping whorls of colour. And you climbed inside them and sat on the plain wooden seats opposite your sister (or brother or friend) and you reached up to grab the thick coiled snake of rope – in your clenched fists, as thick as a ship’s hawser – and you tugged and tugged, like drunken bell ringers, until the boat started rocking and then higher and higher – giddying sickly with delight and excitement. ‘Go, go!’ we’d shout as the clouds and sky seemed to slide under us, while at the same time ‘no, NO!’ And with each pendulum we’d wait with dread and excitement for the boat to go right over – to loop the loop – so that mum and dad and all the fairground rides and stalls would rush in a blur beneath our heads. Of course, that was impossible. Unlike some park swings (and the one the we had for a little while in our back garden), these were designed not to loop the loop. But nevertheless, as we hurtled between that exquisitely terrifying moment when the world and the wind stopped and our bellies felt feather-light and our eyes widened into saucers, nevertheless, we told ourselves, this one might go all the way!

Yes, there is something about swings. Is it the pitched rush of wind and sound as you rush towards earth and then back up into the sky? Or is it that fragment of moment of stillness, when you are free – as weightless as a bird on the wing? Perhaps it’s a bit of both. But I think, personally, it is the still-point. The top of the arc. The feeling of void, inside and out. The rush is all part of the excitement to get to that place – but the rush without that poised balance at the end of the arc would be nothing. I don’t know what to call those points – one at each end of an arc. I thought there must be some fancy term – but apparently not. Disappointingly, geometrists tell me they are simply called ‘end-points.’ Perhaps if we left the naming of geometric names to the astronomers they would come up with a much better term. Any community that can come up with azimuth, sidereal time, and obliquity of the ecliptic will get my vote anytime!

So, it is this illusion that each year, twice a year, we meet this still-point – the utmost end of the arc’s distance of travel – in our annual journey around the sun – with all the mystery that is attached to that idea – the sense of poise, stillness, and that brief moment of otherness, the breathless weightlessness of the unordinary. The passing instant when we slip from this world and become and experience something quite different – something outside our normal earth-based lives.

And it is a special – exceptional – type of stillness or silence or peace. It’s not the stillness that derives from balance here. This not equilibrium – a balance – in the sense of the equinox – where light and dark equally share the day. This is the stillness that comes at the very, very, edge of the tipping point. The edge of a precipice – teetering. And for this one grasped instant, we break free into the unordinary, hanging suspended at the very edge of our own, earthly and earthy, event horizon.  

Perhaps that is why I rather ridiculously look forward to these natural mileposts in the year. Ridiculous, because I know this is all just imagined. They don’t exist in physics, but nevertheless they do exist in experience – as I watch the sun’s progress back and forward along the east and western horizons. We’ve pulled on the rope as hard as we can, this is as high as we’ll go – WAAAIIIITTTT for it! That one instant of calm, when the natural order dissolves away, the things that bind us to the ground are cut free. Afloat in the eye of the hurricane. It’s compelling – even if, I know deep down, it is illusory and based only from my single perspective – but then we could say that about most things and creeds (sacred and secular, scientific and economic) that we hold dear.

Perhaps – that is why this unease coming at this precise time is hitting so hard. I don’t know. Perhaps, it’s entirely due to other things. All I know is that I am finding it hard to walk a balanced path, to stop the noise, to focus. These cardinal points in the year – and particularly the solstices – have for millennia, functioned as stopping places. Places to pause and reflect: To light the bonfires, pour out the beer, sing the tales of the song-ways of old to create the dream ways to lead us into our futures, tell the old stories for new times. And, boy, do I feel that, as a planet, we need that right now! The still-point above the plummeting precipice. But I also need to experience that individually as well. And right now, it’s hard.

Unsettled, dis-eased. That hushed, exhilarating moment of calm; the stillness at the end-point, is fractured, disturbed. The waters calm, the surface mirrors and then the wind lightly ruffles it and the clouds blur and reflections deform; distort. A hundred and one, unbidden, voiced and unvoiced thoughts clutter and jostle. Emails ping and pile up. A siren drowns out the robin’s song. I have been working on this for well over a year. I know exactly what I want to say – it’s just finding the way to say it that is left to find. This should be easy. It’s the part I enjoy most. It’s fun. Light relief. Letting words run through my fingers, letting them play in my head and on the page, letting them run free and wild – feeling them mould ideas in new ways. It never ends quite how I expect. But I like that – walking into the dark; writing into the night.

It should be easy, if I could just find some space, some silence, some quiet, SETTLED place. But the wind ruffles the mirrored surface and someone drops into the water a stone and once more my mind turns in – disturbed, unsettled, going everywhere and nowhere. Have you been feeling that too? Finding yourself staring into space, captivated by a maelstrom of thoughts and unidentifiable feelings? Perhaps, in some way, if we let them, our minds… or what its, our psyche, our consciousness, our souls? Well, whatever it is, perhaps it is in some way sensitive to the outer environments in which we live. Perhaps, deep down, we know that there are deeper existential questions that are needing to be addressed. Whatever the case, this week particularly, I am struggling to know how to deal with it all.

We are living in uncertain times, in an uncertain world. We’re constantly bombarded with bad news, real and constructed. It should not be a surprise to find that this leaves us feeling unsettled, disturbed. And we pick our way through the chaos of noise trying to find the pathless path amid the clamour; to look up and find our polestar, to look across and connect with lives that have deeper roots than us and a shady canopy that can shelter us.

And so tonight, we hang poised at the end-point of the sun’s westward journey. On the longest day of the year. On the night of twilights; a night that never truly gets dark. Unsettled at the still-point of the year. We wait breath bated for the plunge back down and the giddy rush of air. Tell you what! Let’s both grab that rope and pull it for all its worth – let’s see if we can make our worlds spin!!!

For we are the people who sit alone in the dark on muggy summer nights, when the darkness doesn’t fully come and catch the glimpse of firefly dance and are entranced, only to later find that they’re the sparks of steel grinding against steel as a train clatters past But, it reminds us that we do live in a world in which fireflies exist. And if the sirens do drown out the robin’s song, we have, at least, heard the robin sing. And if there are storm clouds gather growling on the western slopes of the sky and our hearts shrink back, at least we know that, when the thunder comes, we WILL find a new way to dance in the rain. 

And this! I mean this time right now. The feeling of uncertainty, being disturbed, unsettled. Doesn’t it strike you too as, well, rather amazing. Here I am a grown man, approaching the final stages of my life and finding that, after sixty-five circles around a little star on the edge of a whirling galaxy, that I still don’t know how to live it! That is rather incredible. I am a child again – but this time I know it is in a broken world – and as scary as it sometimes feels, it’s sounds great too. I can try new stuff. Do you feel that too? Will you come with me?

No one said this life would be easy – but let’s make it wonderful and exhilarating and fill it with something beautiful!

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