Walk by the river Tweed in the Scottish Borders. Sunlight and the trees all these colours, a display, a parade, as if to say, this is who we really are, drink deep, for what you see now will soon be gone. A feeling opens in me, a realisation, that this day is offered to me as a gift. It opens like a fan. Here it is, it’s yours – no, it is you.
Time drops away. It is a subtle feeling that holds the day, usually it does, the changing light meshing with your ideas of what you’ll do with this day, what you and time and light will wyrk (in that old sense of craftsmanship) together. It vanishes. The colours of the trees turn luminous and there is the faint sound of the river. There’s no schedule to this day. Such freedom. I don’t have to think – I only have an hour or two. I don’t have to think – I may have to turn back if this walk is too far. So each step is in the present moment. A gift spilling out across the fields, the river, the trees splashing the banks with colour. This is the travelling feeling.
I pass a holly tree, with bright red berries. The path, in places, is thickly carpeted with yellow leaves, so bright I have to blink.
A heron flies up from the river bank, close to me. Parts of the path are muddy and dried grasses hang from low branches showing where the water had risen to and then retreated, leaving its residue of grey grass and bleached twigs behind. The river is still high and wide, flowing with that certainty that only rain-swollen rivers know. I note its purpose, this mighty being close to me, showing its reflection only, sun-dazzled surface, with the light-coloured leaf cargo sailing downstream. I only see light, while the underwater is obscured, murky, secretive.
The bridge is pink stone lit with sunshine. The beech trees lean over the river. I wonder why they grow at such an angle, why their branches stretch out across the water as if it was their destination. The light falls between the tree trunks, bars of shade striping the ground.
I sit on a fallen pine trunk lying near the river bank. Drink coffee I brought with me in a flask.
No wind. As if the season holds its breath and pauses. This is one of the thresholds of the year, marking transition. It is these still points that make you realise that all is in movement, all the time, and this movement is life itself. The sun, the river, the fallen pine log that I’m sitting on with a natural declivity that holds my coffee cup, the coffee itself, all these are miracles. The movement joins with the unmoving.
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Walk among the hills, also Scottish Borders. At first the road goes steeply uphill but once you’ve gained that rise, it levels out for a while and there is this sense of having reached somewhere else entirely. You are high up now, out of the valley with all its connotations of a populated place, the whole human world of mingling and exchange, of motion and communication, of traffic and commerce. Valley world falls away, is out of sight and hearing.
Among the hills, it is completely still, no wind at all, and so silent, I walk quietly not to disturb it. Just a few crows calling. The hills catch the sun’s warmth as if you have crept a little closer to it. The quiet and the stillness remind me of walking in Greece last year, from Triklino to Pelekas. Not as hot of course, but that same stillness and quiet.
The road goes a little further uphill, with a bank of pine and beech trees on the left.
A track leads off the road, swinging right, skirting a small farm, dips down a little, crosses the old railway track, then goes uphill again with beech trees on the left, to a hilltop, cutting through a pine and spruce plantation. Just before the thicket of trees, a solitary bull sits on the horizon. I’m about to take a photograph of him perched on the top of the world, when he senses my presence and gets up, looks at me.
The cutting through the trees is a kind of last resting place for various farm machines.
On the other side, a view down into a different valley. There is still this magical sense of stillness, of being on the top of the world, looking down on human life, a wider view of everything, and the calm and detachment that comes from that.
This is the first time I’ve walked here in the morning (and there is always something special about morning light) and I’ve not been here since high summer, when the trees wore thick green coats of leaves. Now, there are only a few rusty leaves remaining on the branches.
It’s downhill now, with beech and pine trees on the right. These beech trees look as if they have been caught in movement, swirling dervish trees. I wonder if to trees, our lives seem as brief as those of gnats and mayflies seem to us. In their slow and graceful dance, do they see us as moving at high speed, so fast we can take off from the ground and fly through the air?
Past the farm near the main road, cross over that and continue on a track right down to the valley. I pass a human being and we exchange greetings. Lovely morning, isn’t it?
A pedestrian bridge over the small river, uphill again to the back road, which was once the main road, for stagecoaches, and home.
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