Adrift Among Stars

“To fish is to be held in the heart of a stillness in which nothing is still. It is to wait patiently for a time that has already been imagined, yet which may never come. It is to live between tenses, in anticipation of a perfect present. “

 

Mallachy Tallack

 

Day-time is only a part of the land’s story, and not necessarily the best part. One night I found myself beside Loch Morlich. I had been hoping for a glimpse of the aurora, but very little was to be seen. Nonetheless, there I was at around midnight, standing on the shore. Despite the absence of the northern lights, still the night sky held me spellbound. Once again the mountains were deeper shadows against a dark blackness, scattered with a thousand diamond-brilliant stars. A streak of light faintly showed the Milky Way, as if a bucket of silver dust had been emptied across the gently flowing ink of night. The water of the loch itself was utterly still, so the whole scene was repeated in perfect balanced reflection. I walked out a little into the shallow water, and once the water had settled around my feet again I seemed to be surrounded by nothing but the heavens, above and below. I was standing on a silky sky, held in the tender embrace of the universe.

 

For several minutes I simply stood, watching, but I was not alone out there. Somewhere across the loch in the darkness someone started to play music on a wooden flute. Note by note, melody of darkness drifting across the perfectly still water. I did not know the tune, yet its rise and fall felt as old and familiar as the upslant and downslash of the sweeping Cairngorm silhouettes. Music of the Sky. Music of the Water. Music of the Earth. Each note was long, given time to be savoured, as if every note needed time to fill that immensity of starlit space. Lingering over a note, now changing through the scale, now going back. It’s not the note itself that makes the music; it’s the change from one to another. It’s the way they drift from anticipation to memory, easing open the Now and widening it. It was far off, but fluttered through the distance to me clearly in the starlit darkness. A small sound in a vast quietness. 

 

Chills cascaded through my body as I stood there, my skin prickling and muscles shuddering as I stared down at the stars below the mountains, as well as the stars above. It was a moment of unexpected perfection. Absolute union of music and place. That sweet old tune, full of life’s bittersweet joy and longing. A single instrument, no words, note by note among the stars and hills. Yet now I can not recall a single second of how it went. Could it have been the music of the Sidhe? Beckoning me and entrapping me there forever? If it were, then let me be trapped.

 

Quite suddenly I felt a moment of vertigo, as if I had lost all perspective of the things around me. My leg twitched of its own accord in search of security, nosiomely through the water. A stone turned beneath my foot and my body suddenly felt solid and secure once more. The ripples cast by my leg spread out and out, undulating the stars and putting reality back in its usual place. Sky above, water below. A moment later the musician of the dark ceased their recital, and whoever they were, they did not play another. Silence rushed in again as the music stopped, and its ending was a beautiful as its beginning.

 

I turned, shattering the reflected cosmos, and splashed back to the shore. 

 

The night was not done with me yet though – it felt full of magic and life and things that needed to be seen. My mind was tugging at the threads of light that joined me to the stars, and the filaments of sound and silence which lay like a web across the land. I felt as if I were a witness to some great and wonderful event; as if I could feel the whole north of the world arcing out beyond the horizon, bathing in the light of the stars. As if I could see the whole world, suspended in light, spinning on through eternity. And I wanted another piece. I did not want the music to end yet.

 

From the loch I walked in among the trees, following a path that was well known yet alien in the dark. It was true dark in the woods, away from the loch. The canopy cast twisted shapes across the stars and the ground soaked up the little light that landed there. I moved slowly, carefully, secretly. I knew the way, but by night it seemed so much longer. By day things are separated from each other and given definition by light. Each tree and bush is made distinct. But in the darkness, there is an intangible joining up of things. One tree becomes another, together they become the forest, and the forest is everywhere. Shadows run together in the dark and things hiding in the recesses of imagination come out. Features overlooked and ignored in light become landmarks and obstacles in their own right, seen and felt as it were for the first time. You feel surrounded by a presence you can’t see and can’t grasp. Something primal rises inside you. It might be fear if given its head, but it’s really just an awareness, a guessing at all you cannot see, but can feel.

 

Sounds passed through the night air, but they left no mark. The darkness was instantly quiet again. A tawny owl hooted softly somewhere nearby, and its call fell folded into nothingness so quickly that I wondered if I really heard it at all. Heather stalks scratched at my trouser legs with each step. It was that kind of silence some people can’t stand – where they’ll whistle or hum or shout just to hear anything but the darkness pressing in. But I love to listen to it, because it feels like something important could happen at any second. It’s a sit-up-and-pay-attention kind of quiet.

 

At last I came out of the trees again, onto open ground on the hillside above the loch. Here I picked a good place to settle, and lay down on my back to gaze up at the stars. I was careful to orient myself so that no piece of the earth – no hilltop or tree branch – intruded on my peripheral vision. The familiar shapes of the constellations drifted there in front of my eyes. Polaris, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Hercules… more that I can’t name. I can see nothing but the stars. Millions and millions of them.

 

I stretched out my arms to either side, and bit by bit I asked my body to relax completely. I’d done this before – if I could relax totally, stay utterly still, then I’d start to lose any sensation at all that I was lying on my back. As if floating in water, I’d lose the feeling that I was in contact with anything, like the brief moment of vertigo I had felt earlier. With nothing but the stars in my vision I could be adrift in the universe. I gradually lost all sense of orientation completely, all sense of scale. Was I tiny, or did my arms span the cosmos?

I felt as if I was a tiny point of consciousness inside my own body. I flexed a foot, and it felt like something happening miles away. My body was as vast as the universe, and somewhere distant my hands turned over and grasped the heather, to stop myself plummeting off the tiny earth and into the night sky. The sky was no longer above me but rather in front. I did not lie on the ground but was simply stuck to the earth, glued to it by gravity as it went joyriding through the sky. Adrift among the stars, I was riding the waves of the galactic spiral. But then I thought of everything happening at my back. Behind me, on the other side of the world, where the sun was shining on faraway lands, the wind blowing, and bright waves rolled and crumpled on distant shores. 

 

Then, much closer by, a roe deer barked in the night, and that brought me right back to earth, to the here and now, in a reawakened and reconnected body. Of all the night time noises in these woods, the most arresting is the bark of the roe deer. So very like a dog, and yet so unlike it that you can’t help but think with alarm ‘what was that?’ A rasping screech that you would think must come from some horribly fanged predator, ready to drag you off in the night. But I reminded myself that it was just a deer.

 

Roe deer are the ever present yet invisible companion in the forest. Every time I go there I feel like I am a step behind them, or that they’re trotting along in my footprints, laughing at me. I can follow their tracks, spot their sign and hear their calls, but they are tricky to get close to. Their territorial barking is often heard at night among the trees. So I lay there, listening now to the politicking and bickering over territories in the night.

 

Not so long ago I had heard the same thing, when I had been trying and mostly failing to photograph a night time mist that lay thinly between the trees in a patch of pines, all brilliantly lit by a newly risen full moon that had sneaked up over the edge of the world while no-one was looking. It hung low in the southern sky, slightly red and surrounded by a blazing halo of rainbow colours. The moon flooded the landscape with an eerie brightness, surrounded by the diamond hard stars. The mist glowed faintly in the light, drifting down between the silhouettes of sleeping pines. A spectre light, as if the veils between worlds were thin and I was looking at the forest of the past.

 

Through the mist came the sound of the hidden deer. It was the time of the rut, and both reds and roes were out in force that night. I imagined the bucks and stags strutting and snorting about, tearing up the ground with their hooves and facing off against one another with all the swagger and bravado of teenage boys trying to impress the girls. But all I could hear was the barking in the darkness, and the occasional clatter of antlers. With every roar and clack the silence briefly parted in shock, then enveloped the noise and folded it back into the night, as if it had never been, leaving me standing there in shock and wonder.

Just a deer. Just the moon. Just darkness and the earth and me, lying on a hillside where only the stars can find me.

 

I felt a mighty yawn crack my jaw. Time to go. I heaved myself back to my feet, my body feeling oh so normal once again. Actually, feeling tired finally. Wandering back down through the black branches I looked up and caught the unmistakable shape of the Great Bear hanging in the north sky, leading me home.