Beauty Was an Ocean
“Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.”
Pooh
Time went by; the world turned its shoulder to the sun and winter came again. It spun on and tilted us back to the warmth of spring. May came, and brought a weather forecast of a week as full of sunshine as I had ever seen, so I took myself off to the forest again.
There were several places I knew of where I longed to spend a night in a tent; invitingly flat and quiet patches of ground, close to some of the deepest reaches of the woods. The act of sleeping in the forest can make it feel truly home; weaving yourself deeper into the fabric of nature. As the light fades and you cinch the drawcord on your sleeping bag closed, there is real joy in knowing that you don’t need to leave. Besides that, I have always seen it as a good thing to see both sunrise and sunset on the same day. There is a deep satisfaction in knowing that every single second of light has been well spent; that you have used it all.
Naturally, the first night had to be at the dark moor. I knew the exact place, just beside the same clearing where I watched the light dance from my fingertips in the golden mist. There’s a flat place on an old glacial mound of stone. It’s covered now in moss, heather and pine needles, and grand old trees, but it’s dry underneath. It’s the perfect place to sit and listen, and to sleep. From this refuge in the trees you can look out on the clearing and to the hills in the distance. The forest stacks itself in layers – small trees at the front, big ones at the back. It’s always that way – pine trees need lots of light to grow, so the young ones are often found at the edge of the woods, or filling in the clearings. If I could sit for long enough, I would watch the forest flow across the land like the shadow of a cloud.
It was in warm evening light that I unslung my heavy rucksack, pushed poles into fabric sleeves and pegs into soft soil. I love the process of camping. It requires just the right blend of knowledge, experience and artistry to do it well. And I love the way it focuses the attention and narrows the mind to the here-and-now. Anxieties and worries about the future and the wider world drift away, as you concern yourself purely with practical matters and the things that are within your control. You worry no more about the state of the world and instead think only about where you will get water, whether or not to add another layer of clothing, and keeping things orderly in your camp.
Best of all, you are absolutely present in the world. Natural happenings, big or small, take their rightfully important places when you are no longer simply a visitor, and you are free to take them in. You are free to hang around, to dawdle and drift about, to comb the ground for treasures with one eye constantly on the weather. But even if it should rain iron stair-rods, forcing you to take shelter in the tent, still you are happy to be there, to have nothing to do but listen to the sound of the rain, safe and snug and dry under canvas.
With the tent erected and everything in order I took a short walk among the bog grass and pine trees of the clearing. The first midges were coming out, but it was too early in the season for them to bite. Instead they did beautiful dances in shafts of sunlight that sneaked through the gauntlet of pine branches and juniper bushes. The sky was a lustrous pearly blue, the mountains white under a healthy amount of spring snow. The forest could not have been more welcoming. Before I turned in for the night my senses were drawn upwards by the honking of geese, and the rush of air over grey wings. A pair of greylags circled the clearing, then passed northward.
As darkness fell I retreated to bed, but lay awake for a long time. Night time was the greatest unknown for me in the forest, and there was so much to be learned by simply listening to the night noises. Familiar things took on new intensity when the sight of them was taken away – the wind in the branches, the trickle of water, the fall of needles on canvas. Tiny noises take on new magnitude by the magic of quietness and imagination. The folding of a blade of grass is like the fall of a mighty tree. The trickle of a burn becomes a thundering spate. A ripple kissed shore rages like a storm. Through such sounds I dozed, half aware. Then through the dark would cut some startling sound that could not be ignored. A roe deer barking close by brought my eyes open with a snap. As night drew on into the earliest reaches of morning a warbling chittering noise echoed among the pine – black grouse at the lek, as clear as a church bell on morning mist.
I was out of the tent early – very early – walking through cold air to the top of the hill where I could watch the sun rise above the hills and flood the forest with light. A slight frost clung to the tips of heather sprigs, white under the purple sky. The cold morning air felt taut with anticipation. I sensed a primal awareness among all things that this was a sacred time of silence, and now only the rushing of water down distant mountain slopes made any sound at all. The woods were yet in shadow – the hills blue in the distance beneath a burgeoning orange glow.
Birch trees rather than pines grow at the top of the hill, their fineliner branches gently swollen by the buds that bear the promise of spring. Before me was that huge sweep of air that lies between the mountains and the forest – a vast bowl of wood and glen, beginning to fill with light. A fine mist rose from the cold ground as the frost started to vaporise. For mile on mile the forest began to glow with that suffuse golden peace I had seen once before. I watched as the shadows fell into the earth and the world seemed to take shape from some ethereal clay. I had to admit to myself, it was the closest thing I could imagine to the story of Genesis – the shaping of the world from void.
Beauty was an ocean. Like water, filling the space in which it is contained, the wonder of the morning existed everywhere. Realising this, I relaxed into the moment, knowing that there was no right or wrong place to be. I descended again into the deeps of the wood by a circuitous route to take in every scene of wonder I could find. The mountains were bright in the morning sun, the wood full of sunbeams and shadows. Day had truly arrived when I returned to the tent to find it wet and sagging from melted frost. I packed it away, slung my heavy bag on my shoulders once more and departed.
On the evening of that same day I was newly encamped beside the shining waters of a nearby loch, watching the sun perform the opposite trick. From brightness the sky faded through many colours to dusk. The noisy ambience of day-time began to quiet, and stillness carried itself over the air once more, while the shadows crept from their hiding places to throw their cloaks over the distant shore. The dancing and rippling reflections on the loch, which teased and pulled apart the warmly coloured clouds, gradually turned to perfect mirror stillness.
My tent that night was pitched beneath a broken pine that turned out to be the favoured perch of a tawny owl. So, I slept when I could in between hooting calls. Fair enough, I thought. Noisy neighbours have to be tolerated when you are the visitor.
In the darkness outside mist was rising thickly from the loch and drifting like a ghost in among the trees. The dawn was muted and white when it came. The fog was dense and cold – I could not see more than a few feet. When the sun crept into view from behind the edge of the hills, it was nothing more than a pale disc hiding behind the faint shadows of trees. A ghost sun rising on a ghost world.
Hadn’t I just done this? Hadn’t I just been here watching the sun rise over a quiet land? It seemed as if no time had passed, as if I was still present in the same moment from the previous morning. Maybe time had gone by, or maybe I’d just flitted instantly from the top of the hill to the shore of the loch. Where the fog thinned above me, I could see the same blue sky filling with light.
It seemed I blinked, and then I found myself in a different place, up among the mountains where the forest margin fringed into the wide heather moors. I pitched the tent again among pines whose branches glowed red in the setting sun, around a mountain lochan stippled by the blades of water grasses, where I retreated again to my sleeping bag as darkness returned.
I lay in the warm softness of the down bag under the familiar contours of the tent fabric, wondering what sights might lie ahead in the morning. Spring and summer nights are short here – I would not have to wait long to find out. The sun did not set until after 9pm, and would rise again around 5am. Night was really no more than an extended twilight during which the sun swung under the northern horizon in a red glow. And there I was, waiting in vigil, watching it whirl by again like the flash of a lighthouse. I could not sleep. I kept sitting up and staring through the unzipped tent flap towards the water, watching the blue darkness, watching the wheeling stars. Despite the fatigue I was feeling; the weight of my eyes and the heaviness in my body, I was so excited. I was more excited with every passing night. Spring sunrises pass most of us by while we sleep, caught up in our tyrannical routines and priorities. But once I had begun to look there was nothing as urgent, as important, or as wonderful, as simply watching the sun come up again.
Once more I left the tent shortly before sunrise and sat by the water to wait. The light of the gloaming lay on everything. The stillness of morning deepend further still, to an infinite silence as heavy as the sky itself. No bird or any creature on earth dared move. I wished to spend forever in that moment, in an everlasting sanguine sunrise. A constant beginning.
Dawn broke again through the woods, injecting a scarlet stripe of light across the blue mountains. It flowed downhill like water to where I sat by the loch, which erupted the moment it was touched with the seemingly inevitable vapours of sunlit mist. I started to feel something like a sense of drifting in time. It was all happening again, with perfect repetition. I was starting to lose my sense of when and where I was. Was this the same morning? The same stretching moment? I was disoriented on the spinning top of the world, but delighted and enchanted by the lights and colours as they flashed by. The strangest thing was that I could not decide whether this all felt like unreality, or actuality.
Like a leaping fish, the sun arced upward into the sky, reached its apogee, and plummeted back under the horizon again. For the last time, I lay in the tent waiting for the next jump.
4.30am, and I’d been awake since 3am, again. I was sleepy, euphoric, calm; waiting and listening to the quiet world. This pitch was on a quiet hillside, wooded with birch and overlooking the mountains beyond another crystal clear loch, mirror calm. The world was drawing its breath. I took my place on a huge stone above a crag, looking out across the wooded slopes, down to the last loch and dim shapes of the hills beyond, beneath a brightening sky. With senses expanded, I looked at nothing and everything at once. My attention lay over everything with ease.
As the purple gloom faded away creatures began to stir, and through the cool unbroken air the sounds of flying geese came to me again. The rushing of air across wings, and a back-and-forth honking that traced its way from one ear to the other as they passed me by. I looked down from my hilltop to the water of the loch under a canopy of fog. There I found four dark specks streaking across the milky brume, far below me. As their wings brushed the top of the mist they left swirling vortices in their wake.
The birds flew through a sky that was not yet spoiled by light or noise. Day takes its time to stir and shake off the shadow, reluctant to give up the quiet night. But the glow in the northeast sky was the rising of the curtain that must begin the show, and while I waited for the appearance of the day I sat back among the stalks of heather and blaeberry, listening to the flight of geese. It was the very sound of spring.
It’s one thing to watch a single sunrise, to take in the deep peace that pervades everything at twilight. But to do so over and over, it has changed me. I’m tuning in to a deeper rhythm of time. The long song of the slow land, set to the beat of light and dark. Sleep and wakefulness have blended, and everything is now determined by how long it is until sunset, how long it’s been since sunrise; not by minor happenings and self-important routines. The sights I’ve seen while others slept… I feel like I’m carrying knowledge of something they haven’t even guessed at.
The sunrise is putting the lie to one of the assumptions about how I’ve always sensed the world; how I’ve lived in it. Living as if each day is separate, with a beginning and an end. The forest has taught me that there is only a constant now. Time does not count itself or divide itself, even by days. Only now matters. Only now is real. I watched the sun set, and now I watch it rise again. Tomorrow never seems to come, yet it’s always here. I’m living in yesterday’s tomorrow, tomorrow’s yesterday. Every moment coexists. ‘Now’ is not a short time.
As the sun crept over the horizon the first glows of red caressed the tops of mountains and flowed down their flanks toward the mist that lay in valleys and between trees. So the curtain of night did not rise, but instead sank into the earth, revealing what was only imagined by night. Or perhaps what really happened is that the rising of day obscured the dark. Either way, I knew the shadows were not gone, but were just hiding in the ground.
Every day is filled with light, and every night by dark; they are each separate and have their own form. But it’s just an illusion caused by the turning of the world, held in an embrace of light. It’s always sunrise and sunset somewhere. A joined up circle of light at the edge of the constant Day and Night through which we roll. And as I pass through it, for a few seconds everything balances upon a razor edged moment. The rim of the rising sun cuts as surely as a blade – irrevocably slicing the then of night and now of this ‘new’ day. But in that moment of separation, when both night and day are still at least partially joined by a half risen sun, lies magic and wonder.
The air came fully to life with birdsong, for they had important business to be about. Colour flooded into the forest, and with the light now strong and growing stronger I got on the move, searching through the ocean of beauty for a place to compose a photograph. In some places the simple geometry of physical features resonates with some internal bell. The seeming disorder of the place – branches, rocks and pools of water all over the place – conspire to form a perfect revelation. And then you understand; this is how the world is meant to be seen.
Before long the orb was fully risen, travelling in stately manner along the ecliptic, though it seemed from here to be starting a long haul up into the sky. The world was transformed as it climbed. Everything now given shape and definition again by light, the dark quiet of night now vanished. The vapours above the loch – which walked the lines between warm and cold, wet and dry, air and ground – began to curl and dance while the last shadows draped themselves through it, clinging to tree tops.
At last I packed the tent, and left the woods.