Let the World Come to Me

“This is the face of Nature, unchanged since it left the hands of its Maker, a soundless, endless river, flowing forever onward in the perpetual cycle which is the immutable law of the universe.”

 

Grey Owl

 

The memory of those two moments when I had felt genuine connection with the world – by the river and in the sunlit mist – were henceforth never far from my mind when I walked through the woods. I wondered if the seeking of quiet and stillness in the forest could be my path toward a more profound sense of belonging, and so I began to make a particular point of seeking it.

 

Autumn came suddenly one year to the Cairngorms. Summer had stretched itself out like a slow and lazy dog reluctant to move, until suddenly shifting off with unexpected pizzazz. A cold snap passed through the woods with clear nights and misty mornings. The arrowhead leaves of a million birch trees were suddenly and universally transformed from the deep greens of summer to a riot of gold. The pines stayed green, as always.

 

The sun beamed through brightly trimmed clouds, and fell through the birch branches to a carpet of soft browning grass. Beneath the trees where I fox-walked through a tapestry of colour, I stopped to listen. Just to listen. I didn’t really hear anything, but I let the quietness in again. 

 

I was on my way to the secret waterfall. It lies on a hillside in the forest – a deluge of rock and water dozens of metres long, yet invisible until you are there beside it. The burn rises high up in the hills and weaves down the cleft between two peaks. In a deepening gully it flows fast as it approaches the lowest flank of the mountain. Then suddenly in a series of drops and slides it plunges down through the forest. It broadens across slabs and ledges, narrows in chutes and winds across stone faces it has spent millenia shaping into scalloped curves. Water is a fine sculptor. In the lull of summer dry spells it is a wet trickle across baked stone. In winter’s spate it is a white slash, foaming and crashing like thunder through the still woods. Full of weight and power and as much in the air as it is upon the ground.

 

The waterfall had a healthy flow that day and the water echoed loudly in the woods. Yet, as I came near, I stepped inside a stillness so profound and arresting it was like walking right into that pane of glass that stands between us and true perception. I had forgotten it was there until I hit it. One second walking; the next, brought up short, sparking with awareness. Another one of those stillnesses that is not in fact silent. The sound of water hushing in an endless sigh, carried on the gentle wind. But water is a quiet sound. It’s the first sound there ever was on earth, besides the wind, and its music is not done yet. 

 

Very slowly I knelt down, pushing both knees into the soil and sitting back on my heels. I didn’t want to go further yet. I wanted to watch, to wait, to listen, let the world come to me right here. The ground was nice and soft; warm and dry in the autumn sun. It was a pleasant place to be. Here I could sit, and look at nothing in particular, yet not feel like the eye lacked anything for its appetite. Just beside me ran a tiny stream – a silk-like tendril of the main waterfall that spilled off the side, came down the hill in its own track, and fell into its own little pool.

 

My sight was drawn down to a rock beside the glimmering water, where the ripple of the stream cast dancing lights across the mossy grey stone, like a cobweb that keeps being pulled apart and reshaping itself. Then my eye shifted, and traveled along the brilliant line of a glowing filament of actual spider silk. It drifted minutely in the breeze just enough that the light played along its length from end to end. Then I caught sight of other threads, twisting among the heather stalks and tree trunks as, gradually, more and more of the place revealed itself to me. 

 

I noticed a brilliant quartz crystal beside me, embedded in the stone beside the water, and once seen I could not help but see it, regardless of where else I looked. Then I noticed a spreading shockwave that pulsed within the pool as something impacted the water without breaking the fine tension. Was it a drop from above? Too dry for that today – was it something alive? I didn’t think so. Ah, there it came again – it was the bursting of an air bubble from the tumble of the burn. How did I not see it before? And now I have noticed the brown sword blades of grass, and the rusty zigzag of that fold of rock and the way the water filled it with such precision.

 

My eyes lingered on the rock as I realised how similar it was to one that I saw yesterday being hauled out of the ground by a mechanical digger, then broken into pieces with hydraulic drills. A rock that sat in silence for so many thousands and thousands of lifetimes. Broken open in a day for the crime of being in an inconvenient spot with a literally earth-shattering noise that hurt my head. Such indifference. It doesn’t matter. But also, it does.

My eyes flitted back to the water, to the cobweb, to the crystal, to the light, and to the stone. Now I found that I remained aware of them all, even though only one might hold my precise focus at a time. Each was like a bright light shining in darkness, that spread their light wider and wider across the forest. I became gradually more aware of the wider wood beyond – not in a general sense, but with precision, as if the focus of my gaze was universal rather than local. I did not simply see trees – I saw roots, trunks, bark, needles, sprigs, curves, lines, shadow, and colour. I saw meticulous detail, form and light. 

 

I bore this sense of hyper-awareness as I stood once more and walked to the edge of the waterfall. The main flow of the cascade split in two, splitting around a thin island of sorts all the way down the middle, between the two halves. It was steep and stony, but even still had some trees growing on it. They clung to the bare rock with hard and twisted roots. 

 

I hopped across the watery gap to the island, and made my way upwards, with the water roaring on both sides. Tapestries of colour wove in and out of view as I passed among the trees. Moss so darkly green and wet it seemed black, growing in the deep shadows behind the fall; white flood of water streaking across the air; gold and copper ferns dangling fractal leaves into the light. The pine trees gripping the shallow soil with gnarled root fingers. I plummeted into the depths of their detail – into twisted contortions of wood; patterns of grey lichen folios and scales; heaped brown pine needles and discarded fiery rowan leaves piling up in dark woody purlicues. 

 

I turned my attention to the water itself where it rolled over the slabs of rock, and let it settle there. Staring into the creamy foam as it hushed across dark and shiny mosses, my perspective suddenly shifted.  I felt for a moment that the water was actually still. It was only churned into such whiteness by the upward motion of the landscape through it; just as I sometimes feel that I do not walk from place to place, but turn the world beneath my feet until the place arrives. 

 

Again I pondered the way in which water is all connected, as I did that evening by the Tay; sitting by the river feeling the weight of it all. I considered the way rivers physically join themselves to every other river. If I put my hand in this waterfall I’m not simply touching ‘the water’. I’m touching The Water – like touching The Earth or The Atmosphere. It is no less than all the water on earth that flows to the sea. One vast and infinitely fine, complex shape that is constantly changing, surging, flowing. This bit of waterfall connects to the river below, and to the sea, and the sea touches all those other rivers, going up into mountains, glaciers and icecaps and aquifers all around the world. If I could release my spirit into it, to race along and explore every part, then I could dash up into the sub glacial meltwaters of Greenland’s icecap; dive into the blackness of the Mariana trench, or rise bubbling from rock in the Cairngorms. They say you can never put your hand in the same river twice. I say, you can only put your hand in The River – and it is always the same River.

 

I suddenly wanted to go and see where the waterfall began, up there in the hills. I was filled with the excitement of the world. The frenetic energy of it was filling me up like electricity, and I needed to connect with something – to ‘earth’ myself. I wanted very much to get somewhere high up, in the hills above where the river began, to look out on the world and in upon the secrets of the mountain.

 

I clambered up the side of the waterfall until I found the trail that led up onto the red-green hills of autumn, out above the forest and into the wide open mountainside. I hoped that I would be able to hold on to the sense of expanded attention and clear sight I had found in the stillness beside the waterfall, but as I sweated in the warm evening wind I lost focus. My attention faded back to normality, back to drifting thoughts as my body did the work of walking. An hour went by, shoving the world down as Norman MacCaig would have it (and he was right). An hour of foot scuffing, sweating, hard breathing and ‘pace yourself’ and ‘hurry up’ until finally I reached a place high up in the coire where the young river tumbled over rocks and into a clear pool. This was the place. I wasted no time, put my face to the water to drink and gulped down what the mountain had to give. Doing so I made a part of it part of myself. Water of life indeed.

 

Voices of wind and water carried to me in the mountain air. The wind was flighty, drafty, slight, coming and going. The voice of the water was stronger and constant within its tumbling notes. It sang another chorus of the song that’s been going on forever. The song of water started with the earth and will thread its way through until the utter end, yet I was present to hear a verse or two of this song, by some wonderful chance.

 

The water; the noise; the mountain; the forest; me. All kind of the same, in a way. All different aspects of the same reality, like different views of the same mountain. Constantly changing yet always the same thing. Different water, same river. Different time, same noise. Different shape, same mountain. Different trees, same forest. And me, watching, changing along with them all the time. More ephemeral than the stones, the water, the seasons, but full of potential. Full of living and a part of everything, not apart from it. I don’t want this moment, this feeling of life and strength and understanding, to end. But I can feel time passing, it will end, it must, but something is telling me it doesn’t matter. One moment makes way for another.

In the waters of the pool beside me the sun glittered upon rippling blue. I held my hand over the water and a web of filamental light flashed and danced in the palm of my hand. I knew I could close my fist, but that was something I could never hold. As if to illustrate this point, a nearby bird moment suddenly took to the air with a clear call. It flew up into the sunshine glare, every translucent feather brilliantly illuminated as if it were no more than a dragonfly or a mote of dust. Against the sky it traced a line in my eyes like a sparkler on bonfire night. A looping set of figure-eights, another for sheer joy, and then gone. Vanished like a phoenix.

I sensed the coming of winter in this place, even though it was only autumn then. I could feel its touch in the shape of the low-growing sedges, the ice-moved boulders, the cracked layers of granite. The snow patches yearning for new replenishment. Like a pair of empty boots, there are spaces where winter is conspicuous by its absence.

I washed my face in the pool once more, refreshed, and walked away across the rocky, boggy mountainside, connecting things together by breath, by step, and by sight.