Perfect Stillness
“I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is ‘it’ – It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved.”
Virginia Woolf
Down to the forest loch we walk, our footsteps and voices breaking like a wave through the quiet woods. Before us are the last trees at the water’s edge, their roots like knuckling toes squirming into the sand, slowly and secretly. The little grey and green spaces between trees expand, opening up to an infinity of air as we reach the water and look out to the distant hill. There lies the forest fence, on the far side, with an arm of mist flowing over the hillside above, half obscuring the summit. The watersmoke coils down into the trees, and attention comes fleeting back again across the silver mirror to the near side, where wet and mucky branches hang low, curling away from their own reflections. The interlacing rings of a hundred million drops of water dripping, dripping, dripping. Beside the shore stand three grey rocks, lichen-thick and cold. Brown needles lie across them, and a broken branch floats unmoving in the water. My attention flicks from each to each, out across the water, back to myself, again to the rocks, and finally expands a little, settling like a blanket over the aggregate of the whole. I ask Kirsty if she understands what I mean by ‘painful beauty.’ She says, no, and I wonder how I can begin to explain. It is like unrequited love – joyful and sad. Something we know deeply, but can never approach.
I stand welly deep in the flooded sands of the shore. I can feel that sense of yearning again – the reaching out of the heart. Water around me, water beneath me. The rain starts to fall, the sound of rivers enters the place as the loch begins its dance. The ripples from my feet go out and out and out, compressing into fine strands. I look up and the water is silver, with black rainrings; I look down, at black water, and the rings are silver. Somewhere in that space, where the water turns from one to the other, is where the beauty of greatest pain lies. It twists my heart into exquisite tension, and its release is a burst of joy.
I ask her ‘You know the philosophical question about a tree falling in the woods? If there’s no-one there to hear it, does it still make a noise?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you think the same thing applies to beauty?’
‘You mean, if there’s no-one there to appreciate it, is it still beautiful?’
‘Exactly.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I think it does. I think it matters a great deal.’
The question is whether the world knows that it is beautiful or not? Does it love us back? No. It’s beauty is so effortless and eternal, but dispassionate. It happens without expecting anything in return; but more than that, it does so even without knowledge of its gift. The water twists the strings of my heart, and yet in water I can drown. But I dare say that in the waves of my thrashing would be the same beauty. I once saw a butterfly dying that way, wings spread helplessly in the water, glued in place by the surface tension. It beat and beat its wings, never even lifting its own body from the water. But with every beat it enlarged itself – rings of light spreading in a perfect butterfly shape outwards into the water. Glittering light played from them on to the hanging branches, and the brilliant light of its wings flashed with every flap. I carefully scooped it from the water with my hand and placed it on a stone to dry. The moment it could move again it flew straight back into the water.
Later, further on around the loch, and further on in seasons, we walk again down to the shore. The summer wind is lofting high clouds across the country, a speckle or two of rain is in the air, and the woods bristle with green. Kirsty slips into the water with Scout for her swim, and I continue along the bank, adrift.
I follow the brown earth of the trail over fallen branches, through green shores of blaeberry leaves, stepping gently and slowly through it. The splashing of Kirsty’s strokes and the snorting of Scout’s breath carries as easily as sunlight over the water and into the trees. I can hear the silence between each stroke, each doggy snort and each one of my breaths, pulsing like a heart and enfolding me a little more.
I reach a small earthy clearing beside a promontory and settle down in the middle of it, looking out. Kirsty and Scout are swimming around the island that stands crowded with pines and bushes in the distance. Beyond stands the treeline and the gentle curves of the mountain horizon. The wind ripples blue and black waves against the shore. I feel the rain in the air and settle to wait, knowing that if I do then a rainbow will likely follow soon.
I have nothing I wish to do but listen. The noises of swimming do not disturb the peace any more than the act of swimming damages the water. Cross legged, with my hands on my knees and my back upright, I become completely still. A sense of total content fills me. It’s like having a small bird land inside me, as surprising as it is wonderful. And I am just as keen to do nothing to startle it.
Clouds roll through the sky and light washes across the forest, coming and going. Sun, shadow, sun, shadow. With the edge of each cloud warmth and colour flush through the wood and over the water, and the general shadow retreats instantly to hard edged lines that hide between trees, dangle from branches and sit underneath me. The water catches light and rushes it all toward me in little waves, throwing bright glimmers ahead. With every shadow there is delight at knowing the sun will come again.
I can feel perfect stillness inside me. I test it with a tiny movement of the head and feel the slightest creak of a neck muscle. I lose nothing of the peace and happiness though, so I let my head turn further to allow my eyes the exploration of other sights. My gaze seems to land everywhere at once, but I am marvelled by the way the focus of my eyes shifts. Some new thing comes to the fore and is the new centre of everything, yet the world has remained still. My head rolls back, and my eyes go up to the clouds passing above the black tree tops once more. I look in all directions, but as every new thing is brought into view, something else is removed. I start to wonder about what lies beyond the edge of vision that I can not see. I’m always ignoring that blank bit at the back, which now seems so obviously present. I try to sneak it into sight, roll my eyes around as if trying to find the back of my own head. I can’t see it, but it must be there.
I let myself relax from these weird ideas, though. I do not wish to chase them. I can sense myself slipping into the beginning of something. The waves caress the light, the sun flows over the forest. Kirsty and Scout splash and laugh in the distance, while songbird wings brrrrrr overhead. Yet it does not happen in a series of moments, one second to the next. I feel it all within a single, lengthening moment that goes on and on and on like a sustained musical chord. It is all happening together. The river of time seems to have looped back on itself.
Most incredible of all, I can sit there, feel it, and enjoy it. I have not slipped off into a daydream or a trance. Nor is this an unexpected moment of shocked connection. There will be no ‘coming back’ because this time I am utterly and completely present to a degree I have never been before. I am not rushing outward to the woods, to the water. I am both in my self, and in the world, together, I am simply being, just as the forest is also being itself. The delineation of here and there, this and that is taken away. There is only… It. And It is everywhere. I am It. The trees are It. The softly glowing sun, the lapping water, the brown soil are all It.
In silence, It speaks. The world reaches out and embraces me, and in so doing, embraces itself, knows itself. I realise then that I am no bird perched on a branch, distinct, separate, visiting the tree. I am the leaf on the end of the twig, which means I am also the tree. I did not come into the world or into the forest, but out of it. I’m not a swimmer in the loch, but a wave. I am a little bit of the universe being me, so I am also the world, being. I am shining the sun as much as I am beating my heart, and I finally am everything I need to be, like a young deer in the forest. I realise then that I always was.
Sitting, watching, breathing, looking. The arcing rainbow I was so sure of comes out over the island but I do not reach for the camera. Kirsty and Scout return, laughing and refreshed, but still I sit, a smile on my face. I don’t want to move, to end this stillness. My body rocks ever so gently as blood pulses through my veins, strong and steady. A slightly turning head and a shifting gaze takes it all in.
But with a satisfied sigh I get back to my feet, and we go on hand in hand, Scout leaping, bouncing and sniffing his way through the forest. Later I will come to realise that this was a true meditation, entered into without trying. The spell does not break however. It won’t, because now I see that I have no need of a ‘connection’ to the woods at all. The woods have given me their ultimate gift – the understanding that connections only exist between two things that are separate. But the forest and I are one.
