Pause

Finding stillness at year’s end

In the past few days it’s been harder to walk the steep path to the summit of the ridge, though it isn’t exactly mountain steep, just a half-hour steady climb. It may be my age, or perhaps some subliminal virus. Or it could be my inner voice telling me to slow down, here comes the still point of the year. For god’s sake don’t miss it again!

For years I missed the winter solstice completely, overshooting it, always on some errand, fulfilling commitments to work and family, giving in to my culture’s activity addiction. For as long as I can remember I’ve dreaded the last days of December. The few family arguments I’ve had all happened at this time. The only occasion when I ever saw my dad cry was on Boxing Day. As parents or caregivers Christmas is the time to speed up, to run flat out, to feed the fucking machine, when your soul is screaming for stillness. Not this year. This year - soft rain; this year - leaf litter in the woods; this year - the last call of a robin at dusk, the first call of the owl.

The animals feel it. I watched a raven this morning high up, drifting and sliding down the wind, alone and silent, barely moving its wings. Just waiting, watching. I stopped for a while, watched and waited. I feel it too, the undertow, time pulling backwards as it flows forwards.

When I commuted to work I covered 40,000 miles a year. Driving 100 miles home in driving sleet at the end of December, going to bed exhausted, then getting up an almost-instant later to drive back, was borderline madness. No wonder I couldn’t relax at year’s end, in my head I was permanently on the road. This year I’ve yet to clock up 1000 miles, and perhaps that is still too little stillness.

A year is such a small span of time, a tiny tick of the infinity clock. But the distances we travel in that short span are enormous. Here in the UK, at 50 degrees latitude, we travel about 5.5 million miles a year as the planet spins. In a year the earth makes one revolution of the sun, a 580 million mile journey. The sun also revolves. Our vast solar system occupies a tiny portion of the Milky Way called the Orion Spur which travels 3.9 billion miles around the galaxy’s axis in a year (Our planet has completed 19 revolutions of the Milky Way so far, each taking approximately 230 million years to complete). And our galaxy also moves - 11 billion miles a year, pulled by the gravity of other nearby galaxies within the local group of the Virgo Supercluster of which it is a part. The supercluster, of course, is also on the move.

There are also journeys going on inside of us constantly. Two thirds of our body mass is made up of cells. Some of these, the fat and muscle cells, are static. But the trillions of cells which make up our blood are constantly on the move during their approximately 4 month lifespan. In this period they’ll travel 1.4 million miles, or, roughly speaking, to the moon and back 3 times. Feeling dizzy yet?

Out there, beyond the cliffs, is the vast ocean, which never stops moving, even when it freezes over in northern latitudes. On its surface ride, dive and feed huge flocks of seabirds that have bred on our coasts this summer, and which, apart from the few weeks when they sat on their eggs, never stopped moving. As they migrated, foraged and returned they travelled thousands of miles. Beneath them is the vast flowing cycle of vertically migrating fish continually rising into and sinking away from the sunlight. There isn’t a square inch of space on this tiny island that isn’t affected by the motion of the sea. Our constantly changing weathers, internal and external are influenced by it. The valleys that surround me here in the Welsh Marches are funnels for its squalls. The clouds overhead which shift constantly and rarely clear are being pulled and pushed by it.

What seems fixed is never so. Families, long-term friendships, homes and places transform. Last year I visited the house I was born in for the first time since my mum moved away. It had been a still point in my life for 55 years, the furniture never changing, the wardrobe in my old bedroom still full of the toys and games I played with as a boy. Gone now. The doors and windows had changed, the front garden had been dug up (I’m told the new owners have gutted the interior too, and it’s very on trend). My mum lives here in the borders now. A year ago she stood a little straighter. A year ago I hadn’t had to hold her hand when she walked across an uneven courtyard with me, and she hadn’t commented that it was the first time that had happened since I was tiny.

Everything moving, always. It’s no wonder that there comes a point in the yearly cycle where stillness is a dire necessity. We’ve needed to make rituals to help us achieve it, creating metaphors of death and birth for a time when both are happening in the same quantity and order as at any other time. But it’s the imagining that matters. And the remembering. I remember the stillness after my dad passed away, how everything stopped working suddenly, even the weather, as the softest rain landed on the window out of a clear blue sky. And I remember the cliff edge of silence a few seconds before my son was born, as my own youth fell away, and how his little face looked so much like my dad’s. Death and birth - the stillness. The whirling cycles beyond.

This year I published a book about twilight. It was written mostly when I was juggling a busy job, long commute and the nagging need to write and paint. My time was not my own. I’ve noticed things since I quit the day job that I wish I had explored in my book, particularly the pace of twilight at this time of year, which I don’t believe I’d paid enough attention to. The speed of the descent of night is so fast, you can feel it falling, feel the undertow of the dark pulling the hills and valleys into shadow. It’s a rush towards stillness, the proof that we need it, every living thing.

It’s time now for me to make an attempt at stillness. As a writer I’m trying to see this period as a parenthesis

(light a candle and stare).

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Dear friends and deep woodlanders,

Thank you so much for reading my work these past months. I began my Substack journey at the end of summer, almost on a whim, or at least on a “why not” after a fellow writer recommended the platform. I’ve had a ball so far. I love the discipline of writing a new post each week, trying to bring together interesting elements, to let them play, or the two-in-one as Don Paterson once said (he was referring to poetry, but I think it works for prose too). It’s also been wonderful to receive your views and comments. Thank you for those and please keep them coming. I love to hear from you.

I won’t be publishing here again until 6th January. In the new year I’ll have some news about a new project I’m about to undertake, a series of illustrated pieces which will evolve into a book and which will be available here first. I’ll also be adding essays so that all of my short prose work is available on Into the Deep Woods only.

I’ll leave you with a poem I’ve just written which I hope shares a little stillness amidst the great revolutions of life.

I wish you a wonderful year’s end. J

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At Year’s End

You slip down past sleep,
like sunlight through fog or smoke
feeling the edge of things somehow.
The chimney gasps as the sky goes slack,
dogs sleep like leafless trees
and children tie their dreams
to hooks in the roof-beams.
On the wall before you now
is the high green line of the tide.
Or is it a mark you made
one morning when the light returned,
the beginnings of a pattern or form?
It’s familiar now, though all has dropped away,
here in the same place on a similar day,
that flawless song you almost know.
It will take shape soon, when you begin to sing.
Not yet though, first the pause,
let your breath go out, 
then breath again. 

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