West Penwith,
Cornwall.
(Written 21st February 2020)
There is no climbing down to the beach today. The sound of waves thumping against the cliffs below clearly tells me that the tide is right in. Last night’s storm has left a powerful swell and it’s pounding the bay with a mash of surf. Peering down, I can see pockets of exposed sand, brief glimpses of swept gold as the surf sweeps back leaving a glistening film. A single herring gull circles overhead, hovering deftly over the turbulence.
I wasn’t expecting to go any further today, and set about finding a sheltered place to sit half way down the cliff. Somewhere protected, but where I can watch the sea spoiling into the recesses of the cove. I find a good, solid ledge in the granite, away from the path. From here, I am facing directly out across a heavy sea, all spume and foam, to the headland of Logan Rock. Walls of spray are soaring up the cliffs in glittering shoals, explosions shattering in slow motion, then pouring copiously back down into the turmoil.
Even where I’m sitting, the spray reaches high enough at times to splatter my jacket and throw water in my face. Below me, I trace long banks of surf toppling in a relentless mass that never seems to recover before the next surge. I can hear the bass notes of waves compressing into hidden caves and zawns below me – a sudden crack, followed by a booming echo as the sea is sucked out again.
There is something exhilarating about being close to a really wild sea. The sheer power of the waves and volume of water making landfall. Monstrous tonnes of water on the move. Today the waves heave out of the swell, slow-rolling walls of mounting, languid tension, followed by collapse and release. I feel small crouched in next to it all, and grateful for a safe perch above what is a dangerous sea. The usual scramble down to the bottom of the cove on a calm day, would now be a huge risk.
It is amazing how the granite cliffs sustain the relentless pounding of these big winter storms. I’m mesmerised by how the waves build and reform with such primitive, rhythmical force. And, following the storm, the inevitability of such theatre, a powerful mix of causes and conditions playing themselves out in the stormy waters. Wind and gravity, and the dictate of moon on tide. All the laws of movement we cannot see.
Somehow, there is a raw but comforting order in the mayhem. If I close my eyes and listen more closely, there are lulls between the breaking waves before they build again, a waxing and waning of energy on a massive scale as the sea shunts itself back and forth across the bay.
The sheltered ledge where I’m perched is a place of exposure, yet intimacy. On one side the cliff drops steeply away. But I’m also at eye level here with blotches of lichen spilling over the granite in speckled shades of grey, gold and white. Whorls of life born of air and light, weathered by time. Like me, breathing the salt. I know the small pockets of soil sewn thinly into the crevices around me, hold seeds that will bring the promise of wildflowers – ox-eye daisy, wild carrot, sea campion – as sunlight gradually warms the cliffs and unleashes gardens of colour, torching upwards into the blue skies of spring.
For now, I feel comforted by the sense of being safely sheltered above the maelstrom, and my mind is quiet, like a clear lens scoping the bay. Perhaps the sound of waves breaking so closely has a soothing effect, despite its chaotic rhythms. I let my attention become tethered to the buffeting wind, and the cacophony of breaking surf. Now and again I’m splashed sharply awake by the sudden curtains of spray lifting up the cliff.
Perhaps we enjoy getting so close to the wildness of the sea, because we sense its energy and capriciousness, and recognise in it something of ourselves, our own potential for extremes of turbulence when the mind is loose and unbounded, but also our capacity for sheltered places of gathered, inner calm. There is, after all, delight too in the flow and texture of raging water. Within all the disturbance and fragmentation, a magnificent light shines in the white pools of effervescence, and there is sensuous beauty in the soft curling profile of the waves as they roll in as smooth as glass, swelling out of the fathoms.
Maybe we sense in the sea something of our own ebb and flow, our fluctuating minds, our stirrings and restlessness, our fluidity, impermanence and unpredictability, and our times of joy and unruffled tranquillity. And that it points us towards the whole movement of life, all its mysterious wonder, vastness and spectrum, and brings us closer to the instinctive awe we feel for laws of nature that are so much greater than our individual selves, and that we are all part of.
And so we are able to sit on a cliff and watch wildness, and see how storms pass, and wear themselves out in time. We feel all the energy and power of it, but we are not in it. We can trust in solid ground, that waves reduce in size, and that awareness can drop beneath the surface turbulence of thoughts to a still place within the vast ocean of awareness. The world is an entwined place. For all that we see out there, the waves and the calm depth of the sea that we know in our own experience are just different aspects of our own mind.
And it could be that this is why I let go so readily and happily up here, resting in this cocoon of observation high up on the cliff, anchored to the simplicity of rock and wind and sky, and the seeing of it all, like the raven tilting high above, following and trusting the openings of air that create a path of least resistance.
