Loch Broom,
North West Highlands.
(Written April 2019).
The spring light is as clear and sharp as glass, cutting its edge on the wind, prising things open. Nothing escapes its polishing glare, yet it glances the shore with a thin warmth. A strong south easterly is pushing the loch in a fleet of silver boats streaming out towards the Minch. Against the stained winter colours of the hill, gorse lining the burn is striding out in sunshine yellows, sparking off lichens that are splashed on the shoreline rocks like broken egg yolks, intensified by a primary blue of sea and sky.
The persistent wind has dried everything rapidly in the past few days. I sort out birch twigs and sprigs of heather from the debris washed up on the tideline. Deposited high by winter storms, and mixed with feathers of dead gulls, tangled fishing rope, and lines of brittle bladderwrack, the sticks snap like fingers to the touch. I soon have a small pile of kindling for a fire. Wind licks the driftwood hissing and popping to life, fanning a warm core of flames and carrying a line of smoke with it. The fire sizzles heat and haze across the foreshore. Beyond, a single cormorant dips and treads water loosely, intent on going nowhere.
With the simple elements of wind, fire, sea and sky and the sound of the burn easing into the loch, any observation of what’s around me here ceases to be a noticing, more a sense of simply knowing what I’m part of, a play of relationships. The way the sea reflects the light and the light reflects the sea. Or the way the wind holds the frame of a gull’s outspread wings in the very moment of its veering. It’s not a one way traffic of perception – I’m receiving the place as much as it is receiving me. The salt air I breathe is the wind from the sea, the same air that glistens on the barnacles hissing on the tidal rocks, and stirs the waves and catches smoke in my eyes.
After boiling water for a late breakfast of coffee and eggs, I’m lying outstretched on the flat, wave-smoothed rocks just above the tideline, as close to the sea as I can get. The shoreline is littered with periwinkles and pockmarked with a million barnacles, densely clustered and welded to the rock like the rough skin of an animal. Low tide has newly exposed a fringe of seaweeds and the cool onshore breeze carries their saltiness over my upturned face.
With the sun-warmed rocks beneath me, I feel my breath ebbing and flowing, as clearly and gently as the sea anemone pulsing in the rock pool beside me. A glistening blob of crimson jelly, its blood red tentacles stretch and wave like a mad crown of spikes in its small bowl of seawater. As a child I would spend hours exploring these same pools and poking the sea anemones that I found open, to feel the tentacles contracting and squeezing around my fingers. It felt like a communication of sorts. I was curious about how quickly their crowns seized shut and watched to see how quickly they opened again, once my finger was pulled away. There was a simplicity in that waiting and looking.
You could say, who cares whether an anemone closes fast or not, but even as an adult, I still recall the sense of wonder I felt as their tentacles closed around my fingers, and their clinging to the rocks of ancient Torridonian sandstone, a thousand million years old. It is curiosity and love that draws us towards connection with the natural world. Moments of remembered wonder burst open again in the present, illuminating the miracle of a single species, and the infinite variety of life that surrounds us. How did the anenomes get to be here in this pool beside me? How did I get to be here alongside them? What is revealed in this next moment of breathing, this relaxation into being here now?
Lying here, I can simply be aware, directly and purely, like the piercing light streaming into me, even when my eyes are closed. I can choose to live in this fullness in any moment, and in any place. Everything is constantly changing and flowing, and because I change and flow, perception is permeable, always available and full of possibility. The urge to make sense of things begins with opening and letting the world in, a natural awareness of how everything belongs together, a spaciousness that allows many ways of knowing.
With the south easterly blowing right across me towards the Minch, there is nothing to do but watch the waves rolling in, with the hazy blue frame of Beinn Ghobhlach rising far away on the opposite side of the loch. A gull flags over, following the shoreline in a haphazard trajectory. There is no place of beginning and ending, just the kelp waving in the water and the sea reflecting the sky and clouds above.
Whatever is happening right now is all I need to be aware of, the seen and the unseen unfolding together in the same process of continuity. I’m at eye level with splotches of white lichen, the remains of a smashed sea urchin, the sun-bleached claw of a crab, and the milky spirals of periwinkles pausing where the tide has left them. A bumblebee meanders in search of flowers and a white feather snagged on a rock waves like a wind sock. Fishing buoys hover on the open loch like orange pins while the tide surges in a shower of light mirrors amongst the rocks beyond my feet. Behind me the Allt a’ Choire Reidh burn flows off the hill into the shallows of Loch Broom and I hear all its falling dazzle. I breathe in the scent of peat, gorse and wet stone, and clear April light pours down into the bright space of the day.
