Well, I say new, but in fact it’s older than the species that I belong to, and older than the process that has rounded the pebbles and ground the grains of sand that my body currently rests upon. Pondering time, I look to my right and study the weed-coated breakwater and ponder the relative few seconds it’s taken to carve smooth ripples in to the wood and rust the metal in to what looks like brown bubbling charcoal. The breakwater itself seems to bubble and pop and fizz as a myriad of shellfish open and close, reminding me that I sit next to a living structure, a little corner of life in the midst of this seascape summer seascape. One can’t help but wonder if they worry and discuss local politics the changing the climate too. Probably not.
It’s dawn, the day after my birthday, and the sky is busy painting what one might consider impressionist watercolours of vanilla, pinks and greys as the sun rises though wind-tattered cumulus. My body, its clothes, its senses and I sit facing a northerly force four or five-ish, which as the tide is in ebb, carries the mottled cries of waders and the brooding chatter of a feisty water across the brown-grey flats from the distant tideline. Although the landscape is busy against my skin and upon my ear, this is a quiet place.
Of late, an indoor body and a lost mind has wandered lazily and aimlessly through shallow memes and feel-good posts, people shouting ‘what’s up’ at me eager to share some important discovery they’ve made about life, or folk falling over a wall or off a skateboard to the cry of ‘ho-ly-shit dude’, or some form of dance routine that the last thirty-eight posts were also doing. I fear my mind has meandered into the same witless no-mans-land that I appear to have let algorithm seep into on these platforms we call social, and I reflect upon past incarnations of ‘James’.
So back to that new relationship. For all the memes I complain about yet endlessly seem to devour, one did stick, and it said “don’t let them get you, rise, remember who you are”. I’ve read that in a few different forms of late, but essentially the same. I’m out of breath from cycling, and now sit next to this breakwater, under a fresh Monet sky, bathed in a northerly wind that coats my skin in salt accompanied by the cries of oyster catcher, curlew, knot and turnstone, and by the distant sound of waves. I remember that this has always felt comfortable. And by ‘this’, I mean being among the elements, something I‘ve forgotten of late.
I have always felt euphoric and not alone whenever I stand in higher places, open countryside, or among seascapes, especially in turbulent weather. However much I value and seek pure silence, an extremely precious thing and itself a healer of woes, to bathe in moving air, especially sea-borne air, is to engage in an ancient conversation. I find if I whisper my troubles, they are embraced, absorbed, and are shared with eons of wisdom; old souls who ride the gusts.
And so, a relationship renewed, but not new. A James that lost his way, but remembers his yester-self. A shift in patterns on the horizon, and where one a pointlessness perhaps seen in future dawns, now a hope of many more dawns to come, and conversation with the wind and sea.
