Day 3. A lot of the surface chat is wearing away. In addition to the poetry a new element is added. As we walk we try to speak directly without referring to past and future. Please try it if you feel like it, it can be such a different kind of communicating! It’s a bit like composing poetry direct. At times it moves towards song, or playing with sounds and rhythms or at times feels like shared meaning.
Some can launch themselves into this quite other form of speech and others find it harder to speak off the beaten track. The walking in silence is extending. Malcolm gives the sign that we are to ascend the next climb without talking and as I enter the silence I feel the safety of walking without thoughts and words intruding. Freedom from adding lies and distractions to just being here on these hills. The colors intense, the birdsong vivid, the winds touch felt on the skin.
Then after lunch I team up with my new friend Eka and we are off chatting 19 to the dozen. A potted biography flows out and it is so fun to talk story and girlie talk. We are walking so fast ahead of the rest that a scout has to be sent ahead to warn us we are striding miles in the wrong direction.
After a few hours of this we stop again and join the others and remember the sweet effort of being in Great Nature. And somehow it is so blindingly clear that during our highly enjoyable chat we had been SOMEWHERE ELSE. No longer on the hills. Transported by our minds away from the reality of the artistry of The Creator.
Zombie walking mouth opens and shuts like an automatom.
Then uneven ground challenges the feet and the zip of the lip
cracks open the liminal skin separating me from World.
nice pic! it looks like the sky and hills go on and on….. looks and sounds like the making of a great adventure.
Thought it wo’udnlt to give it a shot. I was right.