“A landscape
can sing about God, a body about Spirit.”
Animals and man work on the land through the paths they take,
the farms they make, their flights on, above, or below the surface. From any hill, the landscape appears as a
patchwork quilt with squares of greens and squares of gold—plantations of trees
and fields of wheat and barley. I look
at the land like a painting when I am standing still, but when I am walking, I
am less aware of any composition than I am of making another line to add to the
vast system of moving, squiggling, dancing lines: a fish leaps, a buzzard lifts off in flight,
diagonal shafts of rain sweep the hills in the blue-gray distance, I walk field-edges,
hedgerows, and ridge lines. I push
through the tall stems and curling stems, and am touched by the wet silks of
spiders. On the hills, I walk the same
paths used by sheep and wild goats. As
creatures in motion, we add to this calligraphy and, sometimes if we’re given
the grace, illuminate the manuscript.
An Englishwoman walker warned me at
breakfast that I would need to get to Morebattle and “gather my strength”
because the hill (“Wide Open Hill”) was a “proper climb.” It is the highest point on the Way, and it
consists of at least three “cols” or summits.
But the morning walk was too wonderful to worry. The steady wind at my back was a constant
reminder that wind in the Bible is often compared to the Spirit that blows
where it will or, as Genesis 1 has it, “a wind from God swept over the face of
the waters.” My thoughts of other
worlds, too, kept me company. I was very
aware of being in proximate relationship (just next to) an entirely different reality. While in the forest—pine with fern understory
or beech with clusters of bluebells around mossy roots—if you look left or
right or if you pull your eyes away from the fascinating particulars to peer
over the stone wall, you will see a bright world of golden grain rippling like
water. It’s no wonder legends sprang up
here about fairies in the woods (“out of this wood do not desire to go”) or of
the people that live under the Eildon Hills.
Sunshine percolates the tightly bound bales of hay, turning it to energy
for animals, and this is the image I sit with as I drink my golden lager (“free
for walkers”) at the pub in Morebattle.
The pub is perched just on the edge of a small hill before the road dips
down into a very low valley that runs along at the base of the huge green slope
that I am going to climb.
To modern ears, the name
“Morebattle,” conjures up images of archaic fighting or some kind of heroic
effort. The Englishwoman, Katie,
certainly spoke about the hill as if it were a test that she had not passed. “It flattened me. I was very weak.” But this place had once been an outpost of
Lindisfarne, and there had also once been a lake or loch nearby (now the trough
before the hill that is rich, green pastureland). “Mere” and “botl” combined is “Morebattle,”
and it means building by a lake. The ancient landscape of blue
waters between the breasts of hills, flowing into crevices and filling valleys, is female and familiar
from the Adirondack Mountains of my home in New York state.
Indian Lake, where I grew up, is surrounded by very high mountains, much higher
than Wide Open Hill. Thus, I felt no
need to prepare for battle. If anything,
I felt like I was heading home.
I approached the hill by crossing through
a field of black cows and sheep with black faces, and I skirted a hedge of
prickly bushes on which sheep wool was caught and drying in the wind. I pulled some wool off the briars and held
onto it throughout the climb to remind myself that I would be led, would be
given the strength I lacked, that I didn’t need to try too hard. The path (pressed-down green grass) sailed
above the pastures and followed a serpentine stone wall. I moved forward and up … and up, trying to
discern whether the wind had its own voice.
I would tell myself that I couldn’t stop and look back until I’d reached
a particular rise. Keep moving into the
sky past the cows, past the sheep, into the wind. I always cheated though, unable to resist the
view, unable not to pause (“shelah”) to take in all the beauty. Each time I reached what I thought was a
summit, another green mountain would appear with a path beckoning me on. I breathed and the wind whispered, “sh, sh,
she,” like a calming voice. The moving
shadows of clouds and the wind at my back kept me going. “Crackin day isn’t it,” quipped a delighted
Dad with his two boys and wife who were heading down. By the time I got to the top, the few walkers
were gone. I was alone and sunk down to
rest with my back against my walking buddy, the stone wall that had been by my
side all the way up. Support.
I had left the quilt made by man’s hands
below and left the herds. I let the
velvet hills, the heathery moorland swatches and the wind flow over me without
trying to analyze its moods. Sitting
there, I knew that my mother’s soul was happy in some such place. This is Heaven. Mom is here (or there) in cool air, warm sun,
feeling connected to everything without effort.
I listened to the wind speak, and then, suddenly, just before my eyes, a
hawk hovered, facing into the wind (like me) and held himself or herself almost
perfectly still in the air, halted in the presence of a commanding majesty. An occasional beat of wings was all she needed
to steady herself. My own heartbeat
slowed. Together, we gave ourselves to
the air and hung there in blissful stillness transfixed by the green mountain.
As I descend, the wind is less noisy
and not as cold. The happy sounds of the
herds return and the human scene takes shape—farmyard, clumps of trees,
tractors, men. I understand that here
below there is so much we can choose to focus on. Not so above where phenomena choose us (or so
it seems). Take the hawk. It didn’t have to perform its trick of
floating on the air just for me. But it
did. Twice or thrice even. Cuthbert understood birds as special
helpers. If an eagle left a piece of
dolphin meat on shore, it was God who had directed the bird to do so to feed a
hungry monk. Perhaps the hawk was my
mountaintop message not to try so hard but to let the spirit lift me up. If you surrender to the air, you can ride it.
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Almost a full week later, plodding
along the pavement in London, hoping I am still marked by my experience on Wide
Open Hill, I enter the open door of a church in South Kensington. I can’t stop walking and am headed from
Hammersmith to the British Museum—at least a seven-mile mini-pilgrimage across
the whole of metropolitan London—to see the Lindisfarne gospels. The gospel from Matthew read at the mass is
about Jesus’ walking theology. Call it
that. He is teaching the disciples that
he will have to die but will rise again.
Then they come into Capernaum and are harassed about paying the temple
tax. From theology to taxes. That is the declension all walkers must make
when their journeys bring them back from hills to the petty paces of town and
city, from crosses in the landscape to crosses nailed to the interior walls of
church buildings. So as not to cause
offense, Jesus tells Peter to go down to the lake, throw out a line. In the mouth of the fish he will catch, there
will be a coin twice the value of the temple tax. Don’t try so hard. Don’t worry.
And, most of all, do not let the petty ways of man divert you from the
Way you have walked. Your face is still
glowing from what you saw in the high place.
Write hawk with quill pen or clicking computer keys, imagine a face and feathers on the letter "H," and make a new and very real path on the desert of the page.
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