Being Present

Things To Be Grateful For

I haven’t been great this last few days. My body went a bit haywire again, lots of bathroom floor time, sudden exhaustion and I was quiet. Now, talking can be difficult, I run out of breath on even moderate sentences. I think it will stay that way and progress.

By pure coincidence, I’ve been reading about Carthusian monks who hardly ever speak or see anyone, not even each other, and thinking this would be a great way to live. I like the thought of solitude stretching to infinity. It is the most austere and brutal iteration of the Catholic monasticism and up to Vatican II had not changed for almost a thousand years.

To cheer myself up I’ve booked a retreat at my regular Trappist monastery (also silent) for the end of May. A few days cloistered away from the world will, I hope, do me the world of good. At the end, I’ll leave for a week in Norfolk with Alison and the dogs.

We love being near the sea. Scout will be so excited when he finds out it’s just through the garden gate of our rental. Alison loves the sea too, it’s a must do for her year. I sit and take photographs or wander along the shoreline trying to catch Scout in one of his action poses. We have to keep an eye on him because he will stay in the water no matter how much he is shivering, like most Border collies he’s as hard as nails and is bereft of an off-switch.

There are quite a few holidays booked this year. I’ve also booked a few days in Glasgow to give myself and Alison a little respite from each other. I’m looking forward to the galleries and looking around anything to do with Mackintosh.

We live for time now, it’s our currency. Time to have experiences, create memories, building a treasured store of happenings that can be accessed and relived whenever I want to. Sometimes my mind brings up things I have long forgotten, so I guess nothing is ever forgotten, no sense, smell, touch, sound or sight is ever erased.

---

Google slipped this photo across my screen today. February 11th 2021.

I still have no idea how Scout managed to be in two places at the same time in the same photograph. This is Ditch Clough in the Upper Derwent Valley, one of the older and nicer routes up to Alport Castle.

The area was sheep country back in the middle ages when the monks of Welbeck had a small abbey just up the valley. Wool was big business, most of it exported to Italy and made into fine clothing. Time has removed the sheep and the abbey, but the tracks are there, the resonance of those long past.

It was a beautiful day that I will always remember. The air was crisp, blue skies above, a yellow sun beaming down bouncing off the frozen skin of the snow. We had the whole valley to ourselves and we took our time to enjoy the light and shadows that worked through the forest. I remember focussing on the sounds my boots made as they broke through the surface and watching how Scout skipped along the same like a stone skipping across water, the surface untouched.

There was an easy wind blowing from the east painstakingly covering our tracks like shifting sand. We were well wrapped up and the cold didn’t really touch us. Half way up is a tiny bothy, just a corrugated Anderson style shelter with a plank on some stones to sit on. We had a break there to give my lungs a rest. Scout had some pemmican and I had a bite of whatever was to hand, washed down with my own concoction of beef tea with infused with chilli, black pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

When we reached the top all you could see was blue white and the black forest plantations. In the sky the tail end of the last storm that had brought the snow was putting on a fine display, creating movement where no movement existed. The sky was huge, the far horizon almost at the coast. I stood for a long time taking it all in.

I’d gone there to get some winter photos of Alport Tower and the valley for a magazine article I was writing. Conditions were perfect. Just luck and a little good judgement, us being there, that’s how it goes sometimes. On the right of the photo you can detect a small black dot looking out into the valley. A man, a speck hardly visible in the cavernous landscape save for a momentary eye catching movement that alerted me to his presence.

I cannot have those hours now. My winter days exist within four walls to protect me from infection and the cold, my body no longer working as it did and never would again. I think a lot about those dreamy days with Scout researching new routes for books and magazines, and how fortunate I had been.

Most days now a vision will come to me of a section of a route, the record as clear as the time we walked it. Now I watch us and live the day again vicariously through memory, the moving image always accompanied with senses of smell, taste, the feel of the environment. I watch and feel myself smile at Scout as happy as a dog can be. The detail is amazing. The turn of a corner opening out into a wide view, Scout clearing a stile, the descent of a mountain as dusk approaches and the wonderful feeling passing through the valley on the way back to home.

I’m fortunate to have these records of images, writing and memory. At first there was sadness attached to them, the fact that now I’m slow to get upstairs, my lungs sounding alarm bells, my chest gripping tight, that I will never experience such perfect winter conditions just a few miles from home.

That realisation gradually metamorphosed from sadness to acceptance and then delight. I was/am fortunate to have had those times and able to experience them and share them vividly here on the page.

I have an inkling that living within four walls reduces outside stimulus to such a degree that the brain, with nothing new to process, has a wander down memory lanes and finds some old record of me in my active days and thinks this will help fill my time. And I get to live the day again and be there in every sense, my presence still there along with Scout’s. These are things I never expected back then, but I am grateful for now.