We can keep no secrets here. Leave them at the door or be prepared to have them taken from you. Isn’t that why we come, drawn to these endless empty places, the high plateaux, the stripped and bleached shoulder blades of deep time’s carcass? Answering the whispered summons on a breath of evening breeze. After the details of the hubbub day have scattered like the ash of a cooling fire. Isn’t this why they always went, the saints and the sinners, alone into the desert? To the places where the meniscus of the sky tenses downwards until it almost kisses the longing cheek of the earth.
At a distance he thinks that perhaps I am God. The juvenile male Stonechat, with just the faintest promise of his adult black hood and white collar, has been waiting for God. Nestlings are fed the old stories of how the world became, their beaks gaping for the next instalment. But as I approach, he sees that it is only me. My long shadow, scissoring across the low-sun land, had confused him for a moment. So he keeps his distance. Declines to land on my outstretched hand.
Instead, he flits along beside me as I find my hop-scotch path through the maze of clints and grykes. He and I are almost the entire cast of this one act play. Not a very original conceit, I’ll grant you. A pair of travellers, met upon the road. The dialogue is sparse. A tilt of the head, a flutter of a wing. Pauses of various durations designed to give the appearance of profundity. Once, a word like a clack of two pebbles, which passes for the little bird’s name. Not to be repeated. A grunt as my ankle strains at the limit of elasticity and calls for reinforcements.
All the while, we inspect each other, the Stonechat and I, as if looking into a mirror. A mightily cantankerous sort of a mirror. This mirror shows what was and what will be. What could have been and what might unfold. The Stonechat is young and I am old. His life is ahead and he is in hot pursuit. The clattering hooves and hot leather of my life’s swash and buckle will be upon me soon enough, flee as I might. The bird’s voice is a whisp of promise on the air while my words are set in a leaden typeface. My companion is clean and I am dirty. His is the innocence of survival and mine is the guilt of acquisition. We orbit each other like twin suns, locked together by the gravity of fascination.
So, of course we go there. To the tree of life. Where else would we go? This is an empty stage except for the one lone juniper that somehow sucks up the bitter dregs of summer drought. But she is not in the mood for dispensing wisdom. Not this evening. ‘Try another day’, she suggests. Only, the young stonechat and I do not have another day. This is both the opening night and the end of the run. As the sun wades waist deep in the cleansing waters of the horizon we cast about us for a denouement.
The tree of life laughs. She was only kidding. ‘Look – there they are. Stitching together the blue of the sky and the green of the ground. Theirs is the final word.’
A revelation of harebells stand naked between two onslaughts of limestone, quivering not from fear nor from any breath of wind, but out of some irresistible internal resonance with the whole universe. We do not trouble them with homilies, spare their fragile stems the weight of description. Together we just look and look until the curtain of darkness begins to fall.
In the absence of an audience the Stonechat and I bow to one another. We will not meet again. He and I have shared this moment of gasping bliss and will share it until the end of time. We have kept no secrets from each other.
Poetry - "as the sun wades waist-deep in the cleansing waters of the horizon". I had to stop and savour that for a moment.
"A pair of travellers, met upon the road. The dialogue is sparse. A tilt of the head, a flutter of a wing."
Such meetings are cherished for they offer a richness that pierces some deeper part of the soul. Thank you for sharing all that was learned.
🙏