It took a few hours to complete the grid. I saw nothing. No evidence of any creature no evidence of anything except heather and one dry stream bed and in the end the footpath that took me back home again. But that was fine. I had completed my first task. Tomorrow I would complete my second.
In a wood a man rose from a bed of leaves by a pool. They were autumn leaves dead and brown and the man was brown also and covered in hair. There was thick orange fur all over his body. There was a drumming sound in the forest all around him it was the rain the sky had opened up and had woken him from his sleep. He knelt and looked up to the sky. He tilted his head up and opened his mouth to receive the rain. The rain was falling over everything in the world. The surface of the black pool was dancing with it.
Something was different the next morning. I supposed it was the morning. I felt like I’d slept for a long time. It had been a hard day yesterday. But something was different and when I had climbed out of my sleeping bag and moved over to the table for my morning mugs of water I realised what it was. The air was cooler. It had been so hot and still for as long as I could remember but today it was not so cloying. Through the window I could see that the sky was still a uniform white but I could see something else as welclass="underline" tiny spots of water on the glass. I looked down at the area of stone floor directly under the hole in the roof and I saw that it was darker than the stone around it and that it glistened.
I went to the door and opened it and stepped out into the yard. It was still warm but nothing like as hot as it had become recently. And it was raining. There was a drizzle a slight fine silent drizzle almost like a mist descending. I could feel the drops on my skin the tiny drops of water but I couldn’t hear anything. It was so fine such a fine drizzle and it was a joy. Something was happening. The sky was still alive. The ground in the yard was damp and when I ran my fingers across the door handles and the windowsills they were damp too. In the night a gentle rain had begun so gentle that I had not heard or sensed it. I hoped it would continue. I hoped the rain would get harder I hoped there would be a downpour and that everything would be washed away.
I went back inside feeling light. I realised how heavy I had felt for so long. Since the accident everything had felt like such a burden I had felt like something was clinging to my back but today I could step lightly again. I didn’t know why. I sat down and drank three glasses of water. Today I would walk the second grid. Judging from the map it would be a more interesting walk than the day before. There were a couple of streams to cross and there were some hut circles with a ditch around them. It would mostly still be heather because everything was heather up here but at least something would break up the pattern. And today I would walk with a light step. It was fun. It would be fun. Everything was fun. Why not?
I packed and set off down the track along the combe. I packed quickly because I was eager to be out in the rain. With my rucksack on my back I stood out in the yard and I spread my hands out and I raised my palms to the sky and I stood there until my muscles began to hurt so badly that I had to lower my arms again. I stood there and let the fine mist fall onto my hands and my exposed forearms and I turned my face up and the rain fell onto it the fine thin rain. The rain was warm like the sky and it was beautiful. It seemed to bring life with it and it brought the lightness that I could now feel inside me.
I felt like skipping down the track I felt like dancing. I closed the gate and headed down the combe and I tried to skip I tried a merry dance down the track but my left leg would not stand it and I stumbled and fell. I fell onto my back and I lay there and laughed and felt the fine rain falling onto my face. How long had it been since I had laughed? It had been so long. I couldn’t remember ever laughing in my whole life. Perhaps I never had. I lay there for minutes giggling and feeling the water settling on me. Was there any reason I could not lie here all day laughing in the fine rain?
When the laughter had run its course I lay there feeling empty and light. After a while I thought I should get up. I still had a job to do. I rolled over on my side to push myself up with my arms and I found myself gazing into the mat of grass and plantain and dock that grew alongside the track. I had never paid much attention to grass but now that I looked I could see that there were different kinds growing together entwined. There was a short wiry ferociously dark green kind and there was a kind with a long pale green stem with white seed heads at the end and a shorter kind with what almost looked like bright orange flowers on the top. There was every shade of green there were oval red seeds on tiny white stalks furring out from long stems there were flat blades and serrated needles everything was down here.
All of these grasses wove into the plantain and the dock and together they made a forest and looking at them from down here I saw them as trees I saw them creating a canopy. This was the whole world down here and I walked past it every day sure that I knew what the world was. But maybe this is where life was really going on. We blunder about with our heads in the clouds with our hearts in outer space and here is life going on amongst the woven grasses and it doesn’t care about us and it will be going on long after we have burnt ourselves out. I could lie here all day and look at this I thought. I could lie here all year and look at this and perhaps if I did that I would learn something because up until now up until this very moment in my life I have never ever learned anything at all.
Then as I lay there about to begin the laborious process of standing up I heard a noise. It surprised me so much that I started. I was so used to the silence out here now I was so used to the hot white silence. I had seen and heard nothing since my accident except the thing in the lane. Nothing had moved nothing had spoken there had been no sounds at all. And yet now as I lay here in the fine drizzle under the white sky I distinctly heard a sound above me high above me. It was the sound of a bird. A skylark. A skylark singing up above the whiteness somewhere its high song its chatter rising and falling. It lasted maybe ten seconds and then it stopped abruptly and the silence returned. But I felt even lighter then. The sky was alive and something else was singing. Something other than me could still sing in the world.
I got myself up still feeling light and I followed the path over the moor as I had for days heading towards the designated grid. I felt now like my body was floating with the lightness. I felt happy. Had I felt happy before? I couldn’t remember but this felt like happiness to me. I was light and floating I had seen the grasses and heard the skylark and here I was just walking. Perhaps I would see the thing today. It didn’t feel like it mattered so much now. All I wanted to do was put one foot in front of the other. Perhaps I could just do this forever. Perhaps all my trials were over.
I was walking over the tops now and I felt my feet through my boots I felt every bump in the ground I felt the roots of the heather through the springy peat. And as I walked as I steadily moved I suddenly realised that I was not the owner of my feet. These were not my feet. They were not an extension of me. They were me. I was this foot and I was this hand I was these fingers I was these eyes. This body was not a vehicle carrying this mind around. Everything was me.
It is so hard to put into words into these clumsy words that say nothing. But the shift was real and total. I knew that I was not the owner of my body. I was my body. I nearly fell over in surprise. I kept walking and feeling both the feet touching the ground and feeling the knees bend as I moved. But now everything in the world was different. I came up onto the high point of the moor and I saw the lowlands fading off into the haze. Now I was this body everything was me and the sense that my mind lived in my head and that my trunk and limbs served it broke down and kept breaking down. Now I was my body but I was also what my body walked upon. I was the grasses all of the different grasses and I was the peat of the moor and I was the heather and the skylark I had heard and I was the thing in the lane and these were not ideas they were not concepts they were not thoughts this was just how it was. I was everything. Here and now I was everything that was and had been and I was everything to come.