‘My Frontier’

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If I could almost remain entirely still, like one of the rare monoliths in this landscape, I may finally find myself moving.

I was in a state of static panic – the plea for an airlift out of an embodiment had become frenzied. “Down there” the onslaught of micro-instructions just got too intense. And like the insect that exhausts itself repeatedly flying into the window on a hot and sticky day, I wasn’t actually moving at all.

I am using a collection of albums that will now stay with me until the day I die. Those that sank into my bones as the soles of my shoes wore away on the tarmacked ascent towards the frontier-like tops.

In hindsight, I walked not only to avoid, but to be with my life “down there” – in a way I just couldn’t be when physically so. It’s as if the spongey texture of the peat actually holds memories, reactivated, like captured gas, by moments in songs, in a place where pain is no longer a ridiculously melodramatic response.

It releases a past passion to carry on in life that I lost to too many of my yesterdays, that were shamefully wasted, spat out against a wall. Years of bitterness spent on empty last trains in what felt like a cancelation in real time of the belief that a life could be what I used to think it was meant to be.

To be human is to be the road.  We are road-makers through the indifferent forces ahead, limping on in-spite of our trauma. From generation to generation. Even if that generation is on a downward track, a wipeout, even a holocaust, we must plough on.

I’m on track that follows the trunk road, once a medieval salt road. Crossing east to west. A treacherous road that is hated by the commuters who’s shining cars make it look like a river of liquid mercury.

Yet, as it rises and rises, and passes over these foreboding hills, it is a direct expression for life as the roadway. To those who must see it as nothing but a miserable part of a daily commute, it must sound odd to say how I see it like a biblical reference within a landscape that feels so personal.

As I walk on the track, I can also mourn, as nothing is ridiculous to admit up here. How certain glimpses of hill sides give me flashes of colour, of childhood memories that hold colour in a way that successive memories don’t

Ever since, the world I imagined, a world I anticipated, dissolved. A world of peace, of less suffering, leaving the horrors of our collective past and never returning.

I come here to hear it, to feel ok with it. “Down there” it comes across as ridiculous, because we all must live in the world. We must continue the road, regardless.

I’m still trying to teach myself to live in this world. No longer desperately clutching to the chance that it could all suddenly “be alright” so I can be alright.

Heavy thoughts catch up with me, the prickly breathing sensations when I think about all things political “down there”.

The desperation in the popular politics of the 2010s, for a collective an airlift out of it all is now a distant memory, mere pre-covid energies.

“Down there” we now wander in a claustrophobic wilderness, all of us working our road; ploughing on, trying to find private salvation, private healing. Unsure any spark will ever happen again.

Unable to be with myself and world “down there”, I would come here not just to escape, but with a need for transcendence. It only ever felt obtainable in such frontier-like spaces.

To find a space outside of myself.

“Don’t forget to breath.”

Inhaling and exhaling.

…the endless dialogue that constitutes Being.

Everything in oneness, but everything also in its particularities. Exhale into the universe, inhale into me.

It is true that time makes everything into one, but it is also through time that all things possess their person.

Inhaling and exhaling, seemingly the easiest most instinctive practice, yet the hardest to remember as a life practice; the dialogue between the particular and the oceanic, the whole. Between you, your time alive in this body, and the vast and indifferent procession of non-human time.

The rivers up here, they all reach the ocean – where water is water. But before then, they are hillside streams blackened by ancient peat, endlessly carving out the carboniferous rock; they become the fast-flowing rivers and estuaries that shaped the industry and culture of the cities that cling to either side.

All becomes dust, all becomes water, and nothing really matters. But not before time. Until then everything matters, if only to itself.

And I need to find a way of inhaling and exhaling, inside/outside.

The ascent up here, away from the particulars, the claustrophobia and trauma in adhering to an identity, a mask we must uphold. The wish to fall out of the body, fall head first into the peat and bogs, in a place where are no longer specific.

So many yesterdays I would play dead up here, fantasise about escaping the painful particulars that provoke the tightening of the chest, the claustrophobia, of being, doing, getting it wrong, of being seen, being known, feeling shame.

The only true Outside is death. Only then are we no longer a particular. Every exhalation is a meditation on the moment when we are truly Outside.

The real challenge is to practice the inhalation and exhalation as the movement between the inside and outside; not to give up on the particulars, but not to inhale them to the point of suffocation.