High Places

 

Sometimes when I need to find some perspective on life, I climb a hill. Looking down, the characters in my mind’s stories fade and become weightless, lightening my load. The human world is subsumed into the whole of nature, its true nesting place. They, we, are not everything. Humans may have made a mark on the surface, but the hills and valleys have a longer view.

Two moments of recalibration and reorientation found me in high places. These intense memories were made vivid and virtually indelible by their emotional significance, standing clear like mountain summits above the mist in the valleys of quotidian existence.

A Maltese apartment, high above the bustle and buzz of a double-sainted religious festival. A deep and challenging three-day conversation, courageous revelations and radical listening, and we agreed new paths forward. But then we hit an unexpected roadblock of misunderstanding, of not understanding, of seemingly irreconcilable differences of perspective. A little thing to me, a tiny hillock, that seemed to him insurmountable, an impossible cliff to climb. And this time, instead of rising to his rage, I sat calmly and breathed slowly while it swirled around me. Eventually he stormed out into the dark city. I continued to sit, wondering what turn the drama would take, as he took his anger to the harbour below. I wrote down his words and heard their pain and aggression. I waited, practising my newly learnt skills of grounding, finding solidity under my feet and stillness in my mind as the gale outside tipped over olive trees on the balcony. When he returned, his anger spent and blown away by the force of the Mediterranean wind, he listened to his words read back to him without emotion, like a news report. ‘I think we’re finished’ he sighed, his face and shoulders falling. I protested and reassured him, but wondered if this could be a paradigm shift, the start of a revolution, a change of life. You can only know retrospectively.

A grassy nook nestled among fragrant wild marjoram and hawthorns. Two roofs were visible between the trees: our house, the roof we’d built twenty years ago when we expanded our family upwards; and the tower and long nave of the Norman cathedral. This place had been my solitude, my escape into serenity and sanity, a precious secret. This time he came with me and we sat together. He accused me of breaking his rules, but I didn’t want the rules to rule me anymore. ‘Do you want to get divorced?’ he asked, expecting the response to be protestations and promises, denial and declarations of love, as it had been so many previous times. But this time the answer was easy, a letting go, a relief. Maybe a revolution can sometimes come too gradually to notice; a slow incremental change indiscernibly reaches a tipping point, and after a disorientating whirl of rebalancing, a new steady state arises.

And here I am, three years later, in another high place. I’m perched on the roof of a French barn which appears on the Napoleonic maps and whose oak beams have tolerated wood-boring insects, storms, and the passing of generations of human dramas. The gradual drip of rain through a gap in the tiles and slow colonisation of fungal mycelium caused a disturbance in the equilibrium of wood and tiles. Gravity won and a thousand terracotta tiles smashed to the ground. So now we are replacing rafters on another section, renovating, renewing, giving it a new life.

It seems, looking back, that my path had always been leading here. Decades of stasis were suddenly interrupted, and the transformation appears shocking and unexpected. I could not have predicted such radical change. But this was always coming: a process of punctuated equilibrium, evolution building the genome ready for this new manifestation of life. I sit on the roof watching the deer grazing in the wildflower meadow, the young fruit tree saplings budding among raspberry canes covered in ripe berries, the food forest emerging to nourish us. I breathe deeply, taking in the scents of rich earth and clear air, and smile as the afternoon sunshine caresses my face. I am in a good place.

 

This is a short story I wrote for a competition. 

You may wonder whether this is fiction. Of course, there are resemblances to experiences in my life, but all of our memories are constructed, to fit the storyline we currently choose. Melvyn Bragg refused to call his story of his boyhood an autobiography, as he pointed out that dialogues, characters' internal thoughts and motivations, and many details had to be filled in creatively. 

Memory is not an accurate record. And therefore, I choose to present this series of moments as a story.