If you know where to look

On writing prompts as pilgrimage.

There has been a string of days I can’t stay out of. Days of bitter cold, snowstorms over the mountains, and searing, bright sunshine. Everything is so still, I hold my breath in fear of interrupting.

My excursions have been less of a walk, more of a tiptoe, as if snapping the wrong twig underfoot might break the magic - and I cannot be held responsible for that.

Ascent

One morning, when the thick breath of the lake hung in a damp fog around the house, I climbed the hill to get above it. There is a holly halfway up. It is large, flesh-pink and so entwined with hazel that it feels indecent to linger. I pass it every day, but this day I paused, this day I pressed my face into a hole where a branch had been severed, and in it I found treasure. A single, smooth nut, wedged into the gap, like a sweetie stowed for later.

The glimmer of a hazelnut buried in the tree.

There are caches like these all over the woodland, if you know where to look. Red squirrel saw this coming, these short, sharp days, this darkness. She knows a thing or two about preparation.

Above the cloud, the sun was shining, and I turned to Alice Kinsella for inspiration (I love to keep company with poets).

‘This peace is outrageous. Something must fill it.

Chuckles of grouse, the odd hysterical pheasant.

Somewhere impossibly far, stones fall, jolting the air.

Rushes bend and quiver, waves roll over them.

Wind, my breath, my heartbeat.

This is where people bring their grief.’

- from III Ascent, an extract from Pilgrimage

Wake Up

This morning, I dropped the kids to school and turned up my pre-swim soundtrack. It’s lowkey techno, and I hook myself up to it like a drip. How else can I look at the snow on Ben Bulben and step into the Atlantic Ocean?

This is not a quiet practice. When I arrive at Deadman’s Point, there is a man collecting seawater in a milk bottle, and another up to his neck, deep breathing à la Wim Hoff. It is still and calm. The water has filled the pool and the whole bay is in bright sun. But no matter how I try, I cannot enter cold water with anything other than expletive abandon; it’s either that or noises that verge on orgasmic.

This is why I am here. Nothing pulls me so powerfully into my body, right here, right now, like cold water. And it is a shock, every time, to meet myself in this way.

Wake up, the sea says. You brought your grief to the mountain, and your bones to the shore: let go.

The snow on Ben Bulben, the post-swim layers.

Mystic John O’Donohue said: ‘Winter is the oldest season; it has some quality of the absolute.’ It is a wise, old crone with stories to tell. It is also an absence: without light, without heat, stripped of leaves, devoid of life. It grabs our face in both hands and asks us to reckon with the things we outrun.

Or my Family

Little hands skinning blanched almonds for the Christmas cake.

But there are ways to prepare, nuts to squirrel away for the hard times when we believe spring will never come. Like the friend who arrives when I forgot my towel and am rubbing myself with socks all-ashiver. She helps me dress; she brings hot coffee. Or the class I am teaching in the Sudbury School where children write poems that stun me. Or Christmas baking with my mum-in-law when she wraps the tins in cardboard, and they smell like took kindling in the AGA. Or a tiny gloved hand in mine. Or her gift of a whooper swan feather. Or my sister, boarding a plane in Johannesburg to come ice skating in Queen Maeve’s square, her person, not just a voice note. Or my family, the full complement, gathered around a table made of sleepers from the Victoria Falls railway line, my dad at the top, giving thanks, raising a glass, reminding mum to remove her apron.

In her recent Substack, Alice Kinsella wrote about glimmers, the moments that catch our attention when we are otherwise engaged with the business of life. She described a glimmer as:

A moment that snags in the emotional fabric of your day

An image that makes you do a mental double take 

A sensory experience that ripples through time 

It is self-contained, a sort of 3D snapshot. A moment in detail. (Read more here.)

These are my glimmers, at the holly tree, on the hill, in the freeze-your-tits-off wild Atlantic. When I began to write them, as she encouraged us to do, it led me through grief, into the black heart of winter and on to the Christmas dinner table where mum has outdone herself on the ham, and my messy, imperfect family pull crackers.

Why don’t you try her prompt, and see where it takes you?