Gleanings from a short retreat
“Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner—what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
The gale smashes into the metre thick stone walls of the lighthouse cottage I am safely within, sheltered from the elements. Fifty mile per hour winds rage around the stone lighthouse cottage, built like a bunker next to the lighthouse on the exposed cliff top headland which extends far out into the open ocean. Here, where the full force of the Atlantic breaks onto the jagged rock, I can enter into something of the wild raw life of the ocean. The air in which we all live and breathe, like water to a fish, is of course usually invisible. But now, the air is everywhere not only visible but shaking the earth and the sea , screaming through the air vents of the cottage, asserting itself as the dominant element, a sacred power which must be respected.
On this rocky cliff, the elements are undisputed and irresistable. When I venture out for a short blast, the wind is strong enough to support me and hold me up as I lean back into it on the cliffside, my eyes watering from the dashing force. The rain lashes down – or rather fires across – horizontally, and then in a dramatic change of mood, the sun is out, clouds scudding across the vast open sky. The ocean changes from deep green to ominous purple blue, to dark ultramarine, minute by minute. The waves are all white topped and rolling deep with big valleys between the peaks and their white horses. The jagged rock islet offshore disappears under the spray and foam as it is buffeted by the force of the ocean.
In the midst of this maelstrom, from the shelter of the low cottage, when the rain relents so that I can see out through the windows, I become aware that there are many seabirds around. The regular gulls patrol the headland but further out on the ocean there is a large passage of huge gannets, their pure white bodies clearly contrasted against the dark ocean; golden yellow heads and black wingtips, their two metre wings long and pointed.
The gannets keep coming low above the waves, disappearing under the high peaks and emerging from the troughs, their sharp black wingtips constantly in tune with the elements, rocking and turning, at one with the raging ocean. I’m transfixed watching them, so much so that I’m no longer watching but rather it’s as if my heart is beating with them. Round the headland they travel, only visible from land because of this jutting out headland on the wild north coast of Cornwall. From the shore they would be too far out to be able to see with the naked eye.
The gannets are all flying in a single direction, in twos and threes, or singly, or sometimes in wide loose groups of dozens. I count how many pass by the wave battered rocky islet offshore. It’s six a minute or nine per minute, and now it’s fifty a minute and it’s every time I look out; all day long the migration continues – and likely it continues all night too, outside of my vision.
And the most extraordinary thing is that the gannets are travelling more or less against the fierce wind yet they make rapid progress in a seemingly effortless manner, tacking low into the waves in shallow zig zags across the sea. In a surprisingly short time the gannets I follow have traversed the big headland and are gone to the southwest.
As I gaze across the ocean aided by binoculars, I start to see many other much smaller birds, often too far away to identify: auks in tighter flocks with flurried wingbeats low amongst the heaving waves; shearwaters; fulmars with their straight stiff wings.
And all life seems to be heading southwest with a unitary purpose. Where are they going? The gannets are likely on migration south to the Bay of Biscay or even West Africa. Are they from the remote Welsh island of Grassholm, where I have visited their vast colony, or maybe, since it is late in the year, from colonies in Iceland? It seems that young gannets migrate much further, while once reaching maturity at around five years of age, and more expert at fishing, the older gannets don’t need to migrate so far south in winter.
I am moved by this living drama every time I gaze out of the windows. Vivid rainbows appear with each downpour, the rainbow serpent arching across the sky before diving into the ocean deep, as indigenous Australians would term this amazing phenomenon. The sea horizon is a wide arc, a beautiful curve following where sea meets sky in a circular world.
I soon realised that my initial concern for the gannets in the storm had a sentimental edge to it, until I realised that they weren’t at odds with the storm but were part of it, at one with the waves as are albatrosses in the Antarctic Roaring Forties. Gannets are at home, ocean going, only setting foot on land to nest once a year . My initial sheltering in the cottage had a retractive quality to it, separating myself from the force of nature, but then watching the birds, I let go, surrendering to the life of the wind and the elements. I am learning from the birds to be at home, that I am already at home.
There is no gannet without the sea and no sea without the gannet; or at the very least the sea would be immeasurably poorer without the gannet; as would I and all of us; it’s a living unity, an interdependent reality. Though I am a being of the land, I feel I absorb a taste of this marine story by feeling into it.
The next day the wind has abated and the cottage no longer shrieks with the wind whipping around it. The ocean is calm and a mellow sunlight suffuses the now silvery smooth surface. The local gulls still wheel over the headland but of the gannets and other seabirds there is not a trace; not a single one, and the calm conditions now would make them much easier to spot. Maybe the storm actually helps their passage as they are not separate from the elemental power of the wind and tides, and surrendering to it, they are carried faster. Who knows? Life is an ever fascinating mystery.
A big part of this mystery is the air. All pervading, inside and outside, with the passing of the storm the air has resumed its usual invisibility, now felt only as a gentle enlivening breeze on my skin; and as the cool breath entering my lungs, while the waves are now lapping instead of crashing. No wonder indigenous peoples saw the wind, air, breath, as a sacred power, as spirit, as that which joined humans to all other creatures, plants and the mountains and seas. Air, the unseen medium of all their existence, was once felt to be awareness itself, rather than some special interior human quality, located somewhere inside the body.
Even our modern term ‘atmosphere’ derives from the Sanskrit atman, which signified ‘soul’ as well as ‘air’ and the ‘breath’. Similarly the Greek ‘psyche’ signified not only ‘soul’ but also a ‘breath’ or a ‘gust of wind’. Native Americans referred to all these expressions of air as the Holy Wind.
Out on the grassy slopes of the cliffs after the storm, I feel into the air we mutually share. The grass is breathing in what I breathe out, supplying its nourishment, while I am breathing in and am being nourished by what the plants exhale. Far from being empty space, we are thoroughly immersed in this precious element of air, not separate but fully enveloped in this world. By paying attention to my direct sensory experience, so much opens up and I find myself becoming more enlivened. Experiencing the storm and entering into relationship with the gannets, I learn from them about the air element. I feel a new appreciation and gratitude for the air, that much taken for granted medium which connects and makes all life possible. It is not empty but rather endlessly full of life.
Being perched on a clifftop day after day following the sun setting over the ocean after short November days, and rising on the morrow, I tune in to the earth’s rhythm of circular time, and the constant movement: very fast in terms of the moody waves and flitting clouds and the seabirds; far slower in terms of the slate scree flaking off the cliffs to the side of the headland, washed by little rivulets down the slopes; and infinitely slower still for the hard greenstone of the headland on which the lighthouse is embedded. In such an elemental landscape it’s perhaps easier to feel the loosening of the deadening strictures of the modern mental rational framework and to allow a more ancestral oral awareness to surface; the world of the senses where to see or hear is to participate, to have relationships with the community of active agents, where everything moves and is animate. I feel more that I am in the land and that I am in the mind, rather than the mind being in me; and that awareness is not a possession of mine: it is the Earth’s.
