Changes

I've got David Bowie's Changes playing in my head, in these recovery days after my long walk. "So I turned myself to face me" seems like a suitable description of some of my mountain moments, and now it's time to turn and face the strain. 

But I don't want to face the same strains as before. I don't want to drown - as I have done recently - in a news agenda that I cannot respond to in any constructive way. Yes, I made a donation to a Ukrainian charity, but that feels like a neutered response to all that human suffering. I want to engage with real people, not words on a web, to use the hour a day I was previously spending lost in news websites, engaging with friends and contacts. I have spent six weeks away from daily news, and not missed a minute of it all. 

It's hard, in civilisation, to get the same emotional intensity that you get on the bealach that you have just climbed, and from where you can see the world - or at least the last few and the next few hours of your walking world. It's relief, and a yell to the sky, and a pounding heart, and clean wind in your face, and a hug from the earth. At an arts festival in Edinburgh on Thursday, dancing my socks off to a thumping beat in blue and pink light, I get close. No clean wind, and it's packed humanity not a lonely hillside, but that reaching down inside until you are one with your world is the same. Dance does that for me. So, more dance. 

And time. It seems so much more precious now. In the mountains I lived in the moment, now, here. Back in civilisation (if that's the name for the train to Cambridge, from where I'm writing this) I can feel the world seeping in, the cares and preoccupation (a time word!) sneaking into my head, unwanted. I want to fight that, to stay in the moment, for as long as the moment lasts.