The Chilterns

I’ve started packing in preparation for leaving London. My clothes and books are going into storage, to be unpacked and rediscovered in a new life in Berlin, while all I need for the 65 days of walking and living on a path is going in a rucksack. I’ll be camping most nights. Whenever I’ve camped before it’s been with friends, with cooking kit and tent pegs split over the party, this journey will be the first time that I have camped alone. I’ve begun to walk alone though, to train myself physically for what’s to come but also mentally. The past year has been one where I’ve avoided being alone with my thoughts, where I’ve tried to crowd the ache of sadness from my mind with chattering. Silence has been a threat – disclosing inner discord. For a long time my customary retreat, of reading, was also denied to me. I have never before put away so many books unfinished. So this long, often solitary journey I’m soon to begin will be one where I’ll be reacquainted with me, and with the thoughts I have tried to avoid. I expect this to be painful, but I also know that the path will aid me, and that the sea is going to be my companion for every step. The sea, which restores me.

I recently walked the Chilterns, alone apart from flying ants that dive bombed me for fun.  The sky read grim in the morning, with bottom heavy clouds seeking rest on nearby hills, but the longer I walked, the lighter the day became.  Walking, just walking, feels an indulgence at times when duties press, but this day I had nothing to do but walk, and make my own the memories of these hills I have previously always shared. I followed a river for miles, sometimes walking by its side and resisting the urge to dip my feet in, but more often from a distance, climbing to the edge of the valley and out of earshot of its hurry onwards. As the afternoon drew on the path became a muddy track where stones made a natural staircase, and at the summit, it described the edge of a bluebell wood. I stopped and the air seemed to hold silence, while a veil of gnats danced in emerging sunlight. History looks like this. Over the valley and behind me the sky had cracked open, a chasm of sunshine spilling onto green fields and setting alight the river.

I was the only person in view and that land, just then, felt like it was mine.