The sun is shining. It’s warm, not hot, today. The breeze strokes my cheeks as I watch the floral metronomes keep time on the hill. Above, the blue sky stands still while wisps of white surge across as far as my eye can see. They are not lingering here today. Too urgent to move on, heading for the coast, out to sea and to other far off shores.
I’m not the first person to look upon this scene. My mother grew up here. She gazed out on the same vistas with the wonder I feel now. She was invincible. She bubbled over with the permanence of life and the gentleness of time. Nothing changed, she was rooted in the now. The endless tapestry of now.
The tapestry she wove so intricately now belongs to me. I am as linked to her as my distant ancestors who built a meagre life on these bare hillsides, searching through stone for a square of their own. Endless days and light-filled nights breaking granite to reach a seam of black, fertile earth. A few feet away, cradled in long fronds of grass, their infants gurgling in innocent delight. Time did not touch them. Soft white bundles wrapped in wool, their faces framed by red curly tresses and mouths dimpled in slumber of things to be. As light dimmed, blackened fingers and wizened hands raised them from their nests, caressing a world to come. A world of hope, a world less back breaking than this.
I gaze up to this place. This place that stands in the past, in the present, and will stand for sure in the future. A brooding presence that hides a multitude of voices and life. If only our future was as certain. No more the surety of youth. The crows’ feet belie crushing fears of loss. We pass through as whispers in the trees. I hear them when I care to stop and listen. Songs and laughter, dancing and feasting, harvest-time and hammer on anvil. A world of colour imbued by the smell of honest, hard-working sweat and the sweetness of sloe gin and elderberry wine.
I am tied as much to my past as I am to my future. I am a product of these people and places and I seek futures that are a counterpoint to their melodies. I hear them in the wind, and I see the staves of their tumbling notes gush over pebbled streams in whisky-coloured water. I smell them in the farmyard and taste old half-forgotten recipes when a memory pulls me back there. Far from being retrograde steps, they drive me on to give these songs continued life. To shout with air-filled lungs that they are still here. The worlds they knew are here – deep in the soil, high up in the hills, sweeping across the barley fields and cornflowers as shining precious gold.
I look back to look forward. The line stops with me. No future generation to take the tune and make it their own. But this tune of mine is no lament. It demands to be heard. I am not its keeper. Like an endless furrow from Rhynie Man on to that yet to be seen, a deep yawl erupts from deep within me. I am alive…and we will continue even though flesh and bone desert all of us.
As notes in the songs of life, we resonate through time. We echo in the timeless hills and are carried in the wisps of white so others hear our melodies. The colour of landscapes and the sound of our companions tread carefully only breaking through when invited by our thoughts. The bright fox sniffing the sunlit gorse as a rabbit nose twitches, blinking at the sudden light flooding from darkness underground; the horses nuzzling the sweet clover in the rolling fields at sunset, the sky carpeted in glorious red of kings.
I wish this for our future. Clean air to breathe, crystal water to drink. Silent landscapes to hear life in its endless variety and the joy of others who respect that these gifts are precious, irreplaceable and to share.
I do not need a virtual reality to see this beautiful gift. I can touch it in the folds of my mind when I am not standing right in front of it, drinking in the elixir it presents. I fear we are becoming dazzled. Blinded to other worlds more ephemeral and disguised. Synthetic chocolate to draw us in but hide its true nature: a black, cloying morass that purports to bring us happiness, joy and…life. Once covered, it clings sealing up all our senses till we believe that there is nothing else.
The future is not lost but hidden beneath a lie. We have one opportunity to peek beyond this darkened veil and see a real world beyond. We crave the black sweetness of what we know. Its addictive taste beckons. It assures us that we are better than those before. We can keep taking from the here and now, the chocolate will endure.
The hills look back at me with pity. Scars of streams run down in ribbons. ‘We have both suffered,’ they confide. I turn away, my own face reflecting their pain. Suddenly, an image emerges. I wipe the tears from my chin and nod. A smile slowly flickers into life. There, she sits. Paints all around her, looking at the hill. In the distance, a faint yowl can be heard. And as I hear the tune finding air in my mind, I start to hum.
The songs of the future are the songs of life. They are eternal. Pass it on.