The height of sky and rock is something like the relief of a thirst quenched, before the mind races, the relief in the moment between filling the mouth and swallowing, an absolute certainty in something which has become essential.
I love the mountains more for their confirmation of space than the things themselves, although the way the light leaves a day on a mass of ground, the way, here at least in Italy, I am watching oranges sink into pinks and deep, deep reds against this mass of grey, is dramatic and breathtaking. It can become thrilling if I can slow myself, my being, to match the changes of the light, and so, by some perfect lawless quantum, the world speeds up and there is no waiting, no anticipation, just an unquantifiable shifting.
I am not so good at the sea. The sheer expanse of it hits a fear of oblivion in me: a threat of space instead of my possibilities within it. I don't know why this is other than perhaps I took ferries as a child, crossings from the UK to Ireland, and back, and there, on those boats, was the threat of being in the middle, surrounded by endless expanses of water. At the window, Holyhead's strange little curve, always miserable and metally, disappeared as a rising panic gently stilled me, until we came the other piece of land, Dublin, Dublin, which I never understood other than from the windows of our car in the strange fuggy smell of ferry on clothes.
I never knew this in myself until now, until I feel my love of masses and earth, my love of something that gives me possibilities giving birth to a dark twin which carries me to a memory of that ferry on the sea. In Dublin we moved further inwards, the English cousins going further west, further from the crossing, to another edge that for me was always to go deeper inside.
Endless space is rarely something a child might wish for. In the lonely hills of Connemara, in some gasped breath of a bike-ride, a brother, a cousin so far ahead I could cry, the hills were never a confirmation of anything but ground not to lose, tarmac for the struggle. Walking as a child, a forest is better, and the sea is nothing more, at that moment, than the edge of the sand, far from the rug and the sandwiches, a small experiment perhaps in coldness and depth, but I never strayed, I was never with the sea at the beach. The real sea was the middle space, the oblivion around me, the going or coming home, not a place for relief.
Perhaps others who never live the crossing are less threatened by the sea, perhaps it is to them a horizon which holds a promise of possibilities in space as firm as the mountains do for me. Perhaps the horizons of the sea are running streams of stories of those that left and found peace elsewhere, stories of promise, that yes, at the end of it, there is always that, an adventure to the horizon. It is not exile, then, it is an unexplored map, confirmation of space, of promise in which we might, in the absence of anything greater, place our faith. I am learning this now, this faith in being, that is faith in something greater than ourselves from which we rose and we will return. Our being is not ours.
I am full of stories, of my ancestors, my body, my womanhood, although the sea and the mountains speak of the same - shall we call it magic? - it is sacred, it is beyond these little words, although the sea and the mountains might utter the same prayer, my stories lead me to a mass against a sky, to firm ground, to greenness and texture. My stories house me in fear of oblivion that rises more strongly, painfully, at the sea, buried deep, deep in the speechless journey of those of us carried home and home again in both directions surrounded by endless horizons. It was a small body of water, but I was a stranger to the world there. Under a mass of rock and earth, alone, my stories hold my fear, still it is unnamable, but I can make an approach, I can begin to speak, and there I would learn ritual.
