All at Once

“All real living is meeting” ~ Martin Buber

This moment of encounter, slight and fleeting though it seems, contains every twist, turn, halt and reverse which has shaped the stories of countless elements, and brought them together now in an unrepeatable point of intersection. All at once, everything appears indivisibly united.

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A light frost covers the shadowed valley, muting her palette of greens. It is early morning in late September. The sun has risen just high enough to crown the tops of the surrounding fells with a warm amber light. I am walking the narrow lane from Rosthwaite towards the craggy uplands of Borrowdale. On either side of me, a stone wall hugs the contours of the valley. As the landscape responds to changes of weather and season, the wall remains constant, a dwelling place for ferns, moss and lichen.

On the other side of the wall, a mist rises from the restless waters of the beck. The chill air bites through my sweater and I wish I had worn another layer. Every few steps I stop to take in a new correlation of stone, branch, leaf and light. I begin to sense that I am part of this correlation. I’m not just an observer recording a view. Through the intimacy of my seeing, the quality of my presence and the choice of my perspective, I am a co-creator, constellating beauty.

Ahead of me the wall curves gently round the edge of a field. My eye follows its line towards the familiar shape of an old oak tree, its roots entwined in stone and covered in moss. All at once my attention is pulled to an unexpected scurry of movement along the top of the wall. A small russet body hurtles towards the tree. A red squirrel. He’s up early to make the most of the abundance of freshly fallen acorns which lie strewn at intervals along the path. Five or six bounds along the top of the wall bring him within reach of the oak. There he pauses, as though acknowledging my presence. Then in a single leap, he vanishes from my sight.

Had I blinked in that moment, or been looking the other way, had I dallied a little longer at my last stopping point, or walked at a different pace, I would have missed him. Staring at the wall, I mouth the words ‘oh my god’, as though acknowledging receipt of unfathomable blessing.

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Bound to the steady rhythm of mechanical time, we have come to regard the present moment as the next predictable click of a digital clock turning from one number to the next. Conceived in this way, each moment weighs the same as the last, which is to say very little. We forget that the moment is a measure of lived experience. It constitutes an unrepeatable coalescence of time, place and subjectivity. As such, it is fundamentally relational.

Reflecting on my encounter with the red squirrel, I marvel at the improbability of so many stories and subjectivities intersecting at the very moment I approach the oak tree on my morning walk along the stone-clad lane:

There is the geological story of this valley, shaped by aeons of deep time and by the elemental interaction of rock and water.

The rain has her own important story here. Borrowdale experiences the highest rainfall in England. Even on a clear day the rain makes her presence felt in the modulated sonority of countless streams which pour down the fell sides.

This particular day, marked as it is by the turning of summer into autumn, already has her own story to tell. The September sun has touched the tops of the fells later than yesterday. Today, the temperature is a degree cooler in the shadowed valley.

The human story lives here too, evident in the careful placement of stone in mile upon mile of walls and pathways, each one a handmade tale threading hillside to valley, kith to kin. As I walk down the lane, I’m aware of all the contact points between foot and stone which have preceded me.

There is my story, rooted as it is in Cumbrian ancestry, a tale now also weathered by time, nourished by an invisible stream of yearning which calls me to return to this land of fell, beck, crag and thwaite. Wrapped up in this moment of witness lie years of dedication to the practice of beholding, both as a photographer of the natural world and as a psychotherapist.

Then of course there is the squirrel’s story. These small native reds have inhabited Cumbria for the past 6,000 years, but since their grey cousins were introduced in the 1870s, they have been pushed to the brink of extinction. Fragile populations of red squirrels survive in the cloak of Borrowdale’s ancient oakwoods. Still, it is extremely rare to encounter one out in the open. This little chap crossing my path so nonchalantly fills my heart with joy.

This moment of our encounter, slight and fleeting though it seems, contains every twist, turn, halt and reverse, every hesitation and every acceleration which has shaped the stories of these and countless other elements, and brought them together now, in an unrepeatable point of intersection.

All at once, everything appears indivisibly united.

Standing very still, I remain for a while near the old oak tree, my attention held by the small stretch of wall where the squirrel and I crossed paths. It was such a small thing this squirrel, and our encounter was so fleeting, and yet I feel somehow altered. Martin Buber would have described an encounter of this kind as a relational event. The word ‘event’ derives from the Latin ex-venire, meaning ‘to come out of’, so an ‘event’ signifies the emergence of something entirely new. No wonder I feel altered.

Pausing in wonder that something so small and fleeting could effect this alteration, I recall a line from the ‘Revelations’ of the fourteenth century mystic, Julian of Norwich:

In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought “What may this be?”. And the answer came: “It is all that is made.”

It strikes me then, that the ‘relational event’, slight and fleeting though it may seem, is not incidental, not merely the next step on a linear progression from past to future. It is in fact a way in to ‘all that is made’. Not a point in time, but a portal.

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Some time later, recalling my Borrowdale encounter with friends, I find myself struggling to account for the depth of feeling stirred in me by the little squirrel. ‘What might this encounter mean?’ they ask, somewhat bewildered. The encounter doesn’t signify anything, I explain. I have no wish to read any symbolic meaning into the unlikely crossing of our paths. What stays with me is the lived experience itself, my sudden vulnerability to the sheer miracle of meeting in the moment.

Somewhere wrapped up in the emotional strength of my response I recognise traces of sadness. Borrowdale is home to England’s largest surviving fragments of the sprawling temperate rainforest that once cloaked much of the UK’s Atlantic seaboard. Remnants of this once mighty forest still offer refuge to veteran oaks, birches and rowans, pollarded ash, holly and tangled hazel coppice, all lichen-crusted, fern-spangled and moss-carpeted.

My ancestors roamed these same woodlands, benefitted from their shelter and bounty. They would have lived alongside the red squirrels, amidst a host of other native species, in a living web of correlation. Over time, these woodland habitats have dwindled to make space for sheep. This little squirrel scurrying along the wall has survived against the odds.

Our unlikely encounter opens a seam of unacknowledged sorrow. I grieve for the loss of a shared sense of the dignity of life itself, in all its infinite variety. The erosion of this once commonplace experience of communion is an increasingly lonely sorrow to bear. Sitting with my friends, struggling to explain the depth of my feelings, longing for their recognition, I feel a little foolish.

It dawns on me then. Perhaps I am also one of the last of my kind. I too am surviving against the odds. Those of us who experience wonder in moments of encounter with the wild world are also dwindling in number. It is increasingly rare to see us out in the open.

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FOOTNOTES

Image: Red squirrel | © National Trust Images / Jim Bebbington

Martin Buber, I and Thou, T & T Clarke (1950)

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Penguin Classics (1998)