Meandering
/
I am lying in the tent – hiding from the midges that are hanging in dark clouds – on the Isle of Arran. I am listening to the water and a bird giving a soft whistle call as if it's having a conversation about the ordinary events of the day. I am alone. I feel like having a conversation with the bird, I could talk about how I didn’t see any large ticks in the bracken and the colour of the green and the bog and the mist and the dark cloud. How large that dragonfly was, and hugging the granite for dear life and the butterflies lifting off around me as I walked – the sound of the bird is merging with the water, as my thoughts tumble out like the stream, reflecting on Germany, my family, the deep explorations I did with Andrea, Ramona and Steffi, the forest and the land. I reflect back to arriving at Steffi’s place near Übersee.
I am waiting for Steffi in her farmhouse attic apartment, she is at a meeting and her neighbour brought me here from the train station. I am sitting in a rocking chair covered in a sheepskin, looking out to the mountains of Austria and southern Bavaria. There is a pile of German children’s books about dwarfs, giants and forest animals, and I am surrounded by herbs and books and vinegars. I am in happiness; I feel like Piglet surrounded by haycorns. I gaze upon the changing landscape as cloud and shadow and light dramatically shift across the mountains, at the same time dropping into the eclectic choice of Steffi’s books.
From a late night of talking and laughing to morning, and whilst it is still morning we wander down to the swamplands, talking, meandering, grazing and pausing to observe. We also gather meadowsweet for a tincture, picking the newer flowers randomly. Meandering is as a river flows, the sinuous movement that the river takes through landscape, creating landscape as it moves as landscape also creates it. Meander was a river. A river from the uplands of western Turkey to the Aegean Sea. And it definitely meandered (although not so much now) creating fertile areas, renewing itself as it coursed its way down to the Aegean Sea. It is now called Büyuk Menderes.
In Germany I have never seen a meandering river – over centuries they have seen the meandering, sinuous quality of rivers as inefficient and have straightened and controlled the many rivers that cross the European landscape. Even the clear mountain river near Steffi’s is bound by stopbanks.
When we meander, it is like a process of beginnings, the landscape seems to begin again as we are led from one curiosity to another, timeless, renewing, we are in the state of being lost and not lost at the same time, for we are not going anywhere. Meandering has become a symbol for non-deterministic systems, this means you take more time to explore possibilities, there are mistakes and backtracking, there are unexpected challenges, there is interaction, there seems to be always a state of humour, and yes complexity and irregularity. To meander we have to go off the tracks and roads, these are often straight and designed for an outcome. Off track, views are happened on, and as we walk, aspects are connected, for we are the ones doing the connecting. We may reconnect to a path and then move off again. There are no compartments in meandering, there is no putting an aspect apart from another.
I often think about how we as a culture have made spirituality separate from ourselves, as if we have to do something to be spiritual rather than just be ourselves. I see the nature of meandering as participating in the natural fluidity of being ourselves and that through that openness of curiosity and allowing a movement to arise we open up our senses to things in a surprising way. I guess it’s a kind of listening and it's unique to be able to do that with another.
In the afternoon Steffi and I travelled up to the Alm hut. The Alm is a place in the mountains where the people would take their animals up to the alpine fields to reside in the summer months and the alm hut was where they housed them. There are a few small rooms for the people. The hillsides were steep and the alm hut sat at the edge of a narrow mountain valley. The hut was cool and dark, its function and simplicity intermingled to create a kind of beauty that naturally anchored into the landscape. As we walked up the steep rutted road, we were still touched by the space of meandering, and this allowed us to pause and explore the stream. I was reminded of the missions my father would do where suddenly in the midst of a journey in the car he would take an unknown side road. These excursions could be hairy but they often ended in remarkable places that became mysterious for me as I could never find them again.
In a culture that does not normally value meandering, I started to wonder about the relationship between structure and meandering. It’s like the river and landscape. Both create one another, and they can work together. I suddenly felt that the value of meandering could also be accessed at any moment, the feeling of being open to the unknown, and the choice to move with that. As Steffi and I lay in our sleeping bags looking up at the ash tree, an owl landed in it and we felt a quiet that pushed out a space in the world. Then the owl departed as silently as it had arrived.
