Day Five

 

5th May 2009 SCOTLAND

Sticks and stones and drones

It is early morning; I’ve been told breakfast will be ready at seven. It is not yet six I don’t want to go down to early, I stay in bed watching the sun push its way through the curtains and move lazily across the room. The plan today is to be on the shores of Loch Ness before the day is done…I am quietly hoping the sun once it has reached the bedroom door will follow me down the stairs, hang around the kitchen for twenty minutes… step out the front door with me and then stay one step ahead all the way to the small town of Drumnadrochit.

On the kitchen chair there is a small bundle of clothes; washed, dried and ironed…as well as some sandwiches… sometimes ‘thank you’ is a stupid word it does not express nearly as much as it should. Today started how I think every day should start… sat around a kitchen table… a few words of gratitude for the food in front of us and for the day ahead and after eating we sit awhile with a mug of tea in hand sharing again more stories… and after a really nice breakfast the walking boots back on I am stepping out the front door, saying ‘thank you’ a number of times to the reverend Ian Pallet and his family… in the hope of making the word sound a little less stupid, doesn’t really work it still sounds totally inadequate.

A little over an hour and I walk past the Conon Bridge Hotel, this is where I was taken for dinner last night, and again I say a quiet thank you. The sun has done as I had hoped; its rays fall on to an agricultural landscape, a patchwork of irregular shaped fields. The bigger hills sit in the distance. The walking like yesterday is steady going, gentle hills on quiet and twisting country roads.

The thoughts of yesterday were still bouncing around in my head… a fight, a battle between what is good and what is not… standing with one foot in this muddled up world of a thousand conflicts… and the other foot in a world that feels like a million miles away… a place of love, truth and beauty… we need to believe in such a world because without it I don’t think nothing would make much sense at all…without the existence of such a belief the story of mankind would have stumbled and fell away a long time ago. This belief is real… do we not once in a while catch a glimpse of such a world behind an impossible smile, an unexpected act of kindness or in the songs of a thousand birds at dawn… ah but more than this… look into the deepest part of the human heart, take away all the scars, garbage and the nonsense and at its core you find love… such a heart was never made for a world of conflict and hate…how sad it should be lost in such a world as this.

…hmm I don’t want to give the impression that when walking all I am thinking about is… ‘what’s it all about’ kind of questions… much of the time there is very little bouncing around up top. The time is spent kicking stones and twigs along woodland tracks, thinking of nothing much at all… annoyed that I don’t know the names of more of the trees and plants around me (the hope is when in a few months I step through the open door of Oatridge College to study ‘Countryside Management’ …and three years later when walking back out that same door I will have a much better understanding of this land that I am walking through). If I am not kicking stones, I’m running my fingers through the ferns and grasses on the verges alongside country lanes, looking up at odd shaped clouds and daydreaming. In the clouds I see the image of an upside down penguin slowly changing into a broken umbrella and at the same time I feel a tingling sensation in my hand, I look down only to find that I’m no longer running my fingers through ferns but instead running them through a bunch of stinging nettles… oh boy!

Two hours pass by the walking is easy going, gentle hills and fields… the roads are quiet. The legs ache a little but feel good, the hand is still tingling from the nettles. The sun I think is getting tired, it seems to be hanging back a little. I walk into Beauly and take a handful of steps past the Priory Hotel… hmm I wonder… I take a few steps back and step into the hotel… five minutes later I am sat in the tearoom with a pot of tea, teacup and saucer and a slice of chocolate cake… and not a penny in my pocket… how is that... I sit close to an hour, watching people come and go. A mum with two young children both with a book, the little girl running her finger along the words on the page and speaking them out quietly to herself, the boy sitting on the floor pushing his book along the carpet making the noise of a car.

I finish the last of the tea at the bottom of the teacup… the cake long gone, I again say thank you to the waiter and the guy behind reception. I step outside to a different weather system… crumbs I was only sat for no more than an hour… the sun has gone; the only shapes I see in the clouds are a scattering of grey and broken roof slates. I turn to the south, check my collar is up, push my hands into my pockets and start walking, it’s not long before Beauly is behind me and I’m back on the open road.

It seems a little unfair for children to have to grow up into a world of conflict and division more so when it was not of their making. If you were to bring together toddlers from all the different corners of the world (…not sure how many corners a global world has…) and put them together into a giant bouncy castle they would happily play together. The difference in the colour of skin, eyes and hair or the different languages they spoke and the clothes that they wore, would not for a moment stop them from laughing and playing together. It is only when we grow older, we begin to discriminate against those who are different to us.

To create a better world, we need to figure out what is at the root of conflict and what it is that divides us… a huge question… but one we cannot walk away from. It is horrible when a child sitting on the floor be them playing with dolls or sliding a book along the carpet looks up at horrific images on the TV news and asks the question … Why? …For children, the images make no sense at all, and yet we grown-ups sometimes explain them away without a second thought… what nonsense. The futures of these little ones are tied up in that baton I spoke of a few days back, we need to hold on to it tighter and find a way to run harder.

The slate grey sky that I had been keeping an eye on catches up with me bringing with it the tears of heaven… sorry that’s a little over dramatic… I’ll stick to calling it rain; I dig out my water proof (…which is only water residence, keeping within the spirit of the walk I had decided not to take the best of gear with me, although maybe better boots would have been a good idea… I have a nagging feeling they are going to give me a hard time further down the road). Before the rain establishes itself, I sit on a wooden stile alongside a dry stone wall and the yellow flowers of gorse and eat one of the sandwiches given to me this morning.

The hours pass by; the rain feels like it’s here to stay for the afternoon.my thoughts drift back again to the conflict we see around us. It is only in the human world we see conflict and division in the natural world there is a harmony. A fox will take out a rabbit or a pheasant not out of hate but out of necessity, it may look cruel through human eyes, but it is nature’s way of keeping a balance in the created world. I walk with my hood up; my jacket is giving up its residence to the rain. The words of a song called ‘Faith Healer’ come to mind …’if your body is feeling bad, it’s the only one you have, you want to take away the pain go out walking in the rain’… and I am left wondering as I walk down into Drumadrochit how did hate get into such a beautiful world.

To my surprise once in Drumadrochit the grey skies gives way to blue skies… the sun looks down at me as if to say ‘which way did you go’ …all the while pretending not to notice that I’m wet. I wanted to say ‘shut up’ but not sure if that is a good thing to say to the sun so I keep quiet. My job now is to try finding some dinner and a place to stay the night; I have no luck with the churches that I find, cannot find any contact numbers. I stumble across a fish and chip shop… smells good…I walk in and walk out with a bag of chips plus a name of a youth hostel and directions in how to get there. On the way to the hostel I find a bench and sit down to finish my chips. It would be good to find a bed tonight.

I sit on the bench allowing the sun and the gentle breeze to slowly start drying my clothes, I reflect on the days walk and thoughts. It feels like we see conflict everywhere we look; nation up against nation, even within a single nation we see both conflict and division. The stones and twigs I was kicking along a woodland path that I spoke of earlier remind me of the playground rhyme ‘sticks and stones may break my bones…’. When walking the city streets at night it is not that unusual to come across young men fighting or the divide between those that have and those who have next to nothing sleeping rough. We all know of a family that has broken a part (I am not making any judgments... sadly these things happen). Conflict seems to divide all levels of society… even the individual gets caught up in their own internal conflicts.

…and on that happy thought It is time I made a move, I need to try and find this hostel the chip shop told me about and hope to get a bed for the night. I push myself up from the bench… I feel heavy, not sure if the reason for this is my legs starting to stiffen up from the days walk or just a heavy heart.

Ten minutes later I step into the ‘Backpackers Hostel’. I again explain myself and again given a bed and again I am astonished at the generosity of people. The lady shows me where the kettle and toaster are, and then opens a cupboard and tells me this is the food other people have left and I am to help myself… ‘Thank you’…yeah the word still sounds totally inadequate. I grab a shower, change into dry clothes, and hang the wet clothes up in the drying room. Fifteen minutes later I am sinking into an old sofa with a mug of tea and some toast…not sure why but today was pretty tough… it wasn’t so much the legs nor the weather it was more the head… thinking about the world as it is… a world full of inequality, conflict and division a world where men (and it is mostly men) draw lines on maps and then fight over them (lines that don’t exist when looking down at the world from high up in the sky)… how long has this fighting been going on… I guess ever since we picked up a stick and used it as a club… then moved on to stones and now were using drones… will we ever learn. The hardest part is when I look in the mirror, I see a reflection of that world looking back at me… the conflict of good and evil… the wanting to do good but many times doing wrong… the division between mind and body… the mind having high ideas and the body too lazy to follow… the book of Romans sums this up far better than I … I paraphrase. "I delight in the law of God… but I see another law at work in the body… wretched man that I am". It is not the fox taking out a rabbit that is the problem… for the creation of a better world it is people that need fixing.

The lady who has allowed me to stay in this hostel for the night walks over with a coffee in hand ‘cheer up it might never happen’… she sits herself down in an armchair that looks just as worn out and as tired as the sofa that I’m sat on… I smile… we talk for a while about this and that and nothing at all… maybe she was an angel, the sense of despair falls away… to bring back a little bit of sunshine maybe all you need is an old sofa, a mug of tea, a few slices of buttered toast and a coffee drinking angel to talk to.

I think most of us to some degree are mixed up, muddled up and full of contradictions but at the same time we are also incredible… we have so much potential… a better world is there for the taking… and it starts from here… doesn’t matter if we find ourselves sat in an old sofa or at a kitchen table or in the cab of a truck parked up overnight in a layby… the starting point is this… we need to hold on to the thought, as we pull ourselves up from a worn out sofa, push away from the kitchen table or climb out of the cab… how can I be a better person from what I was yesterday and what is it I can do today to make myself a better person for tomorrow... yeah I know easy to say not so easy to do… but none the less something I think we should try our best to do, it is one way we can help build a better world… one yesterday at a time.