The sun is lower in the sky. I know this from the dapples cast along the track. This is the time of year when shadows become more evident. I don’t want to step on them. I stop and stand to watch the way they shimmy in the light breeze, shifting shapes like a moving work of art. As I move on, butterflies flit across my walking, fritillaries, peacock, black harlequins, painted lady and even a red admiral. They flow through the sunlight alighting on scabious, moon something, meadowsweet, supping the last drink of nectar before the season snatches the bar away, pulling the flowers back down to rest for another year. Skitterbugs buzz and hum, scoot and lift around me. I don’t know their names, there are so many. Some hover, some whine, but all come close to check me out. I don’t swat. I say hallo you. Everything and everyone wants to be acknowledged after all.

Down to the shore of memories. I hear the memoric voices raised in excitement, a whale watching adventure ahead. I think I might have to push through the gorse but someone has scarped a space enough for a human to pass through without a single scratch. I see the water appearing long before I reach it. Low tide, new moon, a good time for the oyster farmers to be out on the shore, tending their cages. They have worked here for days, I heard the rumble of tractors, the lift of male voices on the breeze for a few days now and they are here again. The gorse pods pop as I walk through a canopy that once was an irritation to my feet. How quickly pass the years. I stand to watch a pod explode, sending seeds up into the air and watch them land. More gorse next year. The coconut smell is heavenly and I breathe it in, then move on down to the shore. There will be no otter to watch this day. The tide is wrong, the water somewhat poppled on a land breeze. Otters, I have observed, choose a calm incoming tide for their hunting.

A heron explodes from the bow-backed hazel crowd. These benty trees, known, somewhat disrespectfully as ‘scrub’ were tots in the days of my memory, the granite boulders trojans, all biceps and resistance. It seems even they can be compromised. The heron explosion startles me. So much squawk and crashbang, and that’s just taking off. It reminds me of those I knew who never went anywhere quietly, needing to announce themselves. Across the low tide I notice a cormorant standing on the sand. I watch the first tractor coming and watch it sit some more. When it eventually lifts into the sky there is no sound. Gulls wheel and squeal around like gossips, keeping close eye on the action. A fish jumps. The salmon are running, that instinctive push to recreate, even though death calls just as loudly. When the tidal flow begins, as it will soon, the waters will thrapple with jumping fish, the otter beneath and threatening an early demise, like being fired just before retiring.

Home, and I question that. I know this is home for me. I know it. So why do I want to run and run when everything sacred to me is right here? There is no logic to these biting ants that rise in me. It thinks me. I am not the only one feeling this. I believe we all do, we all feel the desire to run and run and run. But from what? I will not swat the feeling away because it is a teacher, a guide. Perhaps none of us really understand what it is to be human. Current culture teaches endless ‘perfect’ remedies for ‘sorting us out’. Once and for all. But, and I am a questing and curious student of life, I know there is no ‘once and for all’. There is no remedy for human-ness. We all know moments of completion and days or months or years of wanting to run. This is not weird, but we pretend it is and label the so called ‘lost’ as if they had leprosy and we might catch it. But this is not Truth. I have a million times of completion and a thousand times that million of biting ants. It is only possible to accept and to love being human if we can allow this in ourselves, in others instead of expecting everyone to ‘get over themselves’ in the spreadsheet timeline we write upon ourself.

I meet other grievers. I hear the same from them all. ‘Well-meaning friends and family ‘tell’ me I ‘should’……….. I just wrysmile at that.