March-April field notes

March: Clear, Prepared, Trusting

The day broke wet, a damp mizzle coating the horizon. But the horizon is where my attention was held, the waxy thick line of next March. Like a heavy lipstick marking time, the pigment feathered into fine lines, slick with the spray from the sky and colour seeping closer. The space between me and the skyline was clear, fresh moist air, my breath travelled across the land, unobstructed, caught on the breeze.

I looked down at my feet, black boots looking sturdier than they are, already feeling the sodden grass. A puddle pooling at my heel, tinged with turquoise and shot through with blades of green, a plant trusting the season.

Despite my dampening toes, a warmth wrapped around me, cosier than the layers I had prepared myself with. I began. My back-sack slung low, it contents thumped gently on my lower back as I moved, a rhythm beating the syllables of my purpose. 

Weeks ago I’d spread the contents of my previous travel sack around me, handled and reviewed the objects that had served such purpose last time. I selected a few and arranged in-between my imminent trips provisions. I had gathered and loaded the sack slowly. Storing essentials as I discovered them, packing found treasures into pockets, folded papers keeping reminders, charts and instructions safe, a notebook and pen for field notes. Nestled supplies and luxuries together in a bundle that felt lighter than I expected.

3 months it had taken our cohort to prepare, with our coach participating in the preparation with us, each lesson unfurling and taking up new space in our consciousness. Knock on effects and new perspectives were expected as we bound together and formed more fully separately. I imagined the others setting out on their solo journeys, all female, all grown with care, all moving through different terrains to their horizons, equipped for uncertain challenge.

As I picked my way through the initial grassy knolls, wispy grasses and waving seed heads hiding churned earth, impossible to traverse quickly, I felt for my map. I followed the trail through the hewn field not with a finger along a dotted line but with the map that is unrolled within and around me. Softened eyes reveal in an instant, coordinates in front of me, my eyeviewer was working. As I scan the landscape, information pops up, a place of interest, a natural wonder, a trap to avoid. This technology guides me but does not protect me, I still feel the sharp twist in my ankle as I stumble. I suspect that I feel it, and its message sharper.

As instructed, I slow, nearing the edge of a wood. The trees have branches like gnarled old hands, sculpted by work, their bark a course skin stretched over crinkles and folds. Each tree cups a space at its centre, like a seat, some furnished with cool green lichen or emerald moss, other spaces are worn smooth, inviting time to sit. I glance at the sky, wind whipped the clouds into billowing formations but for now the misty drench has lifted. Stepping in I select my first tree.

I choose a large tree with good visibility both into and out of the woods, its seat a little misshapen and an uncomfortable with a burl protruding, ensuring that the stay will be short. I count eight branches, each marked with smooth grooved notches. I flick on the technology and images flicker then swirl around each branch, overlapping and encircling, licking the bark like a flare, building in pigment and form, projecting round and up and over me and I am sat in a vessel of light and colour. 

As the images grow stronger I see each is connected to a branch. One gives a branch thousands of flickering windows, voiles and drapes fluttering, sash windows with geraniums, windows open and hung with drying washing, shuttered windows with balconies, windows with blinds rolled up and closed barred windows dark behind. Another branch is festooned with everchanging faces smiling and becoming, softening and aging, collapsing into themselves and emerging chubby cheeked with baby skin, turning to each other with a laugh and kind eyes, worn edges burling and reshaping. Another branch has burst with shiny leaves, scaling the wood like a coat of armour. 

The technology tells me each branch had a name, and a word hovered over its form; family, relationship, home, work, play, meaning, body, wealth. The ladder of notches on each branch invite my fingers and I feel for the thumbprint shape in each notch, that fits my own. 3 of the branches have notches that my thumb fits in exactly, the course has been set.

I clamoured down the tree, glimpsing my child-self who deftly flicked through branches through the memory filter, guiding my boots to knobbles and jutting branches then safely down on the fertile mulch. I kept the technology running and looked for the next clue. As I watched the woods through the child filter, a path, no bigger than a fox-run surfaced. I remembered the teachings, neuro pathways exist like sheep tracks, the more often travelled the deeper the path. As I hesitate a chain of ideas pop up on my eyeviewer, this might not be the idea but it could be the idea that leads to the idea. The chain tumbled ahead of me catching more links as it flowed. My careful pigeon stepping widened the path, tamping down edges and grasses behind me.

Control, Alternatives, Reset

Days slipped past. I had dutifully followed the path, weaving my way through brambles that tangled and fruited, tearing and staining my clothes, nourishing my lips. My head was down, technology off, thinking of our cohort’s connection, how sharing the path had helped us develop. A wave of uncertainty buzzed through my mind, what if the fox-run was the wrong trail, what if I should have used a different filter, seen another route? Did all routes go the same way? A quiet voice in the technology was triggered, “all routes, same you” and I breathed. 

It was time for a reset, the days without company or any inkling of the reveal were taking their toll. As I decided to pause, a clearing emerged, a soft place with pillowy hillocks.  I sat and scrolled through reset alternatives, the mossy turf beneath me inviting rest, I chose to reset ‘control’ always one of my sticking points during the programme.

I lay back and words began imprinting across my eyelids, scrolling across my tired body. Outlining first the shape of elements within my control then their shadowy counterparts that sabotage if allowed to take up space. Completing the reset were words that cultivate the elements, planting mind-seeds to draw on when the elements need replenishing. 

Inner Element                  Sabotager          Cultivator

Your belief                         doubt                   practice

Your attitude                    ignorance           listen

Your thoughts                 apathy                 read

Your perspective             shallowness      wide-sight

Your honesty                    lies                        courage

Your choices                      rejection             share

Your movement              sedation             stillness

Your kindness                   harshness          self-nourishment

Your risks                            avoidance          information

Your words                        silence                 paper

Your expression               subdue                observation

Your requests                   denying               quiet

Your effort                         aloof                     food

Your judgement                              recklessness     consideration

Your resilience                 weakness           sleep

Your appreciation           disparage           space

31 days had past and my aching body craved a sign, to validate my motion. I allowed the reset elements and seeds to sink into my skin, pips and kernels freckled my body and pollen dusted my closed eyes as foliage flourished around my limbs. Cherry pink blossom fell, coiling tendrils trailed over me and moth soft leaves unfolded, providing shelter as I slept.

April: Curious, Explorer-Gatherer

I realise now I had rushed it. The clarity of beginning and deep trust afforded by the gnarled hands of the woodland, the month of preparation, crossing the landscape had been programmed to take exactly that time. 7 tasks I’d set myself for that month, when this place was only in my imagination, a carefully constructed training ground.

1.      Surface old patterns, discover tendencies

2.      Practice in the open

3.      Measure a unit of time by changes to inner elements

4.      Practice bodily detaching

5.      Speak an idea

6.      Allow the technology to meld with instinct

And I’d kept field notes. Nostalgia coursed through me when I put pencil to paper, a parchment memory. I shaped letters practicing the craft of handwriting which I’d learnt through pieced together instructions left behind on the ‘internet’ a glitchy mess of information. Long gone elders personal details, floating endlessly overlayed with fake promises and tangled with code. But I’d pulled out the meaning, the systems and the rudimentary code of language and created a pamphlet that sat in the technology. Our cohort was the first to benefit from the slow practice of writing our notes, with it discovering the breakthrough of reflection – a beacon somehow buried before writing returned it to us.

And now I reflected, checked off my task list 1. I hold my past treasures with me, patterns that no longer make sense are burnt. 2. Continues. 3 and 4. A grueller but done for now (I skipped over that last thought) 4. I had written not one idea but a few, potentials. 

An inner buzz reminded me of the danger of potentials too close to expectations. I flicked my wrist and removed the word, replacing the heading of my idea list from Potentials to Anticipations and read it aloud into the talc-fine dust that was transcending from the path to the sky. 6. Well I’d been using them both? (I ignored the quiet voice reminding me with a tug that at my most anguished the technology had stopped working) There. I sat back satisfied and leant back into the mountain, cushioned by lichen and laurel, jewelled with tiny pink tinged daisies their petals hardy and cheerful faces tilted towards the yellow warmth of the sky.

Even from my low foothill vantage point the rising dust was beautiful. Powder swirled upwards in ethereal columns giving body to the heavy clouds forming above. Soon there would be a storm. I softened my eyes, tuning into the weather commentary. Wait, the eyeviewer, wasn’t on?

I surged upwards, whipped around. The mountain that had seemed to hold my back now looked menacing, dark rock hewn and foraged by man cooled in colour, from dove grey into pewter aged with years of neglect. The silence and dust filled air pushed on my chest, claustrophobic, tight. The inner buzz? My technology was off. The inner buzz reminder. I fumbled with the manual switch embedded in my temple, shook my head, gasped as the activation flooded my eyes and ears with colour and shattered silver light through the eyeviewer, spinning beads of blue and magenta and lime cascading over my limbs and scattering the ground with baubles. I breathed deep, it had been years since I had performed a manual switch on whilst inside the technology, and my technology was far stronger now I had completed the programme, I clutched the smooth rock, slipping and catching myself.

Gradually the colour settled, my palms flat on the mountain, levelling myself. The laurel that had pulsed with electric emerald a breath ago, settled into its usual uniform green tones. I breathed more steadily too whilst I let a message unfold, processing how the inner buzz, reminding me of danger, had buzzed without technology.

We’d been taught to look out for subversions. Warned of the accidental spoils of ‘resting on our laurels’ The inner buzz shouldn’t have been functioning without the protective radiating beam from the technology that was supposed to encase me. I had only moved to from ‘quest’ to ‘rest’ mode for a few minutes, feeling safe backed by the mountain, allowing a moment to watch the dust without the perpetual quest sensation. The subversions were called …. And luckily there was a tincture for their release.