October has started and we are moving towards Samhain and the Harvest of the Souls. Sounds pretty dramatic and a little creepy. It’s not really. It’s a time for reflecting on what lessons and wisdom we have harvested from the year, and a time for honouring our ancestors, the wisdom passed on to us through our physical bodies in the form of genes and mythologically through our family histories. There is a more nebulous and faint echo of our ancestors in us too, one that comes up from the landscapes our ancestors lived in and walked through, the landscapes we live in and move through now.
I came across the phrase ‘Blue Mountains Constantly Walking’ reading a text about a text about a text, if you follow my drift. It was coined by Chan Master Furong and quoted by Zen Buddhist Dogen Kigen around 1240. It holds a great deal of meaning for students and philosophers of Soto Zen Buddhism. I don’t intend to explore that here, although prosaically, one could liken the blue mountains to the earth element within our bodies, and as we move around we carry the mountains with us.
What arrested my attention was the ‘walking’ bit. Walk. From an old English and Germanic root meaning to roll or twist, to move about, specifically on foot. Or, in more modern parlance, falling over with style and grace.
Thinking of my ancestors moving South Eastwards from Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland, ending up in Essex, England, my brain did one of those ‘I wonder what, where, when.’
When did a most ancient and honoured hominid ancestor decide to stand up? Why? Perhaps somewhere an ancestor was watching the sunrise. Perhaps it was a particularly beautiful sunrise and there was a small shrub or rock in the way. Perhaps that ancestor steadied themselves with a hand against a tree and rose to their feet to watch morning appear over the horizon. Or perhaps there was a particularly lovely, ripe fruit just out of reach. By standing up the fruit could be reached and the reward was enough for others of their group to try. Those ancestors remained standing and then walked across the world.
I make no apology for my romanticism; for those that are interested there are bound to be academic papers about why hominids first stood, detailing leg bone measurements, spinal shapes, brain capacities, hand dexterity and survival strategies. I’m sure these early people did not have a meeting to measure each other’s cranium or talk about toes versus fingers. They were fully alive; feeling, thinking creatures that had the capacity to respond to their environment with more than just survival instinct.
For our more recent ancestors in the British Isles, say going back five thousand years or so, walking between different places and landscapes, noting particular features such as a natural spring, hill or forest, made those features special. They were markers, a guide. Some of those landscapes and places had a particular resonance for individuals or groups, became holders of ritual and story, became sacred. That practice of noticing something important in the landscape, honouring it, marking it in some way on every journey leaves an energetic mark, one that can be sensed; often we don’t even realise that’s what we are connecting with, we just know it’s special to us. Centuries of footsteps along a route become a song, captured by the land, by the trees and creatures, passed on from generation to generation and it’s sung back to us: through the wind in the leaves, through the laughing sound of a brook, through the ground itself, a trace of energy preserved.
How do I know this? Because that has been my direct experience. Moving through a landscape by foot, on a regular basis, one starts to learn about its features and energy. I’ve spent years exploring Hainault Forest on foot. You begin to notice that trees of one type grow predominantly in one place, that the energy in some parts feels lighter or heavier to other parts. Some parts are particularly quiet and hushed, other parts are noisy and active, some are open to the sunlight, other parts are on a hill overlooking valleys, some have water, some are dry. I notice different scents and air temperatures. There are pockets of still hot air and places where it’s always cool, even cold and not necessarily linked to accessible sunlight or tree cover. I have my favourite places and spots I consider to be ‘special’ to me personally. There are particular trees and landmarks that I know well and help me to orient myself. Over time these particular features are not just a tree, a hill, a bank. Being human and sentimental I have, of course, named them: Elephant Tree, Rabbit Hill, Horse Path, Crow Wood and so on. The act of naming, of using words to create a very personal narrative becomes a very personal magic. With words we create our reality, first in our mind and then projected out of us. Suddenly I’m walking through a magical place that is full of song, full of the memories and dreams of those that walked before me.
Over the Summer, my friend sent me some photos of a place she had been walking, a local nature reserve. Something in the photos called to me. So I looked online to see if there was any further information about the place. There was. As I read and looked at the photo gallery and found the name of the river, I could feel a growing excitement that was most strange. I knew this place. Yet I have never been there. The ‘song’ or specialness of this place had made its way through the electromagnetic circuits of my laptop! But then, everything is/has electromagnetic energy, so I should not really be surprised.
Fortunately, a few weeks ago, I was able to visit my friend and go to this place with her. I was overwhelmed at the sense of familiarity, quite emotional actually. More than that, as I entered into the landscape I could feel a welcome from the place itself; a ripple of energy, the song of land and place as I walked the paths, said hello to the river and proceeded up a hill where I gazed out over the meadows to the treetops beyond. I knew this place and it knew me. It was watching me as much as I was watching it. I spent a happy three hours here, slowly walking the pathways, getting a feel for the land, vegetation and energy, or should I say getting reacquainted. To me, this landscape has an energy that is special. My sense of the aliveness of the place is more than just the sum of its biomass parts, just as we are more than the sum of our cells and organs.
Approaching Samhain, thinking of my ancestors walking many paths in different places, I can feel a connection to those I did not know through the landscapes I walk in now. And although I do consider it prosaic, I suppose we are all blue mountains, constantly walking.