Touchstones
I stand barefoot mid-stream. The waters of a nascent River Derwent skirt around my ankles. From the uninterrupted soundtrack of their babble it’s clear they’re quite unbothered by this diversion. Troutlings of various sizes shoal across my toes, their tiny bodies performing the impossible feat of holding their place as the current courses down towards the lake.
Eyes closed, all my awareness is taken up by the shimmering membrane of meeting between woman and water. The notion of there being a ‘subject’ and an ‘environment’ vanishes. What remains is an intimacy that feels palpable and joyous. Perhaps, I muse, this is how it feels to be a rock in a riverbed. An ancient and steadfast fragment of original earth in conversation with a fleeting moment of life in its becoming. Strewn across the hillside in scattered disarray, these Andesite rocks bear witness to the fury of volcanic eruption. Each one marks the point where it finally came to rest as the pyroclastic flow cooled some 450 million years ago.
Reaching down through the flow of water, I allow my hand to touch one of these remnant embers. The deep cool of its time-drenched drowsing tingles through my skin. Energy of stone fonts within me - an unexpected gift of refreshment and revival. I dare to hope the warmth of my hand is as welcome. Channelling all my attention into my fingertips I follow the hieroglyph of lines, dips and ridges that tell this stone’s story. Through the palimpsest layering of its braille, I feel the traces of elemental encounter over eons of deep time.
Could this be why the dry-stone walls which pattern these lakeland hillsides move me so much? They owe their very existence to innumerable moments of contact between stone and flesh, to the intimacy of human handling.
‘Touch comes before sight, before speech’, writes Margaret Atwood in her novel The Blind Assassin. ‘It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth’. This first-hand truth registers most keenly when we quieten the insistence of sight to dominate our perception.
It occurs to me how blind we are becoming. How little we really know of a natural world that is now so rarely touched or handled.
Nascent River Derwent in Borrowdale, May 2022
