The Salt Path

If we hadn’t done this there’d always have been things we wouldn't have known, a part of ourselves we wouldn't have found, resilience we didn't know we had.

Had I seen enough things? When I could no longer see them, would I remember them, and would just the memory be enough to fill me up and make me whole?... Could anyone ever have enough memories?

I wasn't living my life; I was just existing in someone else's.

Most people go through their whole lives without answering their own questions: What am I, what do I have within me? The big stuff. What a waste.

I was home, there was nothing left to search for, he was my home

The lady set off, in search of summers long past, always just around the next corner. On a basic level, maybe all of us on the path were the same; perhaps we were all looking for something. Looking back, looking forward or just looking for something that was missing. Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was. Were we searching this narrow margin between the land and the sea for another way of being, becoming edgelanders along the way. Stuck between one world and the next. Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death. At the edge of existence.

Something in me was changing season too. I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance. Burnt in by the sun, driven in by the storms. I could feel the sky, the earth, the water and revel in being part of the elements without a chasm of pain opening at the thought of the loss of our place within it all. I was a part of the whole. I didn’t need to own a patch of land to make that so. I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it. The core of me wasn’t lost. Translucent, elusive, but there and growing stronger with every headland.

Meet me there, where the sea meets the sky, Lost but finally free.

Life is now, this minute, it’s all we have. It’s all we need.

It's touched you, it's written all over you: you've felt the hand of nature. It won't ever leave you now; you're salted...People fight the elements, the weather, especially here, but when it's touched you, when you let it be, you're never the same again. Good luck, wherever your path takes you.

When you tell a story, the first person you must convince is yourself; if you can make yourself believe it's true, then everyone else will follow.

On a basic level, maybe all of us on the path were the same; perhaps we were all looking for something. Looking back, looking forward, or just looking for something that was missing. Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was. Were we searching this narrow margin between the land and sea for another way of being, becoming edgelanders along the way? Stuck between one world and the next. Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death. At the edge of existence.

You thought blackberries had passed, didn’t you? Or you’ve eaten them and thought you didn’t like them. No, you need to wait until the last moment, that moment between perfect and spoiled. The blackbirds know that moment. And if the mist comes right then, laying the salt air gently on the fruit, you have something that money can’t buy and chefs can’t create. A perfect, lightly salted blackberry. You can’t make them; it has to come with time and nature. They’re a gift, when you think summer’s over, and the good stuff has all

Does it take a time of crisis for us to see the plight of the homeless? Must they be escaping a war zone to be in need? As a people, can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid?

Familiar actions from a familiar life, but one I no longer lived.

Excited, afraid, homeless, fat, dying, but at least if we made that first step we had somewhere to go, we had a purpose. And we really didn’t have anything better to do at half past three on a Thursday afternoon than to start a 630-mile walk.

The shock of something going right is almost as powerful as when it goes wrong.

Do we have a plan?' 'Course we do. We walk, until we stop walking, and maybe on the way we find some kind of future.' 'That's a good plan.

One naked man was interesting, but two became a little awkward. When a third shouted 'good morning ' as he strode past in only walking boots and blue socks, I felt I had to put the stove away and carry on.

I knew then that I was one with everything, the worms in the soil, clouds in the sky; I was part of it all, within everything. The wild was never something to fear or hide from. It was my safe place, the thing I ran to.

A vast area of land and sea in motion together, a never-ending partnership in which each of the couple loses and gains in equal measure, but neither can exist without the other.

We had lost everything except our children and each other, but we had the wet grass and the rhythm of the sea on the rocks.

Lying in the sun on baking-hot grass, having walked four miles before lunch and eaten a handful of elderberries straight from the tree, there's a lot to be said for being a vagrant. Lundy was directly ahead; we'd been walking towards it for days and very soon we'd be walking away.

An old man carefully laid out a towel close by, then methodically took off every stitch of clothing and lay very precisely on the towel. There was something close to tortoise-like about the naked old man, wrinkling, drooping as if his old skin was sliding away, soon to reveal a pink, exposed, smooth new body. I had to stare. We hide ourselves so well, exposing our skin in youth when it has nothing to say, but the other skin, with the record of time and event, the truth of life, we rarely show.

Our native homeless don’t fit that mould; we prefer to think their plight is self-induced and their numbers few, yet over 280,000 households in the UK claim to have no home and the percentage of those who arrive at that state because of some kind of addiction is small.

Smotyn didn’t come. She always came to the stile for her slice of bread. Always. As I looked around the fields for her, I already knew what I was going to find. In her favourite spot under the beech trees, her head laid out on the grass as if she was sleeping. She knew. She knew she couldn’t leave her field, her place, and had simply died. Put her head on the grass, closed her eyes, and died. As I stroked her hairy face, passing my hand one last time over the bent horn, it came like a contraction. All-consuming and uncontrollable. I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed. Crying until my body stopped, spent, drained of tears, dried out by loss.

narrow path alongside the busy world, but as separate from it as if it were in another dimension.

Because I want you to keep me in a box somewhere, then when you die the kids can put you in, give us a shake and send us on our way. Together. It’s bothered me more than anything else, the thought of us being apart. They can let us go on the coast, in the wind, and we’ll find the horizon together.

Ik spande me niet langer in, vocht niet meer om het onveranderbare te veranderen, klampte me niet angstig vast aan het leven dat we niet hadden kunnen behouden, was niet meer boos op een autoritair systeem dat te bureaucratisch was om de waarheid te zien. Een nieuw jaargetijde was in me gekropen, een zachter jaargetijde van aanvaarding. In me gebrand door de zon, in me geblazen door de stormen. Ik kon de lucht, de aarde, het water voelen en blij zijn dat ik onderdeel was van de elementen, zonder dat zich een afgrond van pijn opende bij de gedachte aan het verlies van onze plek daarbinnen. Ik was deel van het geheel. Daarvoor hoefde ik geen stukje land te bezitten. Ik kon in de wind staan en ik wás de wind, de regen, de zee; het was allemaal ik, en ik was niets in dat alles. Mijn wezen was niet verloren. Het was doorschijnend, ongrijpbaar, maar aanwezig en werd sterker met elke landtong.

Our hair was fried and falling out, our nails broken, clothes worn to a thread, but we were alive. Not just breathing through the thirty thousand or so days between life and death, but knowing each minute as it passed, swirling around in an exploration of time.