Running… He almost wishes that he could give it up, surrender himself to hedonism and sacrifice his body fully on the altar of intoxication, but the hill draws him back again and again like a good habit that he cannot quite kick. He knows that if he leaves it behind, it will be a defeat somewhere in his soul, that something will die that he is not prepared to kill. Knows too that it is not about the running, in the end, but something more important than health — the hill stands for something in the city that is simple and good and untainted with excess; to go to it, even if he has to crawl up its slopes, is a pilgrimage.

He is not even out of hearing of the Holyrood Park road, the city not yet fallen away into the windy slopes of the hill. On Arthur’s Seat, you don’t arrive until you know you are somewhere else, not quite the city and not quite the wilds. Your body begins to take on another vibration — perhaps it is the peculiar geology of the hill itself — and some internal muscle of psyche or soma begins at last to relax. Then you know that you are there, that all that came before was just the journey. It is a beautiful moment. Whether it is in the grassy saddle between the summit of Arthur’s Seat proper and the sheer drops of the Crags, where the wind whips tall grass around Hunter’s Bog, or on the far side of the hill amongst the ruins of long-gone hill forts above Dunsapie Loch, there is the dawning awareness that you have made a transition, that although you are surrounded by it, you are no longer truly part of Edinburgh and, should you never leave, will always dwell in some liminal place, a threshold. Wildness whispering at the cultivated door of your urban heart: Let me in, let me in, let me in…

He almost treads on the two bodies rolling in the grass, has to make an extravagant leap that is one-third caution and twice as much surprise. They are laughing, free, careless with drunkenness, but it is their colours that stop him — one is painted blue from head to foot and only barely clothed; the other is painted in thick white, wears a ragged bridal gown, smirched with stains of red and blue paint. They should be freezing, he thinks, but they seem oblivious.

—   happy Beltane, shouts the blue man. Happy summer!

Digger remembers: it is the first of May. Last night he saw the fire on Calton Hill on his way home, exhausted from the restaurant; he would have gone up if he’d had the energy. Made half a step towards it and knew that he didn’t have it in him to pay his respects. Beltane… A colourful slice of Edinburgh subculture celebrating the end of winter with the marriage of a Green Man and a May Queen. Drums, fire, extravagant costumes, drink, psychedelics, ritual: bacchanalia. Edinburgh’s own one-night carnival of excess and liberation. Wild abandon and wantonness abound — the good fathers of Edinburgh don’t seem to know whether to claim Beltane as their own wayward, exuberant child or cast sermons of brimfire on its unrepentant Pagan nature. Thousands flock to it and celebrate until dawn in their own, untamed style.
        For a moment, he halts in his run and takes in the glorious incongruity of the figures in the landscape, totally immersed in themselves and their celebration. He wants, in that moment, to be part of that celebration, to be part of that world. Not to be the one who collapsed exhausted into bed to dream of mismatched kitchen orders and barking customers, but the one who exalts in wildness. To be painted, dancing, drunk and wild in celebration of the season’s change.

He has been aware of Winter ending. In Edinburgh it comes like a miracle; the drop in the wind and the lifting of the constant lid of cloud, the way shoulders soften, bodies lifting towards the temporary joy of sunlight and the incredible greening of the trees. Only some deep death of the spirit could deny a body the power to smile at Edinburgh Spring, but it has come sneaking in with only a nod of recognition from Digger. Now, to see them marking it, praising the change that rescues the soul from the seemingly unending darknesses of Winter, he feels negligent. It is the only word for it. As if he has fallen asleep on some watch to which he was entrusted, he wants to say: yes, I am part of this. I was not oblivious. I know the clock of the seasons, too… But, regarding them through vision that shimmers with the rush of blood from his running, it is obvious — they are the ones celebrating, not he.

—   happy Summer, he says, testing a smile. Happy Beltane!

They raise their bottles again, gone off again into a world beyond words; the ragged, colour-smeared bride pulls the blue man back down into the grass and Digger turns and runs onwards, forcing his body back into motion.

He cannot make the top of the Hill. Though his legs might have strength enough and his lungs — just — capacity for breathing, he no longer has the will for it. Runs instead on the gorse-flanked dirt path that skirts along one flank of it. The morning is becoming glorious and the cool wind dropping; for a while he runs on the flat path without thought, though the picture of the two of them in the grass flashes in his eyes, an unusual enough scene to stay with him, turned and turned again in his mind, a recurring image with every step.
        At last, he breaks out of the tunnel of gorse and bramble, on the east side of the park where the hill looks soft and easy behind and the eye wanders out to sea. He lies on his back in the grass and turns his eyes to the sky. Crows or jackdaws are making complicated trails near the craggy slopes of Arthur’s Seat and he watches them, lets his eyes be taken here and there by the twisting shapes of black wing against the blue and mackerel white of the May morning.
        He watches until the movements take his gaze into the branches of the scrubby tree next to him. A hawthorn, he sees, having to squint at the stubby leaves to confirm it. As ever, the words come to him: ne’er cast a cloot ‘til May is oot. Never cast off your clothes until May is out. Unless you’re covered in bodypaint, perhaps. He had always thought the words meant to wait until the month of May had passed, but remembers now — the hawthorn blossom is called the May. Don’t take off your winter clothes ‘til the May blossom is on the branch. The trees a surer guide to weather than the human calendar, so arbitrary as it is, peppered with the misleading vanities of Roman emperors whose interferences always meant little here in the far North of the world, beyond the extent of the Empire. He wonders then, what the calendar might have been before, aware suddenly in the company of this hawthorn how… unfitting… this other calendar is here.
        For a moment, in that space of wondering, he is gone from Arthur’s Seat and Holyrood Park, gone from May Day in Edinburgh and the routines of work and sleep, eat and drink, gone into a dell in the gentle Suffolk countryside and the shade of apple trees on another May morning that may have been nothing more than dreaming. Not the company of coffee-junkie waiters and the loveless city of stone and sweat, but the silence between slow sentences of an old man standing beside him, watching a falcon tear lines of raw magic across the sky.

 
—   the season’s changed, Digger, says the old man. Can you smell it?

Lying in the grass of Edinburgh May, the words come to his mouth clear as if he were still looking into the eyes of the falconer, the old man’s words like a spell kept safe from time, wrapped against memory until they come back to him there in the shadow of Arthur’s Seat.

And the falconer looks lost for a moment, then laughs. Laughs so easily, so hastelessly, that before he knows it, tears are running down Digger’s cheeks as he lies in the Beltane grass, tears that are both joyful in remembering and sour with the lost place of apple trees and the grey, grey eyes of the old man, laughing.

He does not want to come back.
        If he could, he would stay there in that grove of safety with the falconer, breathing in the season of laughter and letting the man’s words sing like the slow and gentle music they are. Shit, he thinks, says the word out loud in his breath. I haven’t thought of him for so long. My imaginary friend, eh? He feels a host of other memories tugging at the line of remembering, wanting to rise up out of that silent ocean into this day.
        He lets himself drift back to the grove, that holy, protected space, breathes in again the early Summer scent. The falconer rising to his feet and Digger following his eyes to search for Charys in the blue sky. The man crying out, hoya! Hoya! That breathless pause in which to witness the magic of words passing across the kingdom boundaries of man and bird, a time so weightless it barely exists; the pause between breaths or the moment before falling or flying. Then a streak of dark colour in the air becoming suddenly larger, taking form as Charys returns; the falconer lifting his arm in an easy movement just in time for Charys to grasp it heavily and utter her harsh croak of contentment. A flash of light across his eye as he regards Digger for a moment with the eyes of the wild, gathering his form into knowing whether he is food or foe or that other class of things that are better called ‘allies’ than ‘friends.’ The flash of his eye like a knife, so sharp it makes Digger sit up in the grass between the hawthorn tree, shiver, pierced in his heart by it.

High above, the crows are still making their crooked circles, the mackerel sky in its constant imperceptible metamorphosis. The day is warming up. Even a peacock butterfly is braving the world and Digger watches it drift in the air, caught himself in the currents of the past, a wind as invisible and unpredictable as any of the world.
        When he closes his eyes, still there is the bright eye of Charys regarding him. As devoid of kindness or cruelty as a stone or a cliff-edge — the light in it more made of geography than mind, without hope or doubt, a feature of the landscape.
        Opening his eyes, his heartbeat is fast again and his breath tight in his chest — subtle senses of anxiety have been awakened, sparked to life by the sharpness of that eye. Digger is suddenly self-conscious, wants to look around to see who or what is watching him, though he knows that there is no one. The creeping of the hairs on his arms, the tightening of the skin on his scalp; they say otherwise. He shakes his head and smooths the hair on his calves. There is nothing here but myself; no one and nothing watching me. Just a cloud over the sun, nothing more.
        Then he sees it, high above. The crows spiralling around some moving locus of their attention, a quarrelsome urgency to their movement. Another bird in their midst, twisting in the sky and falling, feinting, darting, moving so fast. This is the target of their mobbing, the victim of their territorial bullying. The noise of them the only sound he can hear now, watching still almost idly with his hands on his shins. Then realising beyond doubt that the form in their midst is a bird of prey. As if to reward his realisation, it ducks in the high air and drops fast, faster than the crows can follow, much faster. It leaves them hanging like floating leaves in the pool of the air, itself an arrow towards the pinpoint of its choosing. The sense in him that this is a private theatre, that only he in this moment is witnessing the aerial display. This is for you, it says to him. Watch. Then seeing that it is not just a bird of prey, some kestrel or sparrowhawk up there, but a falcon.
        For a moment, he wants to rise to his feet, call hoya! Hoya! again like he had done so long ago, but something holds him back. Perhaps self-consciousness; perhaps the army of memories now pulling at him like a siege of the dwelling-place of the Present. Perhaps the awareness that all the time the crows were mobbing it, the Peregrine Falcon was letting them; it had only ever been playing at being their victim, itself knowing the rules of its game far better than they. The sight of it in the sky above him tears him between jubilation and nausea. To see it so soon after journeying back to the dell is terrifying in its power on him, as if the walls of certainty have been breached or the laws of physics overturned. He only knows that he does not want any longer to be out on the hill, so exposed to the peculiar forces of this day. Does not want to be out in the open with a Peregrine above him — it is too complex. Digger heaves himself to his feet and runs almost blindly home like a child running from danger, the croaking of the crows still in his ears and, somewhere beyond the surface of the day, the high, shrill shriek of a falcon, wild, piercing and terrible in a way he would never be able to explain.

Yesterday, deepening into memory,
Swimming in the Goddess water.
Today, spiralling out in bright colours,
An explosion of Self everywhere.
Who is in there?
Who is in there?
What is your name?
I’ve been Tom, Tani, Coyopa.
Hirons, Alexander, a King – all of them.
Slept rough on concrete,
Buried my head in the woods.
Known my wings,
Felt the fluid centre of my brain.

One day, I’ll get it.
Before then, I’ll give up getting it.
Who is in there?
Great nameless madness of wonder;
Crushing gravity of Soul.

This morning the sun was warm on my skin.
First time since Winter began.
I was delirious with pleasure
And hope flew round me, dancing!
The wind changed and the clouds came over:
Now it’s icey cold again.

Buddhist, Taoist, Sufi, Christian.
Muslim, Atheist, Heathen.
Jew, Zoroastrian, Heretic.
Red, yellow, black, brown, white.
It makes no difference.
That first touch of Spring
Will make you mad for life.
If you don’t laugh with joy,
You’re already half-dead.

What had been locked in its chest
Began to push back out at the world today.
Soon, primroses and garlic will follow that
Path of life’s breath into sunlight;
Now, it is simply the shifting, vital moment
Between the inhaling and
Exhaling of the Earth.

The fingers of Winter loosened today;
That tight hand will become Summer’s palm
Where all of Life dances:
Myself and you and us and them
And all tomorrow’s children.

                Somewhere, in the centre of the Earth,
                A spark leaps to the hibernating heart
                And beneath the blackened leaves of Winter,
                That great, essential drum resounds.

Today, the earth began to smell again.
The sap turned around; life turned towards life.
The body of this great, wild woman,
This land that grows through my feet,
Shifted in her sleep and sighed.
She whispered something unmistakable.
Everybody heard.
The trees and rocks and the wild birds and me:
All Winter we were waiting
And, today, the earth began exhaling.

In which Jack, having fled the city, is reminded of perspective by a skylark and is assailed by visions of Pacha Mama.

____________________________________

 

 

 

 

I smell the owl in my dream.
The smell of the owl is now the most
Important thing in the world.
The smells of the flowers are full of it;
The smell of the day and the night.
In the morning, when I wake,
I smell the the owl;
As I doze in the afternoon,
The smell of the owl
Rises from the pillow
Caresses my sleep with
Feathered fingers of gliding,
Hunting and silence.

The owl is hunting me,
Who stole its feather
And smelled its forbidden scent.
I pray that it finds me
And hunts my unknown body
From the madness of this world
Without woods.