10 December 2011
The wind created a river of sand about two feet off the beach. Fragments of pebbles caught the wind and miniature dunes sprang up at my feet. The sea was far off still and the wind blew me toward the waves and it blew through my mind scouring it clean. Sometimes the world seems soft focussed and indistinct. Now and then, like a lens turns, everything becomes sharped edged, rimmed in flint. Now was such a time. Like the sand river my life flowed to this point. First a small stream playing with the pebbles in my childhood, then a gushing, rushing torrent through my teens. It took a winding course through my twenties, creating eddies here and pools there but always moving on. As the plains of my life flattened out in my thirties the river became sluggish and prone to stagnation during periods of drought. Now on the eve of forty the waters entered a still pool, a flat facet lake still beneath a wide sky.
A surging waves over my wellies cut into the stream of thought. The leading edge of foam rippled forward eagerly then dropped back at speed pulled back into the might of the sea. Then a rush forward again. On and on like time without end, till the moon falls. And me here looking eastward but not seeing again, trawling the river of time seeking the choices that led to this point. I turn and a sudden blaze of light cuts through my world as the sun breaches a cloud and the island to the south gleams like El Dorado or rainbows end. Lindisfarne, a word like a soft sibilant hiss. The moment passes and the sun dims and the light fades and I am back with the river of sand and the sea. I realise I am hungry and have come some way out so I turn and lean into the wind and begin the long trudge back to the cottage on the horizon, a lone tooth on the gum of the world. Like Scott marooned in ice and snow I have to force myself forward, step after step, the sand has a soft ringing hiss of a note as it rushes past my knees. I wade onwards towards the dunes that line the edge of the wide flat beach.
The River • Opuss № I