On a walking meditation, I took the path I think of as the Secret Valley. It follows a stream through woodland. It's a lovely green tunnel, and at one point the stream runs through an ash tree, right through the base of the trunk.
Most of my walking meditation had been on the lane leading to the entrance to the valley path; I had slightly miscalculated the time I had available, so I had to press on, above the bank of the stream, then across it and back again, a twisty, only slightly muddy path, full of fresh green leaves, and birdsong. It descended gently, until quite suddenly:
there's the sea. The path is a dead end, up above a rocky shore.
Time to hear what the wind and the waves had to tell me. (Sorry about the wind in the mic.) Time for a little presentmomentness.
So I was pleased to be alone, to have the entire little valley to myself, to have no-one else looking out over the sea.
Of course I'd like other people who can truly appreciate the place to visit it. But I've found too many beauty spots littered by people who, having found a lovely viewpoint, decide to defile it with their cans and wrappers. This walk had been pristine. I want it to stay like that, so if you're a selfish litterer, a thoughtlessly noisy person, a jet-skier able with one machine to ruin the peace and quiet for everyone within earshot - then I want you to stay away.
Leave the place to the waves, the wind, the sea pinks and the cries of the oyster-catchers.
I turned back feeling guilty at such selfish feelings; countryside for all? OK - but all need to know how to value it for itself.
On the way back, I checked in with the stream running through the ash tree.
The stream said I was right, it was OK to feel protective. Everything changes, all the time. The ash tree probably won't be there in 15 years, and I may not, either. But changing the place with rubbish and noise isn't a change I want to tolerate.
So I'm afraid Mr. Smug here isn't going to tell you where it is. I'll show you, if you swear to respect the place and be with it, rather than trying to impose yourself on it.
See, I told you this was a selfish, possibly even a snobbish, post.
Too bad.
Having decided to take a couple of days of silence at a suitable and not-too-distant retreat centre of some kind or another, I trained and bussed to St Asaph, then walked the 3.3 miles to St Beuno's. Certain amount of leg-pulling at home about my private pilgrimage - you can imagine..."no, I won't have to get up at four in the morning for matins, or wear a long robe, it's not a monastery, or eat gruel at every meal..."
But although I didn't see myself as a pilgrim, it did feel quite special, a new experience, to be approaching such a place on foot.
A pleasant walk at first; idyllic moments gazing at Afon Clwyd.
The picture is deceptive. A few yards further on, over the river, and what's this ahead?
The A55. From the footbridge over it, the blast of noise, the pressure of the speed, is almost overwhelming.
Well, that's quite enough of that. If you've ever been stuck on the hard shoulder, (bad luck - so dangerous!) you'll know what I mean. I'd rather listen to that river.
But there's no point in being self-righteous about this. I might be en route to a couple of simple and tranquil days' living, I might feel virtuous because I'm walking the last bit, but I've driven at 80 mph along this road myself, many a time. And being close to this horrible racket is a useful experience - makes me remember that it really is worth trying to drive as infrequently as possible. So what the A55 says to me is "keep off me as often as you can."
It hardly seems possible that this corridor of noise and tension should co-exist with that peaceful little river. The impact on its surroundings of a fast road like this is so much more than omnipresent noise for many many yards all around. It's a huge slice of the land, slicing through whatever continuities existed previously. It's all that exhaust gas. Perhaps the only upside is that motorway verges act as longitudinal nature reserves, and corriders for species distribution. Kestrels like to hunt them.
This road doesn't even have proper motorway-type verges. It was a motorway on the cheap, dangerous and in places not well engineered. But it is an E route to and from Ireland. Everything on it is in a big hurry.
Happily, I'm not - lucky me. I plod on, alongside the noise for a little while, steadily up hill, getting hot - my backpack is quite heavy, containing as it does, in addition to the usual necessities, a couple of books and a Very Special (large) Notebook for Inscribing Great Thoughts. (It didn't exactly get over-filled...)
I pass through a very settled comfortable-looking little village, under the A55, and then I'm very pleased to be hauling myself wearily up the drive to St Beuno's.
Of which, more anon.
I really don't know, of course. But I just watched a jackdaw arrive at our bird-table.
As his head flicked from side to side, as his intense little black-and-pale-yellow eye looked briefly at me, I realised what a fast and skilful risk estimate he was undertaking, before he stuck his greedy gob into our very expensive peanuts. (I'm fond of jackdaws, great characters, bit yobby - but they do tear through the peanuts!)
As far as I know, and exceptionally smart though he is in birdland, he couldn't, with a brain that size, rationalise his situation. He couldn't think about it. He was simply and most effectively - in it. Lightning-fast (literally -we should say "electrically-fast") circuits were flashing through his entire system - eyes/brain/wings/legs. That much we do know. He was his situation, at one with it.
Then there's our cat. Super-adapted to his environment. Surely eligble for an award as the most spoiled, smug and contented cat in the UK.
I can watch his behaviour patterns. Enter, pause, check armchairs, note a visitor in his favourite seat, sit at stranger's feet and glare at her - no good. Move to next favourite chair. Curl up. Sleep. But at the sound of a neighbouring cat at our cat-flap he will, with remarkable speed, pour himself silently across the room and out of the door to investigate.No pauses, no if or but.
Sometimes experts try to make comparative measurements and pronounce that dogs are cleverer than horses (or vice versa) Maybe the real question is - how far is a creature a successful part of their environment? How far are we?
New-born antelopes can get up and totter about almost at once, whereas babies take months just to stop their heads flopping about. But if the antelope's environment were to suddenly change, he'd swiftly become extinct. Humans are exceptionally adaptable, hence their lengthy infancy and childhood. Lots of neural connections and circuits to build, lots of different circumstances to adapt to.
But we don't so much live in the moment as our cat and the jackdaws outside do. Humans seem to need Stuff, novelty, excitement, future dreams and past regrets. We can rationalise and analyse and compare things, we can act successfully on a huge number of varied sensory inputs from the world around us. Yet we seem to be altering our environment in ways that might soon leave us as bewildered and helpless as a baby antelope in downtown New York.
Politics, science and technology are trying to find ways of diverting catastrophe. Maybe we also really badly need an inward revolution, one that helps us stay in the present, accept who we are, understand where we are and what's in front of us. We need to be as sensitive to our environment and as in the present moment as the jackdaw. Life would be simpler and harder, more about essentials and less about distractions from distractions by distractions.
The Biomes at the Eden Project are, as far as I can see, particularly sophisticated geodesic domes. They are structured in hexagrams without the six component triangles typical of geodesic domes, but it's surely the same principle.
Geodesic domes - that's a big topic, but as far as I remember, the point was that the struts provided the strength, and you could cover a dome with whatever you wanted. You can make a curved structure with straight lines.
Memory comes into it, because during a formative period of my life, (1965-71) they were a big deal and a new hope. They were and are lovely to look at, they can be built very cheaply, and they looked like a future.
They weren't a future, for most domestic use. Whatever their other advantages, it was difficult to create effective internal partitions, and unless they were better-made than most DIYers could easily manage, they were prone to leaks. Can you imagine trying to get planning permission for a three-bedroom dome in Cheadlehume or Surbiton?
They are perhaps better-suited to large, spectacular structures - or expensive exclusive modern domestic architecture, which was not what we hoped in 1968.
But they helped forward visions of different ways of living, ways that were kinder to the environment. They were structures that helped people feel they were moving closer to their earth.
Drop City, in Colorado, was early in the building of domestic domes out of scrap materials such as old car panels (particularly poignant, given the appalling effect of our cars on the environment.) It was also an idealistic effort to live communally and as such, it didn't last too long. But I think, looking back now, we should salute the courage and creativity of those people trying to avoid the widespread and rampant consumerism that....consumes us.
Here are the guys at Drop City putting their homes together:
I'm sure the sunshine helped...
For more on Drop City from a 2012 perspective:
https://citythreepointzero.wordpress.com/tag/drop-city/
Key publications from The Old Days:
and Domebook:
Domebook and Drop City are the past; it's thrilling to see Buckminster Fuller's big idea carrying forward from Drop City to the Eden Project. Hopeful visions, both.
