Acid Rain

by R. D Rhodes

  I smiled. She had a nice smile. Then I threw out one last stone, watched it skim eight times, and I turned around towards the road and the hill above it.

  I crossed over into the forest, and I felt that energy building up again. The presence in the air, the wind and the trees, this invisible power, was hugging and warming me. I could feel it as sure as I could feel my boots digging into the ground. I closed my eyes and surrendered to it, and then a phrase popped into my head, the key to happiness is the ability to let go, and I abided and shook off all doubt.

  I went back into slow awareness again, lifting my legs in large, elaborate strides and sauntering along, winging my arms. I’m weightless, I thought. But then maybe I am? I have nothing in me. No excess food baggage blocking my intestines and cramping my blood flow. I am free and light in this world of beauty.

  Something was pulling me left. I wanted to follow every whim I was receiving, so I obeyed, heading away from the tent. The forest changed from birch to pine, whose red poles were bending elastically in the wind that was buffering the glen, and I was sheltered amongst them all, wrapped inside my own great blanket. I looked up through the stunning spiderweb branches, at the gorgeous blue swathes of sky poking through peaceful drifting white clouds, and I fell into a silent rapture. My joy continued to grow. I am so happy that I don’t know how to contain it, I thought. Or even what to do with it. I feel like I might spontaneously combust! There really is something in that wind, I can feel it all around me. It’s making me feel at home. But this is my home. This is where I feel safe, this is where I am me.

  But it’s not just me that’s walking through these woods, I can feel my soul doing it too. Jesus, yes, my soul really is here with me. Totally in this moment. Wow, this is just… God it’s so beautiful. Everything is here. Right here. I just want to take all this in. I wish everyone could feel this, but how can you describe this to people with just words? It can only be felt. Oh, it’s coming through my soul. God! Jesus, man, Look at that sky! Look at the grass! That tree! Those birds! Listen to that wind! This place is just incredible! I can’t believe how at peace I feel. I’m connected with this presence, God, yes I am! And I’m repeating myself hahaha but I don’t care, I just want to drift through here for eternity. I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything but this, forever. This is church right here. This is transcendence.

  I lost myself in that forest, drifting for hours, gazing up in awe at each new pine, at each break in the trees where the sun shone through, at the colors all around me, it was like another world.

  And I thought I was onto some sort of epiphany when just then my world was fractured by a deafening, screaming noise which almost burst my eardrums, and a jumbo jet shot across the glen. The valley thundered like an earthquake, and the noise resonated long after it had passed. But he couldn’t see me amongst my trees. Bastards, I joked to myself, he’s broken my train of thought, I looked left- there’s my tent!

  I stepped across the stream and approached it from the front, when I looked down at the ground- and went cold all over- at the long white feather sticking up on the grass.

  Chapter 56

  O h my God, I said aloud. A jolt of electric went through me. Thank you spirit woman! Linda! Thank you spirit! Thank you! I was stunned. It was proof of my contact with whatever that world was. How else could you have gotten here? I thought, as I observed it in my hand. There are birds here, lots of them, but mostly black ones, and small- crows, chaffinches, blackbirds, robins, but this feather is like a seagull’s! It’s bigger than my hand! There are no seagulls in Affric!

  I tucked the feather behind my ear, but then I thought no, I don’t want it to fall out and lose it. So I put it inside, beside my pillow instead. I kissed it. I thanked it. I went down to the oak and thanked that too. I bowed down to the whole forest and felt full of intense elated energy.

  I came back and sat down on one of the stones at the fireplace. I didn’t know how to contain myself. My legs wouldn’t stop bouncing and I felt supercharged. I boiled some green tea and drunk it slowly and with concentration, but still I didn’t feel grounded. Imagine feeling like this all the time, I thought. It must get tiring.

  But it wasn’t making me tired. After a while I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing. Then I tried to focus only on my breathing. But it was like my mind had exploded, and I kept seeing images of strange patterns, and connections, and threads of thoughts all racing in my brain and in front of my eyes.

  I gave up. I was shaking as I built a fire. I got it done quickly and had it going in five minutes. I am an expert now, I thought. I watched the orange-yellow flames in the decreasing light, but though it helped calm me a little, it wasn’t helping enough.

  There was a buzzing sound in my ears. I went back into the tent and took everything out, dusted the bare floor with my hand, then carefully placed everything back. I threw away the nettles and mushrooms and ate three big handfuls of the sugary berries. I was still wired. I came back to the fire and poured almost all the porridge we had left into the pot.

  I ate it with lots of rosehip syrup, and drank three bottles of water to wash it down. The glen fell black and the stars and a three-quarter moon came out. Still I was trembling and my legs were bouncing, the electric current still surging through me. I didn’t know how to channel or deal with all of that energy, I tried singing out loud, and praying, and then writing everything down, but I just couldn’t switch off. I just want a leveler, I thought. Listening to Time out of Mind helped a bit, but it wasn’t until the daylight was returning that I felt tired enough to get to sleep.

  But I got what I had desired the next morning. I felt flat, drained, almost like I was hungover. I lay in my bag for a while in the dim half-light. When I eventually looked out at the grey sky, I guessed it was about one pm.

  Has my mood changed with the weather, or the weather with my mood? My brain felt turgid and rotting, a complete contrast from the day before. It is a relief though, and like that lady said, I need to feel like this in order to know what happiness feels like. I can’t have one and not have the other.

  I ate some rice, then lit another fire, and had a lazy day sitting by it and watching nature. A million little wet droplets hung in the air, and I kept my hood up while I sipped a tea.

  I’d really like some hot chocolate, I thought. Oh man, or hot milk! And a decent meal that’s not rice or porridge.

  I wonder when Harry will be back? It should have been yesterday. Hopefully he will bring some nice food.

  I went back into the tent and slept. Slept right through the night and into the next day. I didn’t feel much cheerier when I woke.

  I ate, and went to the toilet, and had a little walk. And washed, and came back, and sat at the tent and wrote. Then, although I didn’t have much desire to, I went down to the oak tree.

  Good morning. It said.

  Hello.

  It’s normal, you know.

  What is?

  The dive. You couldn’t possibly keep at that level all the time.

  I know, I said in my head. I’m just grateful that I felt it. It will come back around, I’m sure.

  Yes. Yes. Patience. You’re learning.

  I looked away to the left, over the loch. Sometime Harry was bound to be rounding it.

  He will be back, the tree said in my head.

  I know. I’m enjoying it fine here, anyway. I like being alone. Part of me doesn’t even want him to come back. I’m just drained today.

  Well, rest. Come back when you’re ready.

  I lay down on the spot, my left cheek in the soft grass. The last of the oak’s yellow leaves blowing down around me. I watched a chaffinch hop along a branch and call out to some other birds.

  Chapter 57

  I lay there about an hour, then went back up to sit by the fire. Then went inside and had a little doze.

  About four pm I stoked the fire to restart it, added plenty of fuel, and left the flames burning twenty yards behind me as I sat back down beside th
e oak. I straightened my spine and closed my eyes…

  It was just blackness. Nothing came through me, or was in my head.

  But it’s okay. You can’t force it.

  I was aware of my diaphragm going in and out. I was aware of my straight spine. I thought of nothing. My mind was empty. I slowly inhaled and exhaled through my nose, my breath getting deeper. And then Dad’s face was before me. The blood was before me. And what I had done.

  I shuffled on my bum.

  No, don’t move. You have to see this through.

  I allowed it, and went with it. Went back to that night.

  Him in my room. Then me coming down, and grabbing the knife. Him on the couch. The feeling of the knife sinking into the flesh of his back. The shock in his eyes, when he turned to face me after the third wound, and the fear in them too. And so much blood.

  But I didn’t feel guilty. Should I? I thought. He wasn’t a good man. Sometimes he did say sorry, but he carried on. And the way he acted every day, and stole those charity funds, and fucked around with people’s money, and everything else. It was his lack of regret, his lack of emotion, his lack of love. There was nothing in me that could make me think he didn’t deserve it. But who am I to judge that?

  I went back, before that night, to the many other times he came into my room. And his breakup with mum. Her leaving me and never getting in touch. Embrace your emotions came into my head, and the key to happiness is the ability to let go. And it felt pertinent to me, the last phrase especially, my key to happiness is to let go, I decided. As I went through the many train wrecks of my past, I thought, I don’t want to be a victim. I don’t want to give him that power. I don’t want to carry around emotional baggage with me for the rest of my life, I want it gone. He isn’t going to win. I know he is dead now. I don’t know about that vision I had of him in the hospital, but I can’t hold on to those emotions anymore.

  I am a superbeing. I am strong.

  I went deeper. I felt secure enough in that forest, and at the side of that tree, to do that, and I knew that it was looking after me. The only thing I have to fear is my own mind, I thought. I delved down. I felt things I hadn’t felt for a long time. Seen memories that I thought had gone. And I went back to the good times too. There was love there, sometimes. With Mum and Dad on the beach, building sandcastles. The love my mum showed me in the early days. It seemed she just wanted a doll though, I realised, she didn’t want me to grow up.

  I cried so much my face and hands were soaked, but the more I cried, the more cleansed I felt. It felt good to do it, it felt human.

  I absent-mindedly went to the vision I had had of him in the hospital, when I’d imagined myself floating over the forest, before I saw him. Then I suddenly thought, why floating above a forest? Did I prophesize myself coming here?

  I still had some anger, but I didn’t want to hold onto that either. Especially in that sacred place, anger felt like a wasted emotion. A black emotion. Negativity. I was done with negativity, I was through with it. And he was a good person sometimes, even loving sometimes. But no, I don’t know, I thought, maybe deep down nobody is one hundred percent bad. Everyone has to have a little bit of good inside them.

  And I thought about what Jesus would do, and I knew what Jesus would do. It was the hardest thing, but I’d did it before at Sleepyhillock, when I saw him in pain, and I wanted to really reinforce it. I forgave him. If I can forgive him for that, I thought, then I can forgive anyone for anything. I wanted to express that highest form of love that Jesus talked about, and just be at one in my soul.

  I forgave him, totally and fully. And I didn’t know what that meant regarding the pacifism that Jesus preached, and Tolstoy talked about which he’d copied from Thoreau- that non-violent stance and never ever lifting a finger to someone who does you wrong, and not retaliating. I thought if I was there again, behind that sofa, with that knife, I would kill him again. But I didn’t know. All I knew is that I knew nothing. But I wanted to follow love, and I wanted to trust what I felt deep down.

  I opened my eyes, and I said a little prayer. Then I went back to the tent and wrote in my notebook, and ripped the page out. It said that I forgive my dad, and my mum, and that I wanted to put it all behind me. And that I only want to act in love. I didn’t want to plant the page under the same oak tree, or even in my viewpoint, so I went for a walk until I found another tree to plant it under. I dug up the mud with my fingers, and buried it, and I said another prayer, then I came back and sat by the fire. I let all the memories swim back to me, and I knew it could and would take months and years for me to overcome them. But I also knew that I would overcome them. I just would.

  I sat out most of the night, with the feather in my hand. I was grateful for the wind making it not too quiet, and grateful for the drier weather too. Great clusters of stars swirled above me and the fire cracked and whistled away and I fell asleep next to it in my sleeping bag. I woke up briefly, and the fire was still burning and the stars still above me.

  Chapter 58

  T he rain fell flush against my face. The charred remains of the fire was smoking away under its dowsing, and up the hill a light wind was fluttering the tent. I brushed myself down and took my damp sleeping bag inside.

  I finished the bag of the porridge, leaving only rice left to eat, and I had a green tea to drink made from pine needles I had gathered.

  I put on warm clothes and my jacket and walked slowly down the hill to the road. The rain came down softly from the dark, atmospheric sky. Little waves rolled across the loch in the breeze, which swelled up parts of it like there was a giant fish beneath. At the other side of the water, Harry was nowhere to be seen.

  If he doesn’t come back, I will be fine, I thought. I’ve adapted. I’m stronger. Both physically and mentally.

  I crossed over the bridge and decided to keep going this time, instead of turning right up the river. The wet trees had all turned black. I kept my hood down and let the rain wash through me, tilting my head back to catch some drops in my mouth. The wet gravel slid and crunched beneath my boots. My arms swung at my sides. As the blood flowed through my fresh young veins, I felt imbued with good health and the simplicity of my surroundings. The key to happiness is the ability to let go, I remembered.

  I felt relaxed. Lots of other little thoughts popped into my head. Embrace your emotions. Wisdom doesn’t come from age, it comes from experience. Environment determines consciousness. There is no such thing as death. And they came so promptly, and seemingly randomly, that I didn’t think it was really me that was thinking them, they were only entering into me. You’re a vacuum, I thought. And then something made me think of Bob Dylan, and all of the other songwriters I loved so much, and I thought, if this stuff isn’t coming from me, if it’s coming from the collective unconscious or higher dimension, didn’t so many artists say that too?

  Bob Dylan said he didn’t know where the stuff he wrote came from, and Neil Young too, and Leonard Cohen was always singing about secret cords and being told what to say instead of getting to choose what to say. And Mozart, said he didn’t know where his ideas came from, he was just in a good mood and in a bit of peace and didn’t practice at originality. None of them knew where it came from. And they said you can’t control it, it just flows through you, when it chooses. And I’m not as smart or as talented as them, I’m just dumb as fuck and know nothing, but maybe they are all just vessels. In fact, we are all just vessels! I’ve seen a ghost. I’m sure that death doesn’t exist. These are just bodies and brains that we are filling. This thing I am moving in, trapped inside, is just a shell.

  I stopped to watch some ducks on the water as they bobbed around then dived under in search of fish. I kept walking. The mountains on the other side were black and ominous. It looked like a heavy rain was readying, I thought I could feel it coming too.

  My size eights stomped through the gravel. But so many of those writers and poets have been inspired by nature. Keats, Byron, Burns, Kerouac, Wordsworth, Shake
speare, all of them were inspired by it. By this. But if their art has been, had been, coming through them from the trees, or other forms of nature, can they claim credit for originality? If it’s come from a collective unconscious, can anyone be said to be an individual? Who talked about collective unconscious anyway, was that Jung? I don’t know.

  But ninety-nine percent of these writers and poets, and scientists too, believed in God. Einstein was a mystic, and said that imagination was the true sign of intelligence, and he sought everything out in nature and the universe. So even if this has all been in my imagination, does that mean it’s any less real?

  Up ahead was another little stone bridge. I crossed it over a smaller river and continued, the furthest up I’d been along that side of the glen.

  The bridge reminded me of the one in the meditation, and I pictured the joy of the people in that garden, next to that giant beanstalk. Why a giant beanstalk? Was it the oak I had been sitting under, creating that impression in me? Or was it supposed to be a biblical tree, like the one in the garden of Eden? Maybe it was a sort of garden of Eden? Was there not a quote in the bible, my father’s house has many rooms, or something like that? That mansion next to the garden could have been it?

  But that tree, in the garden. And look at the two trees you spoke to, and felt that energy from. The trees that inspired you so much and took you somewhere higher in your mind. But- there’s been loads of people who have received inspiration from sitting under trees! Buddha became enlightened sitting under one. Newton realized gravity sitting under one. Didn’t Moses talk to a bush that was on fire? Maybe Newton and Buddha were actually in communion with their trees too? And Darwin had a route he walked every day through the trees in his garden. And Jesus at the garden of Gethsemane. And he also went up a mountain. Mohamed went to the desert. Just about everyone who has helped to elevate society has been inspired by nature. They didn’t go to temples and man-made buildings for it. Environment really does determine consciousness.