by Biddy Wells
*
It’s hard for me to stay still and drop the notion that I ought to be somewhere, finding the next place where I will rest for a while: the special place I dreamed about back in Wales. I imagined a village: a dusty street with donkeys and tiny old ladies, dressed in black, ambling past in the noonday heat while I looked on from a shady porch. There would be palm trees and the sea not far away – nothing much going on.
I am exploring the wild southwest corner of Portugal, taking in places that Felipe had suggested I visit. It seems so long ago that we were toiling under the baking sun together. I messaged him recently, and he replied that he had tried to contact me to say he was coming for lunch when I was at the campsite. That was when my phone and the internet were down, so his message had vanished into nowhere. It could be simply that our limited knowledge of one another’s language is open to misinterpretation, but I get the feeling he has taken offence. Does he think I was avoiding him, playing games? Or is he playing games? Or neither? Those few days with no connection to the outside world might have been rather significant. I wonder what would have happened if he had come to visit at that time when I was doubting David’s intentions, and I am relieved that the moment has passed. Perhaps someone was looking after me by disabling the satellite. I’d wanted nothing more than friendly company, but what did Felipe think I wanted? And what did he want? I also wonder where my Swedish friends have ended up and whether I will see them again. They were heading down to the Algarve to find somewhere to stay for a month or so. I will call them. But first, I think, a walk is in order – or a swim, or a wash in the river. There’s no rush.
In the afternoon, I wove slowly south along the coast road, stopping for lunch and a walk at another wild and exquisite beach of silver-gold sand and interweaving waves. There was a huge car park, and when I arrived there were quite a few campervans; but returning after my walk, I saw that everyone was leaving. The sun was low in the sky and I wanted to park up for the night, but I had become indecisive. I didn’t feel right about being the only camper van in this large, exposed space. I guess I have developed a sort of instinct about free camping. It has to feel right; I have to feel safe. I was sad to leave, but I knew this was not the place for me to stay alone for the night. I consulted Tanya and found that I was only an hour or so away from Sagres.
I arrived at nightfall, feeling bit desperate to get settled for the night. Turning in to the road for the campsite, I spotted four familiar figures: it was the Swedish angels with their two little dogs! What are the chances? After helping me find a good spot where my solar panel would not be damaged by falling pine cones the size of small melons, they invited me for drinks, and a few Drambuies loosened my tongue. I was so excited to see them again.
*
The sun is peeping through the morning clouds on the horizon. I see my new surroundings for the first time in daylight and I like the look of this campsite in Sagres, with its tall pine trees and hedged plots. It feels relaxed and friendly. I go to reception to use the Wi-Fi, and there is an email from David saying he is flying out in a few weeks, all being well. Delight, relief and uncertainty collide in quite a pleasant way. Did I really doubt him? Did I really let go completely of my attachment to the idea of him coming to see me? He wants to start afresh after the communication that went so horribly wrong. We both want that now. Today seems even more beautiful.
*
I have spent a lot of time with my Swedish friends, whom I find quite fascinating and stimulating company. Ivan lived as a Zen monk for several years and retains something of a cool, Zen outlook on life, as well as a very dry sense of humour. He stands back from drama and always seems relaxed, even when he is playing agent provocateur, which I think he enjoys. Maira is warm, very talkative, empathetic and expressive. The three of us have spirited conversations which I enjoy. They seem to view life from almost opposing philosophical standpoints. When I mention this, Ivan just smiles and says, ‘Opposites attract.’ It certainly seems that they love each other very much.
One afternoon, Maira looked upset and showed me a pamphlet about a charity helping stray dogs in a faraway country.
‘Look at these poor animals,’ she said. ‘These cats and dogs are living in the streets – starving, dying. It’s terrible! When we go home I want to adopt another dog. Why don’t you take one, too? If all our friends did that, the problem would be solved: just one dog for each family!’
I didn’t know where to start, having had no plans to take on such a responsibility – actually, having no plans about my future at all. Ivan chipped in, asking, ‘How do you know they are starving? How do you even know they exist? How do you know the whole world exists if you’re not there to see it?’
‘Because I know!’ Maira protested. ‘Don’t start with all that cold Zen stuff. I care about these animals. It’s really upsetting.’
‘So who is suffering?’ Good question, I thought to myself.
‘It is called empathy, Ivan,’ Maira retorted, with a slightly exasperated huff. Good point, I thought, again not saying it out loud, wondering if we’d ever reach a point of harmony and enjoy a quiet moment.
*
Yesterday, Ivan and Maira invited me to a concert of sacred songs at a centre for spirituality and yoga along the coast. I accepted, of course. In fact, it turned out to be more of a sing-song than a performance. We all joined in with long, meditative bhajans – devotional songs – and by the end of it, the small circle of mostly strangers felt more like a group of old friends, though very few words had passed between us. I can’t put my finger on it, but something happened during the chanting – a change in vibration, perhaps – and I felt serene afterwards. The whole group went out for lunch together, which was thoroughly joyful.
Today, I woke early at the beautiful beach where we had parked our campervans for the night after the bhajan singing. I went to sit on the dunes to look at the sea and be alone. Maira and Ivan are entertaining, conscious, creative people and it’s wonderful to hang out with them, yet I fear they are driving me slightly mad. Is it them or is it just me? I can’t tell any more. Again and again they do their dance of the heart and the mind – non-attachment versus attachment. There’s a lot of talking. When Maira gets into her passionate stride on an issue, Ivan throws in a Zen koan like a handgrenade, which drives Maira crazy. I guess that’s the point of koans – and I do love koans – to confuse the mind. Just when it looks as though Maira is about to explode with rage, she suddenly bursts out laughing, and then Ivan joins in. It is impossible for me to keep a straight face – it’s two against one – and it feels wonderful to laugh.
I wonder if they enjoy the drama of it all. I just have to roll with it, and, anyway, I suspect that their little flare-ups are only reflections of myself. I recognise I can get caught up in taking a stand on an issue, yet there’s a part of me that is quiet and mildly amused, that sits back and watches. I like the quiet part, and right now, it seems to be prevailing. It’s as though I have been rewired and the old wiring still has some juice in it. The interplay between these two different modes boggles my brain sometimes. I suspect it has already boggled theirs. Or, perhaps, as a couple, they are an actual walking, talking koan! Their purpose in life is to befuddle my rational mind and release me from the illusion that anything makes sense. Though I have come to love them, I have to get away for a while, be quiet and find my own balance.
*
I left my friends and went off along the coast, driving from place to place, and gave myself a task, which was to find beautiful beaches and free camping spots where David and I might camp when he arrives in a week or so. It has rained a little almost every day and it’s colder now, so it’s more difficult to be outside and mix with people or just enjoy the great outdoors. The days feel shorter since the clocks went back. The dark evenings are long and potentially lonesome: just me and my van. The strange thing is that I don’t feel lonely.
My purpose was to reach Portugal. Now that I am here, I have no destination, and
I could even say I am pointless – direction-less. Yet I have hit a seam of self-containment, maybe even contentment. Alone for a great deal of the time, I find myself quite fulfilled just by meeting the everyday needs of being alive. I get up, have tea – slowly coming into full alertness – and put my bed away; I go somewhere new to check it out, or stay put and potter about; I go off on my bicycle, or walk, or swim; I shop for basic foods; I read, I write; I go to bed early. I am awake at three till five most mornings. During that time I stretch, relax, contemplate. Time passes.
Much as I love a bit of social contact, I find that interacting with people is exhausting. There must be something in me that becomes unbalanced when I am with people. I guess it has something to do with the engagement of our minds. It takes a lot of energy to be in the realm of thoughts and opinions. I think this is all part of the rewiring that’s going on. It’s surprising how much space and quiet I need. In solitude, I find peace, and for the first time in my life I am not afraid of the space. It’s not empty or boring, but full and satisfying. This is quite a revelation. I feel complete, and at the same time I am looking forward to David’s company, knowing I can relax with him. Being joined by him will give me someone to dine with, walk and talk with – someone to play with. I don’t feel needy; it’s more that I want us to share this space together. I would love for him to find joy, too. I wonder what it will be like to be together after these months alone. I don’t need to think about what happens after he goes back. I don’t want to focus on it. After all, it’s just an idea – a thought.
Having found neutral gear, I don’t feel the need to think much about anything. I am vacant. Am I losing touch, sliding into a sort of void? Perhaps I’ve been in some kind of deep, unfathomable process, too embryonic to describe coherently. My mind appears empty, yet there’s something lurking in the depths beyond my everyday consciousness. Writing is a magical process, and though it seems I am merely noting down small events, or exploring modest ideas that come to me, something else is disturbed. I notice a crack – a previously hidden doorway. The prospect of entering it and exploring a subterranean world is daunting. Like contemplating untangling a tightly knotted ball of string, it’s tempting to discard the idea and throw the string in the bin; but perhaps that’s a bit lazy. Will the passage from the hidden door lead to anything worth the effort of excavating?
In truth, worse than the fear that there may be no treasure hidden beneath the surface is the suspicion that what I will find there in the depths will be exceptionally banal: merely stuff that everyone else already knows, even though it seems profound to me. But maybe that is the point. I am not climbing Everest, or crossing a desert on a camel. I know mine is not an epic journey – but it’s life-changing all the same. Something is happening to me, and I need to honour that. I need to honour my journey.
*
I have been trying to escape from something – I mean always. I look back again at that time when I had a breakdown (though I prefer the term ‘breakthrough’, or simply ‘break’, suggested by a friend who survived one; it always makes me smile, because there’s a deep truth in those labels) and I realise I was not well attuned to the world I lived in. I felt unable to cope with the barrage of feelings, demands and crises that came at me repeatedly, which sometimes felt like gunfire. Things that other people seemed to manage effortlessly completely flattened me.
A breakdown can be seen as a distinct event, a random depressive episode: possibly the result of something going wrong with the synapses and a lack of serotonin. At the time, I knew what had brought it on – or at least I thought I did. But now I start to connect the dots and follow the thread back into the deeper past. Before I broke down (which makes me think of rusty, clapped out car holding up the traffic) I had been busy working and bringing up a family, just living a fairly unremarkable life and doing normal things, but I was often in survival mode. I was stressed a lot of the time and, frankly, teetering on the edge of total collapse. I know I am not alone in finding life stressful; such is the modern world, it seems.
During that time, I was slowly regaining equilibrium after a long period of grief for my brother, who had died. He was the younger of my two older brothers, and a complex person: a sensitive, somewhat troubled child; a wild and rebellious teenager; an adult who was flamboyant, creative and vulnerable to glowering, depressive moods. As a child growing up, I looked up to him and saw him as a glamorous hero. I followed him around, as little siblings do, and tried to impress him and emulate him, the results of which were often inappropriate for a young girl. I am not sure if I really understood myself to be a person separate from him until I was in my early twenties. During my teenage years, when our parents were going through their divorce, we became very close and, for the first time ever, we both chose to spend a lot of time together. For a while my brother became my friend, my ally and, to an extent, my equal. Twenty years later, he became sick. His illness and death were devastating, needless to say.
And even before those harrowing, terrible years, I had found myself, periodically, in a state of confusion and turmoil. I felt like a small boat on an eternally stormy sea, desperately trying to keep myself afloat. It was as if I had been startled on arrival in this world and then continued to find everything a little bewildering, and I hadn’t been given the necessary tools or armour to deal with life. I didn’t much like the person I found myself to be, but who else could I be? What else could I be? I tried a lot of things – some edifying, some helpful, others destructive. I was searching for a path that would lead me away from the discontent I felt.
Being alone was something to avoid. I believed myself to be an extrovert, someone who thrived on constant company and activity. I have no idea where that notion came from, and I question it now. Actually, my happiest memories of childhood involved being immersed in both nature and solitude. Somehow, though, over time, I lost the thread – my connection to myself, to my being. My mind became a very busy place.
By my forties, I was exhausted from trying to make sense of my life by analysing what felt like a catalogue of things that had gone wrong, and brooding about all the things that had hurt me. I was trying to force it into some sort of order that would make it make sense. Perhaps that’s what killed off my serotonin, zapped my synapses and made me hold up the traffic.
Now, at last, the past doesn’t hurt so much. I can stop running. I am no longer afraid it will catch me up and devour me. I can face it squarely. Looking from where I am now, miraculously, I find that the pain of the past has dispersed, exposing solid ground.
*
I am sitting in the passenger seat, looking out at the sea. Surfers arrive in vans to assess the waves. I think that today they’ll be disappointed. It rained heavily this morning, but now the sun keeps peeping through the clouds and then, suddenly, it’s very hot. I am an imposter. I have a little van just like theirs, and a spot in this small beachside parking area where young people park up for the night, hoping for early morning surf, but I am a middle-aged woman who doesn’t do real surfing. From a distance I might possibly be mistaken for a surfer girl in this context. Amazing but true: I still get wolf-whistles, especially when riding my bike with my bare legs on show and my untameable curly hair flowing out behind me. If the whistler got closer he would soon realise I am his mother’s age. Strangely, though, I find this subculture the most accepting and friendly group on the road. They don’t seem concerned with age, gender or anything – only waves.
Talking of mothers: an interesting thing happened between Maira and me yesterday when I’d returned for another stay at the campsite. She is not old enough to be my mum, but something has been emerging in me lately and I guess some old, buried mother/daughter stuff got triggered. It was reminiscent of when I was a teenager. Sometimes I wanted to be quiet and not have to think. I might have seemed a bit sullen. It wasn’t pleasant for my mother, who was having her own tribulations at the time. I remember clearly the sudden flaring up of a row that I am sure neither of us wanted to have.
It seemed to come from nowhere and escalate from nothing to a full-force battle in seconds. It was one of many similar conflicts. I see now that I had no skills with which to assert my need for peace and solitude. I had no power. Mum wanted a polite ‘good morning’ and a chat before school, but my reality in those days seemed dark, complex and confusing. Mornings were particularly painful, so cheerful conversation was beyond my capabilities. How could she know what I was experiencing when I was never able to explain it to her, or even to myself?
In my youth I had always felt my mum had neglected me, and had little time for my needs. It was only after my brother’s death that she and I began to build a good relationship. Following our shared bereavement, things changed and she wanted to make things right between us. She was regretful, acknowledging that she had been preoccupied when I was a child, trying to mend her own life, and she had not truly valued me. Over time we talked and got to know one another anew. Our relationship became stronger, more supportive and loving.
Yesterday life threw me an opportunity to assert my needs: not to dominate or be unkind, but just to say what I needed. For a moment Maira unknowingly played my mum and I was the teenager, wanting to remain undisturbed in my silent, peaceful bubble. She came over to my van during my morning meditation. What she said is not important – she did nothing wrong; she just wanted to engage on some subject, and I didn’t. I became frozen and my mind went blank; I couldn’t find the words to speak clearly and simply, so I listened for a while, getting irritated, then I waffled and tried to evade conversation. I must have blurted out something about needing space, but what I actually said was probably confusing and mildly hostile. Instead of getting back to my peace and quiet, I spent a long time with Maira trying to undo what had turned into a tangled, awkward knot.
