engulfing sorrow
sly tide on a shallow shore
submerge me alone!
Considering the cycle path runs pretty straight, south to north, with few branches in other directions to confuse me, I often stop to check the map just for a break. I take the chance to be consciously present in the moment by noting, quite dispassionately, my unchanging surroundings and feeling some sense of achievement at every staging post, each new to me, though they do look uncannily familiar.
Occasionally, fellow travellers pass by and wave or say, ‘bonjour’. We smile at each other, acknowledging we are on the same journey, this way or that, all following the same route between land and sea. But there are not many and few stop to chat so usually it is just me, alone with the pines, each tree a carbon copy of its companions, uniform sentinels of this landscape, a silent crowd, an army in formation, like the third century terracotta soldiers of Qin Shi Huang, China’s first emperor, guards, charged with protecting him in the afterlife. And whether because I’ve been so long in suburbia, the quiet monotony of the pine forest is rather confronting at first. My honour guard has an eerie quality. I’m more used to the endless variety of a deciduous forest, gnarled oaks and wispy silver birch reaching up for their share of sunlight; Larch and Beech and Maple, each with their own timetable of colour and leaf fall, and my favourite tree, the Aspen, Populus tremula, with its silvery leaves that shiver in the breeze and sound like the sea seeping through pebbles.
There’s a whole stand of Aspens behind the bungalow where my sister and mother and I often sit in the summer as if we were in deckchairs by the ocean, just looking and listening. The pines, by contrast say nothing, though I’ve no doubt that when an Atlantic storm hits the shores, they show their feelings.
Just in passing, Aspis, the Greek name for the Aspen, means shield. The lightweight wood of the tree was thought perfect for making the metre-wide circular shields the Greeks used in battle. ‘The Tree of Heroes’, as they called the Aspen, took on magical properties and the trembling leaves gave the power to visit the Underworld and to return safely. At a more earthly level, the dried wood of the Aspen is so buoyant, Greek soldiers could use their shields to help them float across rivers, using the buoyancy like undersized coracles.
The very tops of the pines are moving in the breeze today, but I can’t feel the breeze down here on the cycle path. Still, there is shade and the water in my bottle is still cold from the night, so I decide to stop and sit awhile. With my conscious mind preoccupied by the routine of the road, my unconscious emerges from the shadows to play and I get a chance to watch, or listen, to my own thoughts just as Michel did in his study. This is a quite different kind of thinking than I’m used to from the endless priorities and problems to be solved in the usual run of things, one that in effect involves not thinking. Time is plentiful out here, along with fresh air and the insouciance of nature letting me be.
I lay my sleeping bag out just off the path, keen to put a soft layer between me and the needles and cones that litter the ground. I sit, cross-legged if my stiff muscles will give a little, and still my mind to make my peace with the pines. Monotony has a meditative quality all of its own, one that encourages intuition to go to work and I want to grab some of the mindfulness of the moment. In his essai, On Solitude, Michel says:
‘…we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.’ 
Trappist monks, for instance, are said to cherish the monotony of their lives. Monastic life is Spartan and rigidly organised days where repetitive rounds of work and prayer lead to an u...