On Cadair Idris, close by to the bottomless lake of Llyn Cau, I spent the night on a Rocking Stone, with a youthful desire in my heart, to be a Poet Bard. Legend has it that a night on Cadair’s cold flank gives the curse of madness, or the blessings of Seer or Bard. I knew the risk to my mind and the risks of the rocking stone, the balancing of the stone, a balance to be held on a dark night, high up and all alone. I sat and prayed in silence to the moon and stars above, looking up with eyes wide open, alert to the mountain, the rock and the wind that blew in that desolate spot.
The night was long. I came down with the dawn as nothing; an empty vessel waiting to be filled. No-one, nothing at all. Aware that I was very small.
Ten years later, or was it five, and does it matter how old I was, I spent the night on a rock atop a Tor, looking out across a wide open remote moor. I saw the creatures of the night as they scurried about and eyes shining and blinking in the dark. I heard the song of the wind through the rocks. Nothing more. It was enough.
The night was long. I came down feeling I belonged to something though I knew not what. I became a journey begun.
The night I spent on the cliff edge where the wind sings in the grass above granite rock, the waves beat on the rocks below and seven hours became one. Time slowed, or the stars and the moon sped by, who can tell which, the night I sat high on the cliff edge, the moon path spread across the sea, glimmering on water, reaching out to the a far horizon.
The stars, with the moon at the centre of all, moved in a slow ballet of curved motion across the sky, the constellations shone out from the web of night, a rotation eternal, a moving wheel. Beneath me the tide rolled in an out, fast. Time did not stop, it slowed or the world sped up while beauty shone out high above.
Seven hours became one.
If I can, by a shift of my mind, alter seven hours to one could I change one hour to seven and make life longer or can I pull seven hours into one? What is time but illusion? The days of a child are long, a summer an eternity. Seven hours could easily be as seven decades to a shorter lived creature than me. Does a butterfly live six score years and ten in so short a span as a day.
The earth is a rocking stone held in place by the moon while the sun brings it life. Time does not exist. Life and death is all we have and are but we are not bound in time.
We are all finely balanced on the stone. We either fall off or we balance.
This is all I have learned on the Rocking Stone. This is not the end of my journey, a journey I make alone.
