Into the Silence (The Undreaming)

JOURNAL ENTRY

1^st January, Wednesday

“A dawn of tobacco and salmon
And racing clouds.

A solitary raven rows
Swiftly against the current of the day.

Hacking cough and aching limbs
There is more than one way to enter a new year.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It’s a cold night, iron-wrought, that rings with the anvil blow of hard earth and starlight. Puddles that pot-mark the towpath lie shattered into shards of ice, leaden-glazed, with pewter and sea-foam.  Jupiter flares low in the west caught among the meshwork of oak branches. A little lower the crescent of a young moon – buttery bright and scimitar sharp – hangs just above the skyline. The air is still and mirror bright. Over our heads, the glittering dust of star-fields flung like scattered sand across the ink-black bowl of the night sky – stands mute and unblinking. Already the thermometer has dipped well below freezing, and the grass, and the mooring lines, and metal work are brushed with hoar-frost bristles.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the darkness of the gathering year to you wherever you are.

You've come! Thank you. It's so lovely to see you again, and you're always welcome. It feels such a long time, doesn't it? The cabin is snug, the coals are glowing cherry red, the kettle is on. So come inside out of the cold and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

INTO THE SILENCE (THE UNDREAMING)

The dust of the festivities is now beginning to settle. Peace is beginning to flow back along the contours and slopes through which the canal is cut. The wind and rain over Christmas and the New Year have brought more vegetation down. But a new stillness has once more fallen. And cold, sub-zero nights, seem to have a quality to the silence that is almost unique. May be the shiver of an owl in the far distance. A bark, softened by miles. A rustle in the trees as you pass beneath. And a still silence, as thick and liquid as quick silver, pools and flows within and without the boat. 

Welcome to 2025. I hope that you are well. It feels as if it has been such a long, long time since we were last together. It has certainly been far longer than I had intended. In fact, I had everything set up to record an episode for Christmas Eve. It is one of the episodes that I enjoy making the most and it seemed to have felt that there was added significance to this one. However, if you did catch my rather brief post on social media. On the very first day of my Christmas break, I went down with a really horrible bug. I wasn’t taken wholly by surprise; we’d both been fighting something for a good couple of months. Neither of us felt ill, just not quite right – subpar. Therefore, I wasn’t too surprised when I woke up feeling distinctly rough. Had I known now how even rougher I would feel and for so long, I would have quickly recorded the episode there and then, but decided to postpone it for a day or two. Suffice it all to say, I’ve pretty much slept through the last two weeks. It was made worse by my not being able to eat anything at all for the first five days. Both Donna and I have really just focused on managing the day to day running of the boat and seeing that Maggie got her required number of walks, etc.. Fortunately, Donna had done a brilliant job stocking up the boat for Christmas and so we had more than enough to live on, as well as having fuel, water, and all the other necessities.

Apart from coughs, we are both beginning to feel much better. However, it is the enervating, clawing, exhaustion, and feeling so utterly and totally drained after doing a really small job or taking Maggie around one of the fields that we are still battling with. Wendy said that one of the doctors she’s heard from was warning that it could take between four and six weeks before things can get back to normal. Initially that seemed fairly excessive, but, at the moment, it seems completely right.

So that is why, despite all my best plans, there was no Christmas episode. It’s also why, I have not really been around on social media, or emails – just the thought of trying to get the laptop out has felt like a task of almost Sisyphean magnitude. I am aware that some of you have emailed or left comments, and I will, once, I begin to feel a bit stronger get back to replying properly.

But for now, we are – despite all this – doing well. We have everything we need and are able to work together. The Erica looks a bit as if a bomb has hit it, but we are warm and snug and dry.     

But it does feel as if the last few weeks have been rather a void. A space of no-space. Untime. It may be that is why, the prospect of entering a new year, this year, has been attended by so much ambiguity and even ambivalence. All the small, seemingly inconsequential, often semi-conscious, processing and preparing for the future that usually fills this time of winter festivities, have been left undone. This year the new year stretches ahead of me in shadows and darkness, more so that at most other times. I stand at the threshold as one new born. It feels odd, disorienting, slightly discomforting. The landscape rolls out before me, but I have no sense of direction, purpose. The glades and bracken between the trees, are pathless- devoid of any sense of pathways, human or other. I am not used to this. I remember lying in bed in my very late teens, thinking, things are going to happen this year that will change my life forever, but having no idea what they could be – or even how I should plan or prepare.

Normally, paths appear – or at least a sense of direction begins to form. Patterns found in the chaos of life, music drawn from noise and clamour. I know, in the past, I have often said, that what we are born pathfinders – it is what we do best. Navigate our way through the confusing miasma of life and find the significant, the meaningful, the joy. I still hold that. But right now, there are no paths.

One of the things that I found myself doing over the last few weeks, was just doomscrolling – hundreds upon hundreds of short videos – filled with plans, motivational and inspirational affirmations, packets of wisdom honed to perfection, beautifully packaged. So much wisdom. Wisdom swallowing wisdom in its own grotesque serpentine ouroboros. It’s not that there was anything wrong with them. It’s just that, there are times, when it is right for wisdom to be silent. For us to listen to the sky and hear nothing. For us to look deep into the raven’s eye, and see nothing but a hidden life that is alien to us.

I look to the trackless woods in front of me, try to discern away ahead. Follow the sun, follow the moon, follow the star paths, follow your heart. But what happens, when all are silent? I am not used to having no dream. No rough plan to guide me through a notional path – of things I want to do, achievements gained. Skills found. Have I come to this point, at last - unplanned, unbeknown – where I stand within the landscape of my home with no sense of a future for me? Oh, I know things will happen, the dice spins, events will unfold, my life in the turn of the seasons will grow, change, develop, age. But I have no sense how. I can’t even begin to imagine how this year will unfold – apart from the overwhelming conviction that it will.   

I am back to the 19 year old me, staring into the silent, shadowed, abyss of the years ahead of me and wondering. Wondering. And I know that I am probably not the only one looking into this silent dawn of a new year without a path to follow. Unable to predict, unable to plan, for what lies ahead.

And despite all the most well intentioned of internet gurus and sages, filled to the brim with glossy soundbites and pithy advice to all who will listen, standing at the threshold of shadowed silence, is not a bad thing. Not knowing where to go, what to do; facing a journey with no map, no compass, no dream is sometimes what is needed to lead us to the very essence of life. To step aside from the prized throughfares and walk humbly among the nettles and clover, with nothing more than a staff and a tattered coat can sometimes be the beginning of wisdom.

And one thing is sure, the new year will dawn and we will find currents to take us to where we need to be. There may not be clear paths right now, but that is okay. You cannot be lost when you are home. And the sky will lighten, a little more to the north, each day. And you will find bread crumbs along the way, and starpaths and songways, and new paths and old paths. And it will not matter where they lead, only that they are your paths. And there will be butterflies that only you are going to see, blackbird song that only you will hear, and the play of light through silver birch leaves, that will arrest only your eye and make you feel something call out deep with you.   

You can sense the spin of the seasons. The cycles without and beyond time. You can hear them in the evening call of rook and the stabbing exclamation of jackdaw flight. The hill upon which starlight and dew fall with a silent softness. The sound of wing song of swan and geese. The play of light on water as a duck erupts into the cold air. There is something almost elemental here. These signposts of deep-time to which, no matter how much we crowd them out, our bodies respond. The music of the winter turning is a duet. A choral call and response, between the landscape and something deep within me. “Deep calls unto deep” the psalmist once wrote. I have no idea what he meant – though from time to time I have had a stab at guessing. It might be that even he too wasn’t sure – only aware of that deep choral antiphony from deep within and without – the lyric-melody of existence; this is the song-path of our home and everything that lives within it.

Times of no plans. Untime. Perhaps there are times of Undreaming, before we can once more navigate our paths through our own dreamtimes. Times, when wisdom must fall silent and our paths fade into mud. These too are good. They too root our souls deep within the soil of our home.

It is the human way to seek to understand, to make sense of, to be the fire-spark that finds (or perhaps just attaches) meaning or significance. In the random patterns of life, we find patterns; signposts, purpose. And in those we learn to hear music and then find a way to dance with it. It is not always easy. Perhaps, right now, we are entering again a time of noise. But we will find the music. We will learn new dances. The music and the dance are there to be discovered. And from out of the undreaming, the dreamtime emerges.

Do not fear this silent birth of an unknown year. Do not shrink from the shadows or the darkness within it. Do not be concerned about the undreaming that strips the meaning from our lives. Courage traveller. This is your world. Your home. You will find a path, your path, beyond the fields of ‘right and wrong.’ And that is what the world needs right now.

So, courage friend and happy new year to all.

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG