A weekend walk

It's Monday but I'm dreaming instead of working. On the weekends we often go out for a hike or walk somewhere in the hills. This Saturday we did an 8-mile walk that went past a slate quarry, leaving from Abergolwen, a nearby village. I have some vague memory of my father (now passed away) taking me there as a child. A geologist, he was always taking us to mines, quarries, cliffs with interesting rock formations showing... that kind of thing. I certainly remember trying to walk up a pile of slate. It's not easy as the smooth slabs of rock just slide over each other, nothing firm beneath the foot.

It was drizzling as we set off, but relatively warm. Bear had his GPS as well as a printed map. In my bag I have a little kit containing a compass, matches, a whistle, fishing line, etc. Stuff in case you end up lost in the hills basically. Not that I don't trust the GPS, map and bear put together, I do, but you never know what might happen. We had sandwiches made with bread that I baked in the morning, and also bread that bear had baked a couple of days before. Good Welsh cheddar cheese, grated, and fresh tomatoes.

Walking is quite meditative for me, one foot placed in front of the other, and thoughts turning in my head like cogs. I think about the speed at which we move through the landscape, and how our speed freezes it for a moment, even though we are moving quite slowly. When we pause for a moment the place slowly takes on movement of its own, beetles trundle past, birds appear out of their undergrowth nests, a big brown hare lops into the path and then disappears again upon seeing us.

The path leads us upwards and through a forest. The drizzle has turned into a damp fog and everything is wet, especially the ground now, soaked with rain and overflowing streams and turned into thick mud. At one point we almost lose our shoes in it! I have to get Bear to help pull me out and my foot, ankle deep in the squelchy mud makes a great SLLLUUUURP! sound as it is extracted. We follow the path upwards through the trees, a fine grey mist making the furthest trees disappear, and altering the sound of our voices. We emerge from the forest onto a moor, the mist blowing over it. The moor is covered in bilberry bushes and delighted we pick many of the delicious blueberry-like fruits and snack on them. We've diverged from the path a little now but the forest was hard work to get through because of the thick mud, so we struggle over the moor instead, eating berries as we go, until we join the path again.

The path begins to climb slightly again as we follow a ridge. We pause for a moment and look down. There is nothing to see but white - a blank page. We are standing atop a grassy ridge and below us, there is nothing, a great white void. Strangely, the white clouds that are obscuring the wide open view give even more of a sense of openness. There is nothing for the eye to rest on, just the edge of the white where wisps of cloud roll up onto the ridge. There could be anything beyond, or nothing. Whatever you want there to be. It's peaceful.

Bear's hair and the fuzz on his face is dusted with tiny drops of dew. His sun-browned skin looks fresh and the colours of his clothes are the only vivid thing in my field of view, everything else disappears into muted tones around us. I guess sometimes you just have to slow down, pause, remove all the noise and flashiness, to see what's really important.