Photographing trees

Late May, about an hour from sunset. I've walked this path before, just the once, I think. It was coming on dark then, midwinter, the fells under snow. Was it thirty years ago? I wonder, can I be the same person? Biologically I suppose not, every cell in my body having been replaced over and over since then, so the only continuity is that of memory, but memory is selective. Like the imagination, it's also hard to say what a memory is. Is it a mere arrangement of atoms in the gloop of a brain? I find it hard to think of things that way, that memory is like a computer hard drive, and imagination a mere program running in a processor. It's something more mysterious to me, also intricately bound up with my own sense of being.

The sun is going down over my shoulder now. The rise of fells, across the valley is in deep shadow, while the riverside meadows are still bathed in a rich light. Also, the occasional lone tree. It's a pleasant evening, sense of something cooler and more tranquil descending after a hot day. I've been lugging the camera all week, lugging it all year, but the shots have been few and most of those blurred or spoiled in some other way, like I'm losing the eye, losing control of the machinery. I'm not expecting much then, but suddenly, I come upon this tree. It's an oak, I think, but I don't want to fuss too much over labels. It's alone, alive and beautiful, lit up against the dark of the fell. I lift the camera, shoot a few compositions, bracket for exposure...

There are times when the world is too much with us, and it feels like we can't shake it off. It brings a weight to bear, closes up all the little fissures through which we might still escape into the imaginal. Indeed, it's a measure of how far we've gone that we begin thinking of it as an escape, when for some of us at least, life is incomplete without that easy switch from pragmatism to the more poetic ways of thinking and seeing and being. To live always pragmatically is to live as in a prison, it is to live blind and without meaning.

Meaning is not a thing, nor is it an emotion. It is not happiness. It lies deeper, rises from the subliminal. It is a connection most felt at the intersections of the manifest and the non-manifest worlds. I rarely find it in the built environment, more often in moments like this, moments of rare light in beautiful, less peopled places. Sure I've taken a hundred shots this week, and none of them any good. But even as I take these shots now, I know they'll be the only ones to make the cut. Then I lower the camera and just look.

I'm sure, buried somewhere deep inside of us, there's an awareness of pure being. It's always there, but more often obscured by our awareness of other things, more busy goings-on: sights, sounds, thoughts, emotions – and that's without going to the darker side of anxieties, fears. Sometimes it'll come upon you spontaneously, at unexpected moments like this, as we slip through a fissure in space and time. The moment arrests us with its beauty. Then it's just a sideways step into the imaginal, into the sense once more of one's own interiority. The world retreats, the heavens hold their breath and a sense of the magical returns. It is a moment when all things are possible.

As if on cue, a lone woman moves out of the shadows, takes my arm and stands a while in quiet company. We do not speak, but her presence fills me with a deep sense of longing for a home I have never known. It is a remembering of something the soul somehow knows but cannot consciously recall, not a home left behind, but more an imaginal place glimpsed but briefly in these moments of enchantment.

Hiraeth, the Welsh would call it, that mysterious longing for a place and a time, and a home we've never known. Interesting how there's no equivalent in the English language, a tongue shaped more by action, utility, commerce and empiricism, than to contemplation. We English still feel it, but we have to borrow the words from other cultures to describe it. Or we write stories and essays and epic poems to capture what other cultures pick up at a glance and understand intuitively.

Last limb of the sun now over the shoulder of the fell, a deep quiet over the vale – just the river gently running, and I am the last man, stolen away to the land of the faery. The world that was too much with me is a memory fading. And the realisation comes with it that memory is perhaps not the root of being we think it is, that indeed, we can forget everything, as I do in this moment, yet in this moment become more ourselves than we have ever been.

I turn, walk slowly back towards the village, keeping step, hip to hip with my familiar companion, my eternal twin. And together, with every breath we feel the aliveness of the body, and the earth beneath our feet. We glance back, briefly to the tree, distant now, catching the last of the light – feel it too, sense it in the motion of every leaf, stirring in an imperceptible movement of air.

Then a sound. A young family out with their dogs, children's voices, a lusty bark and a rush as the dogs take to the water. My companion melts away and I return once more to the village, alone, as the world closes in. Except, not quite. There is something about such moments that sustains us long after they have passed. And it's not the memory, nor less the photograph. It's more in the readjustment, a shuffling of the priorities of one's awareness, so that sense of pure being sits a little closer to the top than it did before.