Two of the best teachers of all...

It has been just over a year now since I moved to West Cork. There was a draw here, certainly. I came in many ways in expectation that I would find my next teacher- a yoga teacher? a body worker? a meditation master?- somebody that would lead me deeper into my own practice and therefore into myself. I did find my next teacher, actually I have found two, but they are not what I expected. In fact, they don’t even need to speak, or at least not in a language that needs words.Teacher One: aloneness.There have been many hours spent in my own company. There have been long dark nights filled with questions and many hours walking the shoreline and the ridgelines, noticing the calligraphy of a falling leaf and the poetry of open skies. I have spent hours tracing the course of streams until they have become river beds or walking country lanes until they fade into fields. I’ve sat on beaches waiting for the stars to arrive. Storms have come in, and cracking winds, and sometimes the sun set the world aglow. All that time alone but it never felt right to say I was lonely.I suppose I have learned that aloneness has a richness, depth and a range of qualities to it, each offering their own teachings. At times the aloneness has felt comforting, even sensuous, and at times rigid and difficult. It has been a mirror to my joy and my challenges. It made me face myself like no other teacher could, and in doing so it has been taking me across a threshold into the understanding that all I really have is myself, and when I listen close enough, the boundaries start to melt away to a place where ’I’ becomes ‘each other’ and the breath that links us is but one joyous and lingering dance. The dance makes it’s way into the ebb and flow of the tides, or the current of my mood, offering a remembrance too that emotion has it’s own motion, never static and always available to change.Teacher One has been generous. As I walked those mountain ridges they became an extension of an inner challenge, reaching into me to break open resistance and invite me to climb higher, or at least onwards. The meandering streams offered a sign that the journey to the open sea, the expanse, is never straight. I’m less afraid of the dark now too, for as you wait for dusk to turn to dark you sit in the knowing that the darkness is just one aspect of light’s full spectrum. And I am less afraid of taking the hidden path, or the wrong turn, or diving deeper, for it’s in those places where wildness and aliveness inhabit their fullness. I’m still not so keen on the cold atlantic waters though, so I know I have a way to go yet. And woodlice. Not so keen on them either.Of all the places the hours have taken me, it is the edge that I love the most- those places where the sea shifts into sand and then to shore. The place where rugged, hardened rock is putty to the wind or where a cliff suddenly falls to meadow and then back to cliff again. I love how the edge havens colonies of birds and harbours in its nooks and crannies even the most vulnerable of life. It is at the edge where I have felt most at home. All along the clue was in the word. Aloneness : all/one/ness. Not separate, but part of. Not different, but extension. Not singular but syncopated.Before me, all around me, in the air that I breath and the land that I stand on, my second teacher was with me all along too. Nature has a way of revealing herself to us in gradual, medicinal doses. Her magic this time has been her intimacy and her disguises. Those little robins who visited me each day in winter showed up to tell me that lonely is but a fallacy I have been colluding with.  And that song in the wind, that too had a story of belonging to tell. And, of course that four legged being who has been a shadow to me, with her unfailingly waggy tail and zest for life- espically when it involves walks and even better when it involves the sea- well, she is love, in all it’s finest and tenderest and most innocent of guises. In fact I think she has a special ‘teacher’ status too, but I’ll not tell her yet because the training books tell me that I am meant to let on that I am her master but I’m not so convinced of the order of things.In a few days time I will be moving house again (still in west cork, but more town based… for a while…) There is a time for all things and the time of this particular phase is ending. The tide will go out, but a new tide will come in and carry me over. Thanks to Teacher One and Teacher Two, I trust this more now; this coming and going and the life on the edge of knowing and not knowing. For this, I will be forever grateful and so forever will I pledge to be a student to the best teachers of all.