Circles Beyond Time ~ A First Dawn

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Friday started early; there is always that sense of excited, nervous anticipation as the day of a workshop dawns. While our companions for the weekend were making their way from distant corners of the country, two of us were driving through crepuscular suburbs toward the open moors for a final morning of reconnaissance.

The lightening sky lit the pathway through the fading heather towards what would be our first destination, a little bridge across a stream. We had, on our initial visit, intended to climb the hill by the obvious route, only to find the ground to be a boggy and impenetrable morass. The stream had helped itself to an offering of chocolate from my companion’s pocket… which he had retrieved and unwrapped before giving it back to the water. Retreating, we had been directed to follow the path to another crossing point.

We had both remarked that it looked like the troll bridge from Billy Goats Gruff when we had first seen it. This had given us an idea, one that would evolve as the workshop drew closer and we listened to the story of the land as the wind… perhaps… had helped itself to further offerings from our hands.

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By Friday morning, however, our plans were clear. I lingered on the path while my companion went down to the bridge to check lines of sight, then followed him down, reciting a poem from Tolkien that seemed appropriate to the moment, so we could check when approaching voices could be heard. “The Road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began…” As I reached the bridge, the sound of small birds filled the air, rising to protect their young from the silent wings of a hawk.

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The birds were not the only watchful creatures… we were watched by interested eyes as we paced out our intentions and learned the space we would be using for our opening. While the rest of the sites we would be visiting are familiar to us, we had only been here once before and we have learned that spatial memory can be unreliable. What you think will work beautifully in one spot may bear little relation to what you can actually do there.

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We had decided upon a theme and a loose, flexible structure, adding in some more carefully constructed elements to tie the workshop together. Most of the weekend would be allowed to unfold in the moment, relying on memory for facts about the sites we would visit and on the landscape itself for inspiration. This first entry into an ancient place, though, was something we wished to mark, sealing the intent of the company and our search for a deeper understanding of the old places and mankind’s eternal questioning of what is and what might be.

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The all-pervading damp of the early morning mist was chill, yet the light was soft and beautiful, giving hope for a lovely day ahead. It was not until we turned our gaze to the east that we realised that, in this magical little valley, the sun had yet to rise. We watched in hushed awe as white fire erased the horizon and our day was born. There was yet another place we needed to visit before we headed home to prepare for the start of the workshop… and we were unprepared for what we would find there…

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