Judy Hindley describes an experience she calls the conversation.
One summer day, on a solitary stretch of beach, something happened. Marie was perhaps eleven or twelve, then, but in later years, she was unsure about the first time. It was as though she began to be aware of a possibility. This was the possibility of a kind of grace or union, which seemed all the more precious because in her life it was a time of clumsiness, and of a separateness that was ugly and unpleasant. This separateness made her sometimes want to be away from people, with whom she felt so conscious of a jarring awkwardness.
That day, she drifted off on her own, far down the beach, leaving behind the sprawling family crowd. She came across one or two fishermen, but then, for a long time, no one. Clouds of flies buzzed and hummed along the drying wrack of the last high tide, which had a pungent stink that somehow released her suddenly into the moment. She smelled that sour, hot smell; a gull cried, far overhead; the sea-breeze fluttered against the unaccustomed bareness of her body; the faintly lacquered, smooth, dried sand below the tideline felt as crisp as pie crust: she could feel each separate toe break cleanly through onto the softer sand, beneath.
She looked out at the heaving colour of the sea, its tremendous turquoise that quivered with tiny crystal flares all through its body; she took a great, deep breath and felt the salt air fill her lungs. But then, when she looked back down the beach, she realised she had somehow rounded the long curve of the bay, and was out of sight of any other human being. This freedom from observation was like a big permission. Gently and tentatively, her body began to explore this strange, big freedom.
First, it was just a way of walking. She began to walk with a leisured, gliding pace against the sea air, drifting from side to side, trailing her toes to furrow the retreating back-flow of a wave, gently pointing them into the foaming surf. Turning this way, turning that way, she uncurled her fingers, felt the freedom in her arms. She began to sing, moving along beside the water, crooning a wordless melody that seemed to arise almost entirely on its own, out of the trunk of her body, in tune with the feet that stepped, the arms that lifted up and out. But this was all in direct response to the water and the sand, the air, the sea-birds and the sea-weed, all of which kept dancing back, in turn, and answering.
This was the thing that happened: the conversation. She realised that she was in conversation with the world. It moved; she moved within it. The light, the sky, the movement of the water, the glinting colours of reflected sky along the polished mounds of rocky outcrop, the gleams that danced along the newly-wetted sand. You would never get tired of this conversation.
How many different ways is water beautiful? You could never count them. Look at the different things the water does! This little shallow wavelet, for example, racing its crystal hill against a rise of sand here, and it stretches up and up, and thins, and curls, and breaks in a froth of glittering lace, across these bronze and amber ropes of kelp, beading them all over with glistening bubblets.
From moment to moment, she would walk into an event of seemingly extraordinary loveliness: an angle of the sun, for instance, which exactly caught and lit a wave that burst all round her in a great, dazzling crystal sunburst. She would be conscious of a curious play of fear and trust, as though a part of her was warning: this is it; it can't ever be so beautiful again. Then she would exercise the trust like a muscle, flexing it so that the doubts all fell away as she walked forward nakedly: it might; it will; and then once again, and again and again – it was.
After the sunburst dazzle, the sleek shimmer of the beach calls out like freedom. A breeze picks up and plays all round her body, and she finds herself smiling with sheer light-heartedness; and then she looks over to the left and sees the hills. How very surprising. After being so in love with the moving sea – so intoxicated, so infatuated, even – she is now in love with the very stillness of these sweet-smelling hills. Their flanks are a golden-brown, with just a fluctuating shimmer of brightness where the breeze turns the nap of the grass.
It's as though one kind of love refreshes the other; as though all the presences and moments of the world were different beings, with all their different personalities, ready to play with you. The world was speaking to her, and what she was doing was responding. It was clear that the more freely and trustingly she responded, the more openly the world reached out again and touched her. Later, when she considers this experience, she imagines it must be a religious experience. But of course, it is so entirely corporeal.
Judy Hindley is a human rights and environmental activist. She writes children's fiction and poetry.