It was a cliff overhang rather than a real cave. But the walls glowed with beautiful lichens, and at one end was a rockfall hung with ferns. I cleared out the sheep dung, set up a little shrine, cut a bed of reeds and laid out my sleeping bag. I was in business at least as a part-time hermit.
Notwithstanding two decades of tough Zen training, I still had a romantic itch for the hermit life - all those poems and ink drawings! I've done many a solitary in lonely cabins, as well as being a seasoned backpacker. But four walls or a good tent make all the difference. Perched several hundred feet up on my cliff ledge I would have nowhere to hole up and no choice but to hang out.
Good weather sustained my first days of idyllic delusion. I'm high up at the top end of a wild valley of steep grass slopes and craggy outcrops. However.
For stonechats and ravens
this isn't a melancholy place
The little stream gathers its tributaries arid, plunging into deep green pools, flows on past the ruins of ancient sheepfolds to the main valley two miles away. There are no signs of human habitation, nor have I ever seen another human being or any footprint but my own. At the lower end a solitary pine stands sentinel, growing out of a cleft in the rocks. Down among its roots are small bones and the acrid smell of fox. Since my I Ching name is (in Welsh) Coeden ar y Mynydd (Tree on the Mountainside) - hexagram 53, for the curious - maybe this would be a good place to end up:
Zazen in Cwm Hiraeth
where my ashes will join me
That first night I had good company:
Outside my shallow cave
enchanted by moonlight
stonechats sing the night away
Came the morning star, and dawn meditation above my mist-filled valley. Back in my sack, I watched mist and sunlight vying along the ridge opposite, as my spirit stove struggled to produce the coffee. My ledge falls steeply to the stream below: mindful or dead ... But morning and evening down there, among the reeds, is always a special time:
Surrounded by wilderness
among the pebbles of the spring
my delicate pink dental plate
But as yet I was no more than a visitor playing the hermit. My first initiation came that night. At dusk came the thunder, the lightning and the torrential rain. Water running down the cliff curtained off my hermitage, and the little springs springing into life all round me explained the luxuriant ferns:
Chanting mantras
burning incense
my sleeping bag gets wetter
and wetter
'What kills in the British hills is the combination of sustained wetness, cold and wind.' This is big, desolate upland, famed for its bogs and unforgiving of travellers who make an error of judgement. It was better to risk hypothermia by staying put than to attempt the many miles to the nearest sheep farm. Apart from some minor drainage works, and invoking the aid of Kuan Yin (who specialises in tacky situations like this) there was not much I could usefully do all night except watch my mind (quite dramatic) and sense the damp slowly chilling my bones. In the middle of the night, cradled surely by Kuan Yin, I sank into a deep, peaceful sleep. And at first light, pausing only for a grateful bow in the thick mist, I fled my flooded cave.
After that, life at Craig y March (Stallion's Rock) began for real. Mostly it is weather: too wet, too cold, too blustery or:
Like me
the midges
enjoy hazy sunshine
(Frankincense and myrrh keep them at bay; culture-specific, they ignore the oriental stuff.) Worst of all, the roof of the cave is too low for meditating in the approved posture. Indeed, in some weathers I am condemned to long periods of sheer idleness. Just hanging out there. Reduced to watching my mind. Or watching the view in its ever changing sameness.
Days and nights of solitude
deeper in the belly
the sutras growl
Again I am reminded that acceptance is what it is about; leaving space for clarity, gratitude, love, joy and energy to bubble up - laughing at nothing with no one to hear me. The valley and I have become more intimate than even the wild cwm where I normally live, but where there is too much else going on that fogs my perception of how it really is. But here in Cwm Hiraeth:
Day after day
the mind flutters
against the cwm's
irresistible reality
day after day
the cwm is there
the stream below
winding through yellow grass
and opposite my cave
the ridge
coming and going in the mist
the end of longing
Humping out across the mountain, I encounter a shepherd checking the old ridge fence that doesn't know it's become a Euro-constituency boundary. We stop to enjoy each other's company, two pairs of boots settling gently into the bog. Talking about a parliament for Wales we are.
