Morning friends – this incredible story is really a weave of the old pagan world of Ireland meeting the new Christian. An evolving rather than a face-off. A priest talking to a new convert who turns out to have led a tremendously interesting, across-species life. There’s immense beauty in this story, and all sorts of mystery. I gave a section of it in a post back in the summer.
The Rudiments of Time was recorded for you by a puttering Dartmoor fire at the end of summer, and is part of a few stories I’ll be putting up exclusively for paid subscribers every few weeks. Your subscriptions are allowing me to write what’s truly alive for me and not do work my heart’s not in. I’m hugely grateful. This is exactly where I need to be. I’ve just been reading the Parish comments from recent posts and I’m delighted to see a new winter reading list emerging for myself.
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And I was a man alone. So scared that I leapt at the sight of my own shadow, so that I fled at the flap of an owl’s wing, the creak of a rowan’s bough would cause me to dig a burrow like a terrified hare.
The forest knew I was weak and alone. It smelt it.
My every step was paced by sleek grey wolves, long-legged with lolling tongues and eyes without kindness. I would shelter in my little cleft in the rock face, for twenty-two years I sheltered there. No animal was too small to stalk me. But I learnt things in my broken shape, I learnt things. All that was man-known fell away from me, and all that a beast carries in its body I absorbed. As strength grew, I could run without end, crouch on my haunches as invisible as the wild cat, smell danger even in my sleep.
One day I stopped running and stopped to drink at a pool.
I saw into my new nature, it was revealed to me in reflection. That I was furred with hair, tufty, bristled like a terrible boar, lean as bush without leaves, naked as a fish, greyer than a badger, more pathetic than a starving crow in midwinter, and that on my fingers and feet had grown two great, moon-curved claws. I didn’t look like a human, or an animal, or a divinity.
It broke me, this reflection: my stern senility, the profundity of my wildness, the acreage of my loneliness. I wept by the grey pool. Even the animals that constantly tracked me stopped to listen to my lamenting.
That night a terrible storm came, so awful that no creature would prowl abroad, it cracking and snarling and devouring the whole wide world. Trees were gifted the wings of birds as their roots were flung from their encasements of soil, blue waves coiled up over the cliffs and the whole leafy world was sharp with the tang of salt. I can’t tell you if the storm beat me to sleep or that I entered its dominion as a retreat from the awful. But I tell you that I dreamt:
