This is the track to Lighthouse A4272
In nautical terms a beacon sending beams of light out over the ocean, is letting the world know where it is. A lighthouse is a fixed point of recognition - a known place - pin-pointable on a map, which is immediately identifiable by the rhythmed signal of its light.
I have a fascination for lighthouses, beacons, nautical marks and buoys. Something about the certainty of knowing you can rely on them to know precisely where you are when at sea, and which passage is safe to take communicates itself to me as blind reassurance. So I made a jaunt to visit the Mull of Kintyre lighthouse - just to salute its fortitude, touch its massive curved side and to strain upwards from its base to admire its bearing. I did all these things. I even took a thumbnail cutting from a deep purple, flowering hebe which was bold enough in the lighthouse garden to resist all the Irish Sea could throw at it, and was blithely flowering. That tiny cutting now grows in my garden and I admire its fortitude too.
So...this affection - preoccupation even, of mine with the certainty of position - of safe passage - what could it be all about? I drew a blank on this one. I simply had no idea as to what forces were working on me except to be able to state with certainty that I was a hesitant person when it came to stating with conviction, my own direction. This dilemma must have been on my mind while I walked down the steep, blustery slope to the lighthouse. That lighthouse - so fixed! suddenly transfixed me. It occurred to me all at once that the position of the lighthouse is always a known one because it is on no journey...it is stock still. The question as to where I am, metaphysically speaking, is an altogether separate thing.
This apparently blazingly obvious realisation came suddenly to me as I was walking down the steep hill towards the lighthouse A4272 at the south end of the Mull of Kintyre. For reasons unknown to me at that time, this realisation freed up a longing in me. I was halted on the track leading down to the lighthouse, as though the immediate urge to continue had vanished. Sands settled differently inside me and I felt a silent temptation to weep but I did not succumb. It might seem unfounded. Some guard - ever on duty - at the access to my personal freedoms appeared to melt away. Suddenly...it seemed....”it might be safe to sail.”
The mistaken belief that “where it’s at” is always somewhere else, was the very thing which had always blocked me from completely inhabiting my own boat in my own harbour. I could not acquire the steadfast knowledge that I am in exactly the right place at the right time to strike out, to forge ahead and guide myself.
For me, the sudden thought that “it might be safe to sail...” gave rise to the handing over of the tiller to my own inner guide. It grew into the flowering of my commitment to myself and of an acknowledgement of the wealth of wisdom and experience hoisted about my person which would seize my unsettledness at any one time, and curb it before it rocked my boat. But most importantly of all...it gave rise to my active motivation - the setting of my sails.
There was a barrier across the track down to the lighthouse. I walked down and down the zig zag track. On the way down to the lighthouse, that fixed point on the earth - recognisable from all other beacons as flashing twice, white, every twenty seconds ......and suddenly I knew where I was. I wrote a song about it. Alexander Barclay and I made a film there a few months later. It’s called The Soothing of The Soul.
