As soon as I dumped my bags, I went straight up the hill to the web of paths that worm ways atop the Cotswold escarpment. I did not know my route like the back of my hand. I took a path and felt into it. I searched for signs of my figurative footprint, like an animal following a scent. I attuned to senses in my body, to know whether or not it had previously trod this pathway—or was it that? —through the terrain up to that particular segue at the top.
On a warm-squeezed breeze teeters spring. A wall of memory. Past wrings present. Cells alight, cells vibrate, cells create, cells relate. Before and now are the same word. Sliced time. Time bind. Moments unavailable to the clock. Unavailable, undetonated energy presses a path into the ground. I follow, I follow. I follow. Following pulses. Raw remnants read each other’s scripts. Air folds like opening curtains. Air to skin is breath to bronchial. Zero gravity to planets. Mattering against infinity. Knock-knock where does my foot fall? Where does my foot fall to the thereness, the thereness? Thereness, a form. For a second. The inside of a cube. Six sides forming then pulverized then re-forming then obliterated then re-joining then dismembered then never-ending tending to close and never-ending dissolving. Pulsing. Thereness, a pulse. Pulsing inside the cube. Shimmering. Blinding. Electrocuting. Dissolving. Brain break! Body between was and is. Between was and is. One footfall after another. A pathless path ni vi ni connu. And never not known. Knowing when the curtains open. Knowing where to land. A foot. Sight. Sound. Feel. The feel of a place you’ve been before and want to come back to and knowing the place by the person you were then resonating inside the person you are now is how the day went when I found the way to the place I found before and then today on a pathless path.
Not only was the sun shining and the air full of promise, but blossoms bejewelled sprawling boughs, and the familiarity of the place rearranged my outlook and soul.
The path unfolded as I arrived.
I made it up to the place I’d known before. Success brought a sense of wholeness, like I’d retrieved a lost part.
There was another path I longed to find.
I’d always walked it starting from my previous address. I yearned to reconnect with it.
I saw myself walking the streets out of town towards this particular hill via this particular path as though the walker were in a painting drawn from an angle above—a lone androgynous figure in burgundy, knapsack on back, in full stride, with an aura of both purpose and flânerie. I wanted to inhabit that painting again. But I could not find the path. Where was it? I studied the map again and again. I could not situate it.
Not from my current address. And not from a map
So I walked almost an hour to the address of last year and started sensing the way from there.
I lost my head and followed my body. My eyes became lenses into each sensation. The scent of my spirit having ambled, weaved, crossed, skirted, edged and wandered in these parts still lingered, for I did find my way! Turns out this coveted path up the hill—there really is only one continuous hill in the Cotswolds—was a mere twenty-five minutes from my current place. But finding it the way I had done was beyond fun. It was meaningful.
Once found, I settled
into my body’s memories of being there—ah yes, the inclines were brutally long. And look how that side-path had grown in. And, where were the goats? I remembered the goats.
Time is a-linear. Each familiar shadow, each expansive vista over the valley, each muddy crease collapsed the time between previously and now.
The biological term for the body knowing time and space may have a lot to do with proprioception—internal sensors in our tissues that allow us to gauge where our body is in space. Animals and insects surpass us a thousandfold in way-finding. It’s their superpower.
But, to me, there’s something before the biology. Or, beside it.
It’s the chōra. The third space—not entirely physical, nor entirely an idea. The locus of beginning-ness, betweenness. It has no language, no consciousness, no location. But without it, topos—the map, with all its coordinates—is but a set of forms and lines, and science a set of abstract facts.
I did chōretic way-finding. With the thereness of the territory.
Chōra is a vibe that originates in the gap between self and the path. The rightness I felt when I was on track was my body’s rhythms and pulses vibrating with the place’s rhythms and pulses.
We had intersected before. The body archives history.
Valerie Hickey, Writer 
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