Relief Map Of the Soul

I wake up to the sound of a fast-moving stream as my mind opens up like a folded map. I even out the creases. I wipe the surface. I explore the relationship between gradient and land. Which way, I wonder, will the day go? The artist is downstairs but reappears with a cup of tea. (I am still stirring when she hands me the cup.) I hear the children. They are coming on a long walk with their maternal grandparents and us. We lace up our boots. At the beginning we pass a real couple with a real map. (Ours remains in our heads: less cumbersome but not as reliable.) Slowly we continue climbing, the straits behind us growing in scale as fast as the panorama of hills and mountains ahead. Clean air meanwhile pumps into the five-year-old's lungs. Exhilaration courses through the eight-year-old's veins. The artist is so blissed out she doesn't even want to discuss her work. The grandparents show the way. I peer into the distance, though much of what is happening is within. Then I realise that what I am looking at is like the map we did not bring. Tiny paths lead rather than meander. Boundaries are marked by stone walls. Sheep move sheepishly from tuft of grass to shard of branch, cow-pats sit slap-happily on the ground, and small streams trickle into larger ones. The couple with the map are in front again. They know where they are going. Two mountain ponies move gently to our left. The gorse is thick and unchallenged, until a mile or so away a fire sends smoke from some into the soft blue sky. Suddenly we are under these giant pylons, their arms outstretched and power intact, running the exact same route a conquering people ran more than two thousand years ago. Pylons. Ancient road. Smoke. Panorama. No map. We reach a crossroads where two people are fixing their mountain bikes and a third, a man, peers at his neat selection of maps. (Strange: he does not look like a man who has lost his way.) We smile and pass. The light on the land is like sunlight on a large map. I stare at the artist's eyes. They are very blue. They are like maps, too. Only I do not know where they are leading. I am as much her map as she is mine and nobody can really know where their map takes them. We hug the side of the final summit. The man with the map has followed us. We point him one way and hope it is correct and make our own way down to where our walk began. Later, we watch a new version of a film of our wedding nearly ten years ago. I am amazed not so much by the footage as by the continued unity. This is no mean feat when you consider there have been times when not only has our map been taken from us but it has been torn to shreds and scattered all over the mountain. I don't know. Maybe it is an art. Maybe there is an art to marriage. (Just as there is an art to being married to an artist.) All I know is that if a map tells you everything, it doesn't tell you how to refold it.