Beware of Rituals
Lucy Nokes
The plan was to organise our own, two-person retreat weekend at my place. No ordinary girly weekend for us; we were going to “Contemplate Existence” with the aid of Air, Water, Fire and Earth.
Things started chaotically when Jennifer got stuck in the hairdressers in Wales – she was four hours late and by the time she arrived I was onto the second bottle of wine. No matter. That night we did ‘Fire’ (by my fire) and we felt like we were getting into the zone.
The following morning, we completed our ‘Air’ ritual at 11.00am, followed by lunch with wine, and a showing of Man on Wire. In the late afternoon we set off to do ‘Water’ which we intended to carry out by following Meanwood Beck from my front door to the Ring Road and back.
Arriving at the point where the beck runs past the old cricket pitch, I gazed down into the culvert just in case there might be kingfishers, I saw them once at this point, scooting turquoise, gone before you could blink. I leaned over with my phone to take a photo of the stream. A thought floated up: ‘Wouldn’t it be awful if…?’ A split second later my phone was falling; a heartbeat further and it lay, in the stream, a long way down.
A voice was saying, ‘Ha! Do a water ritual, would you?’
Another voice was saying, ‘About 150 contact numbers and no back-up’.
My body, meanwhile, was clambering over the fence (the safety fence) and preparing to drop.
I was kind of wishing that I had a steady job and sick leave and that my back wasn’t so dodgy and all sorts of things like that, but, I dropped, straight into the water, spine intact, fished out the phone, and discovered that I was stuck. Very stuck. The wall really was sheer, and I could see no footholds at all. It took me about twenty minutes to get out again, scaling up via a not very friendly tree stump, landing behind yet another wall, and scrambling down another eight feet to get back to the path. Jennifer hugged me, the small group of interested passers-by dispersed and we proceeded to follow the beck to the Ring Road and back, whilst marvelling – I have never, ever dropped a phone before, and I had to do it during our ‘Water’ ritual, straight into Meanwood Beck.
We did ‘Earth’ the next day, back in the park, followed by Sunday lunch out. I found an old phone and the SIM card worked immediately, all of my contacts restored. I kept meaning to put the wet phone into salt, which apparently is what you do on these occasions, but didn’t get round to it. However, three days later I examined the phone and all was good – even my photos were intact. I had not lost a thing, but I discovered a new respect for calling upon Air, Earth, Fire and Water where Meanwood Beck is concerned. That stream is bigger, older and stronger than I or any of us. For years now it has been the background tempo of my life.
I backed up my contact list. You live and learn.
