[Interlude] The Hare

Photo by Juho Luomala on Unsplash

When I get out of bed, the first thing I do is force myself out for a walk.

It’s often the last thing that I want. But I’m learning that it’s non-negotiable. Something my brain and my body need to keep an even keel.

I walk a small loop, the same every day: up the hill and across the field, along a gravel road until I reach a high point, overlooking the valley below. It brings me back into the rhythm of the living world. Dislodges me from the chaos of my own mind.

This last week, it’s been a silent and colourless start to each day—my part of North Wales pinned under a grey swirl of anticyclonic gloom. The air cold and stagnant, without a breath of wind. Everything hanging on that tipping point between autumn’s honeyed light and ruthless winter cold. But this morning, things were finally shifting. The grey lid of cloud breaking apart, caught by the rising sun and enamelled to mother of pearl.

I walked up to that same spot, leaning on the gate between curls of barbed wire. The town below all red brick poking through grey fog. Everything beyond swallowed by colourless cloud.

My ritual at that gate is like a touchstone. I close my eyes and think, I can feel the ground under my feet. The air is cold. A robin is singing in the hawthorn tree just over there. The cars pouring along the road at the bottom of the valley are a wash of white noise. I am safe.

If I do that for long enough, eventually the screaming fire alarm inside my head starts to quiet. Then I can call in the awen—a chant with its roots in Welsh paganism, summoning the flowing spirit of change and inspiration.

For me, it’s part prayer and part hope. A wish to become something else than I am. Finally heal from the scabs and the scars that have suffocated me for so many long years.

I’ve sung the awen a hundred times before. But today was different.

Something extraordinary happened.

The moment I finished the call, a hare skidded to a halt on the gravel, not five feet away from where I was standing. I didn’t even know there were hares living here. In the fifteen years I’ve walked in these hills, I’ve never seen one before. And never been so close in my life.

And yet, there they were: a mad prophet of the wilds, staring at me with one frenzied orange eye.

In Welsh mythology, when Taliesin drank the awen from Ceridwen’s cauldron of death and bardic rebirth, he immediately transforms into a host of different animals. A fish. A bird. A hare.

It was as though my calling the awen had summoned him there. A spirit of rebirth and transformation, appearing in the very moment I was calling out for change.

Or perhaps it was nothing more than a hare. A random coincidence for my brain to make meaning from. Like a face I’d glimpsed in the waves.

But the exhilaration I felt was, and is, viscerally real.

I stared at the hare, and they stared back with their wild magic eye until I looked away. Tried to make myself as small as possible—watching from the edge of my vision as they hesitated, edged past me, and carried on up the track.

A few seconds later, they were gone.

And I was left behind. The grey of the world slowly breaking apart in the sunrise. Suddenly so desperately alive.