Punya experiences a magical visitation while attending a ballet performance in Edinburgh.
When I was working at IBM… That always sounds much more glamorous that what it was in reality. We were a bunch of foreigners, some even with university degrees, and a few language-talented Scotsmen and -women in between, sitting at star-shaped and partitioned desks, tied to our computers via a headset. One headpiece over the best ear, mine the left; microphone flipped down over the mouth, and the right ear free to hear the conversations in the open-plan office. French behind me, Italian in front.
Our team was dealing with German and Swiss customers. These were just the small fish, IT consultants who sold tiny quantities of ThinkPads to businesses they were managing. Further back in the corner was the team that dealt with orders of hundreds of items at a time for corporations like Deutsche Bank, Siemens, etc. ThinkPads were robust and had a good reputation (had one myself later on when they became available in shops – loved it!).
We took our lunch breaks in shifts in order to keep covering the lines. There was a canteen, but we foreigners hardly ever got our food from the red-yellow-and-brown food display, even if what we brought in our Tupperware was not much more than a mixed salad or a well-filled sandwich. I must have met Liam in the canteen hall at one of those long tables along the high windows. I suppose he was in the French team, but we spoke English with each other, as I remember.
He must have asked me if I would be interested in coming to a ballet performance in Edinburgh. Wow, yes! He would organize the tickets for the show and the train. Set, done! At the appointed time and place (under the clock) we met at Glasgow Central. It was going to be only an hour’s ride… considering that you travel from the Atlantic to the North Sea!
Liam was openly gay, actually camp, displaying all those unnecessary hand movements we women would never think of doing. Much shorter than me and half my age (all my colleagues’ mothers would have been younger than me; they often marvelled that they had to come to me to get help to install the connection to the printer!) We were the most marvellously mismatched couple you could imagine, but the heart was there between us!
Leaving Waverly Station by the back entrance we walked up, along the stretch of lawn on the Mound, to reach a black Gothic college building, whose general assembly hall would, I suppose, have been used during the Edinburgh Festival as a venue. (The building had housed the Scottish Parliament before Holyrood was built.)
We queued in the courtyard to collect our reserved tickets from a tiny box that served as a temporary ticket office. We were going to watch the ballet Swan Lake – music by Tchaikovsky and choreography by Matthew Bourne. His interpretation had created a big hoo-ha in the mid 90’s, because the swans, which are normally represented by ballerinas, are male dancers.
Not far from where we were standing and waiting, below in the Princes Street Gardens, another event had happened years earlier, according to a book I had read. I could do due research and try to find the book*, but I am happy that for me it all stays a bit in the realm of the mysterious… The writer was one of the founders of Findhorn. And for some reason he was in the capital, and was walking along the path in the garden that runs parallel to the street.
(Princes Street, Edinburgh’s main shopping street, never fitted into my concept of ‘main street,’ as it only exists on the north side. On the south side it is flanked first by the Balmoral Hotel, the railway station, the Scott Monument, the National Gallery; and then by a long stretch of garden, the Princes Street Gardens, that reach high up to the cliffs at the feet of the monumental castle. Despite the noise of the traffic on Princes Street, with buses and taxis, and nowadays the trams – the garden, with its benches, music stands and walks here and there, can give a welcome moment of respite.)
So this man from Findhorn is walking in the park, for sure hearing some of the traffic noise on the main street – and suddenly… a presence overwhelms him. Maybe 30 feet high, dark, enveloping him! He knows immediately that it is Pan, the God of Nature, and remains in awe and gratitude for this apparition.
Isn’t it interesting that he experienced this presence not in the wild landscapes in the north of Scotland, somewhere near Findhorn, but here in the big city? While waiting in the queue, of course, I was not thinking of him, although the black walls of the old building could have brought me into a mood to recall old memories.
During the ballet I was absorbed in the movements of the dancers, the music, the story (more or less, as it is very complicated), the unusual view of a flock of male swans, naked torsoes and fluffy, feathery costumes. Having Liam at my side, who in the break would ostentatously refresh his lip gloss (with the help of a flip-up pocket mirror), I silently wondered how he was experiencing the performance.
During the scene where the young man falls in love with the swan, I was wondering, This is more than a love affair between a man and another man, this is falling in love with the Power of Nature! At that moment I felt a big presence on my right-hand side, slowly moving towards the centre of the hall. It was as high as the ceiling. A dark presence. Raw Nature. As a musician I would describe it with a pad of low chords, vibrating. I was not afraid, but I thought that maybe someone in the audience would get up and run to the exit, out of fear; but nobody stirred. Everybody was unaware of what I was experiencing.
I remained, enjoying the show and the unexpected presence.
Thank you, Pan, for showing yourself, in such an artistic way also!
I do not remember if I mentioned anything to Liam on the ride back home. I might have, because he could have understood, maybe. Thank you, Liam, for your presence and for taking me to the show.
Images credit to Sadler’s Wells
* (30.9.2023) S D Anugyan, who passed his formative years at Findhorn, found the book for me. It must have been ‘The Magic of Findhorn’, written by Paul Hawken who for this book had interviewed Roc, short for Robert Ogilvie Crombie, who told him the story of Pan. Or was it maybe in the book, ‘The Findhorn Garden’ or in ‘The Gentleman and the Faun: Encounters with Pan and the Elemental Kingdom’ authored by Crombie himself?
Comments are closed.