Sometimes you wait and you don’t know what you are waiting for. You think you came to find a home but it turned out you came to know how to wait, to know the deep time of the Earth, to know the season, your own season, which is not the time of the city.

The little box trees are everywhere, in conical shapes, the size of human beings. They feel like guardians. I seek one out amongst the other trees on the sloping wood. I clamber up the woody hillside and then I sit down on a dry floor.

I realize I am in a waiting place, a strategic moment in my life, between two states. I have no home. I came here to France to find a home but I know I will not find it here. Something in me has walked away from the village, to step out beyond the reach of human life to know this. I wanted to sit with the box trees on the edge of the town but my feet kept walking.

As I sit down by the tree my nervousness goes and I feel at home, even in the rain that has now started to fall more heavily. The tree seems to have taken the coldness of the afternoon away. I think about the box trees (boxwood) in Oxford, carved into the shapes of mythical beasts, griffins and dragons. How when I was a child I had loved its strange musty scent as I explored the geometric hedges in formal gardens, how I had felt at home in their company.

As I sit remembering, something in my body jolts and I jump to attention: there is a man sitting by another box tree further down the slope! For some reason this sight has sent me into a panic and my heart begins beating like a drum. I am not normally afraid of men, it is just that the sight is so incongruous. I felt sure I was alone. Who is this man? Not moving or making a sound, I look at him. He is about 30 yards away with his back turned but I can see his profile. He has a small beard and wiry body. Oh, it’s Cyril! I think to myself. But no, Cyril is in Nice. And I feel sure I would have noticed anyone else coming along the path or as I had climbed the slope.

I wait for a long time for the man to move or make a sound but none comes. I think about whether I should make my presence known in some way. Why would you do that? I think. It’s only a man. But something in me knows that it is not just a man and I am acting in this strange way because my body has registered that something Other is going on, even if my mind hasn’t. It’s then I realize that when I move slightly to the left the man becomes a piece of wood. It’s an optical illusion! Of course. But then my body jerks me back into the place where I can see that it is in fact a man. Only not a man I can meet. He is a man from a different time.

Our bodies know things our minds do not because, like the mountains, they are ancient. They were formed millions of years ago, and they resonate to the wind, to the winter, to the world of the box tree. They are archaic and they love the archaic world because they were built for it. Our feet love to walk the icy path, our ears respond to the sound of the wild pigs, our hands instinctively seek out firewood, our tongues lap mountain water. When we quiet our modern minds, and we listen with our bodies, our archaic bodies that come alive in the wild places, we can touch the mystery of time, the mystery that is held in this Earth.

In the wilderness, where the ancient wind blows through the gold-glinted leaves of the box tree, where the green river roars, where the mountains in their mineral fastness face you, time is held in a different way, in a deep way you cannot ever know in the city or in your safe room at night. If you keep still, are quiet in these wild places, not afraid, let your body instruct you, you can contact the archaic knowledge of this world. You can find it in this place and you can find it in yourself. You can know you are connected to life in ways you cannot speak of and do not need to because in that moment you have become part of life’s measure, its strategic move. You can know that the faun-like man is as you are, sitting in a certain way by a box tree, and you are meeting across the vast spaces of time.

Did you once sit here and see me in the future? I ask. But the man does not reply. We are in this mysterious present moment together. When I know that I stop asking questions. It was time to be there, to know I was not alone, in this hard time, in this hard time for the Earth, and then it was time to go.

I never solved the mystery of how this happened. Mysteries are not there for that. I knew that there had been people before, who had lived in these valleys, and that somehow they were still here, although in a different time, and that they too had held out in the hard times. High in the caves, with their seer eyes, they saw into a future, in which I was sitting under the same tree, where they had once sat. They saw that life would continue.

In the Western world people talk of the faraway places where the archaic life is still preserved, of Africa and Australia, but they rarely refer to their own ancestors, to the people who lived in Europe for thousands of years, who left their mysterious marks on rock and stone. Not the well-documented tribes of Celts or Saxons but other earlier people. These other people did not just live here in France, they were in England too, in Ireland, in deep time.

Sometimes if you sit on hills and moors, or an ancient burial ground, under beech or elder trees, their presences will resonate through time. And sometimes on a lucky day, a slow day, unexpectedly, like me, you might see them. These people are not speaking of justice or of sacrifice or war. They are the keepers of life; they are speaking of stars, and sun, of plant, and river, and tree. They are speaking like me, like an ancient wind that blows through the house, through the box hedge, remembering you.

After Ithaca was published by Greenbank/Sumeru Books and co-produced by The Dark Mountain Project.