'invisible treasures' that will never be spent

It's the 2nd Saturday of the month today, and for the first time since October 2017 we can't go out with our informal walking-group for a collective stroll ...

... so, to console myself, I've been re-reading sections of Andrew Greig's wonderful 2010 auto-biography (as pictured), and dreaming of once again walking in Assynt just as soon as I can :-)

Here's the closing passage from the book:

"What remains is the descent. The rushing outflow burn, the broken moorland and the ancient bedrock, the darkening sky above Assynt and those bright lochans already passing from sight into memory, are what is left to us. Let it be enough.

Tired, enriched, unburdened for now, I follow the burn over the bealach and off the page, into where whatever has existed once, exists all the time."

And, taken from within the book, here's a Norman MacCaig poem; which I've still never found in any of his other published works?

... 'invisible treasures' that will never be spent - just *truly wonderful*  :-))


RICH DAY

All day we fished
the loch clasped in the throat
of Canisp, that scrawny mountain,
and caught trout and
invisible treasures.

We walked home, ragged millionaires,
our minds jingling, our fingers
rustling the air.

And now, lying on the warm sand,
we see
the rim of the full moon
rest on a formal corrugation of water
at the feet of
a Britannia cloud:
sea and sky, one golden sovereign
that will never be spent.

 ---

Norman MacCaig (1910 – 1996)

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