Flat On Your Back!
- Richard Mark Dobson
- 12 hours ago
- 4 min read
I start with an excerpt from Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez.
'Lying flat on your back on Ellesmere Island on rolling tundra without animals, without human trace, you can feel the silence stretching all the way to Asia.
The winter face of a musk ox, its unperturbed eye glistening in a halo of snow-encrusted hair, looks at you over a cataract of time, an image that has endured through all pulsations of ice. You can sit for a long time with the history of man like a stone in your hand.
The stillness, the pure light, encourage it. (Arctic Dreams, 1986 – p.172)'
Lopez’s description of the Arctic tundra calls to mind another landscape entirely: the vast silence of the Karoo.
The thought it evokes is the expanse of it all.
The inner journey can be as vast as the outer, and these wild, desolate corners of the world produce a sensation of elation return to source that is hard to describe.
Lopez evokes a landscape where silence stretches beyond geography and into deep time.
The tundra he describes is not merely empty; it carries the weight of continuity — ice, wind, animal, and human presence layered across centuries.
Far from the Arctic, the Karoo offers a similar sensation.
Lying on the dry earth beneath an immense sky, the land seems to absorb sound and distance simultaneously.
Time loosens its grip. The present moment stretches outward until the boundary between past and present begins to blur.
Lopez strikes within us a connection to the timeless, the primordial.
Looking into the eye of a wild animal — a cheetah, for instance, as I once did in Otjiwarongo in Namibia — something reveals itself in that unperturbed gaze.
Serene. Collected. Unflustered.
There is something about wild animals that offers clues as to how to live and move through the world. It is called instinct. Animals move by instinct. What guides them seems deeper than reasoning.
Snow geese travel enormous migratory routes across continents, guided by forces still only partly understood — sensitivity to the earth’s magnetic field, the position of the sun, remembered landscapes, and inherited patterns written somewhere deep within the body.
There is great mystery in that.
I have a passage scribbled on the page of The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin.
It goes like this:
'The restaurant cat comes and sits on the verandah balcony next to me. She sits and says nothing. Just looking at the world around her, noticing what is important to her. She says nothing, silent and observational.'
Rick Rubin writes:
'We can expand our awareness and narrow it, with our eyes open or closed. We can quiet our inside so we can perceive more on the outside, or quiet the outside so we can notice more of what’s happening inside.” (The Creative Act - A Way of Being 2023- pg. 20. Rick Rubin)'
Perhaps the first step is simply to turn off the phones. Turn off the noise. Lie on your back. Look up.
One has no idea what will be seen until it happens.
What matters is that memory is cultivated.
So much of our past lives disappears into the fog of time.
Try to recall the places where the sky has been watched this way — lying on your back, letting go, simply observing.
The clouds. The night sky. Stargazing.
Muscle memory returns fragments of places where the simple act of lying back made the world feel immense:
Outside Colesberg, the Karoo. Sunset pink, sky darkening to midnight blue. The twinkle of Venus. 2004
Meadowlands, Colne, Lancashire. Summer of ’73
Hung Shing Yeh Beach, Lamma Island. Hong Kong, Sand and sky
The edges of the Gobi Desert, Turfan, China. 1992
Verneukpan, South Africa. 2008
Kalahari, Botswana. 2008
Misty Cliffs, Cape Town. 2006
Stonehenge, England. 1985
Valley of Desolation, Graaff-Reinet. 2003
Tanjung Tokong, Penang. 2020
Livingston Island, Victoria Falls, Zambia. 1998
Guns Camp, Okovango Delta. Botswana. 1999
Wolvedans Reserve. Namibia. 2024
There are many more places where the sky has opened like this. But memory is fragile. Over time the details dissolve, and whole landscapes fade quietly into the fog of years.
Yet sometimes, lying still beneath an open sky, they return again.
One departing final anecdote taken from my travels. It might be construed as been a bit off subject, but I'll leave that for you to decide.
Mahe, Seychelles
"En route between South Africa and Hong Kong, on a stopover in Mahe, Seychelles, circa 1994, I passed a girl on the beach who waved as I walked back to my hotel.
Some hours later, lying on my back in the soft light of my room, watching the ceiling fan turning lazily overhead, I became aware of a presence at the window.
Before I could even sit up, the same girl had climbed through it — and in a flash discarded her clothes and was suddenly sitting beside me on the bed.
She was clearly intent on continuing our earlier encounter, though going about it in a way that left me feeling rather dumbstruck.
This was, it seemed, taking the concept of hitting on someone to an entirely new level.
I think back on it now as one of those great universal mysteries. :-)
How had she known which room I was in?
Her cat-like instinct for catching prey — and the agility required to navigate a half-closed window — was a remarkable display of dexterity.
But I felt compelled to politely ask her to leave.
I had a girlfriend.
Moments like that — brief, puzzling, and entirely unexpected — are reminders of the strange rhythms of life and travel, and the stories that lodge themselves quietly in memory.
Some remain unsolved forever.
Perhaps that is part of their charm.
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