The dune sand is hot and silky and squeaks under my boots as I slide down its side. The late May sun is high and fierce and blazes back at me as if every surface were a mirror. My skin tingles and burns, my hair is damp under my hat. I’ve been walking for miles now and I need a rest. There’s a tree down there on the edge of a dune slack, big and squat and in full leaf; an oak. I suppose I must have been in the sun too long, because I feel the tree turn its attention on me as I approach, and the distance between us evaporates.

It’s cool and quiet under the green shade of the oak’s branches. I hadn’t registered how loud the voices of the sun are out there, but I notice it now. In here, all is drift and doze, and the leaves are glistening with freshness, still sweet and young, the tannins still undeveloped. The ground is covered with last year’s shedding; crispy umbers and ochres, pale golds. I place a hand on the gnarly bark of the trunk in greeting, as I wipe the sweat from my brow. The oak is a calm presence, so deeply rooted it must fly through the stars at night without any fear at all. How old is it? How many summers of stretching itself into the light and drinking from the sands? How many winters of turning inward to sleep and dream under frost and rain? What’s the dreamlife of an oak like in those long nights?

I sit and take a few big gulps of tepid water from my flask. I’ll jump in the sea later, when I get there; but for now, I need a rest. The oak’s trunk is not uncomfortable behind me, and I let myself settle into listening to nothing. A skylark dizzies itself, running up a flag of song, and I see a skinny street kid shinning up a fakir’s rope into the sky, only to fall softly to the ground again in torn up bits and pieces as light as feathers, and I’m asleep…

…and in a dream, but who is dreaming whom? Something is massaging my shoulders with a grip ogrishly strong, and I know I can’t pull away from it. A tree among trees is singled out: a writhing hydra-like oak. I stare, amazed, and a thousand miles collapses into a magnified close-up. I focus on the bark. Such oakiness; such oak of all oaks. The colours ripple and deepen and shine; the cracks and crevasses in the complicated fibres are richly dark with velvet shadow. And how can there be so many various shades of humble brown? So complex and articulate they are almost a full spectrum of brilliance, turning themselves outward into pure surface. Then, suddenly, the sun shatters every lens in me under its wheel, and I blink and grimace in the eruption of light, and the mind of the oak is stretching and pulsing under gravid reptilian skin, dragonish skin, and a face of liquid bark is pressing towards mine...

What just happened? I struggle to wake and I do wake for a moment, long enough to register the strong hands on my shoulders pulling me hard back down into sleep, but then with a jolt I am out.

And awake. The oak seems disappointed. Don’t I want to play? It’s voice an androgynous dragonish croon in the fading of the dream. A warm breeze shivers through the leaves. I collect my hat from where it has tumbled into the grass and raise it to the tree in an ironic salute. All the answer I can think to give. Time to get to the beach.

“The ancient Poets,” William Blake declared, “animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.”

Enlarged & numerous senses. What might that mean? I’ve been intrigued by this phrase since I first read it as a semi-homeless teenager many years ago, sheltering from the rain in a ruined farmhouse, burning my fingers on the last few drags of a spliff, as I turned the pages of ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’. Does Blake mean to suggest that consciousness is not constant across time and space, across peoples and languages? Does a culture radically different to our own in language and belief encounter a radically different reality? The implications of this are impressive.

And what then might be the dreamlife of an oak tree? Or that of a skylark? Or of the ghost of a street kid, standing among tossed coins? What about a wave, the energy of which crosses an ocean to break and dance in lit fragments of opal, jasper and jade on the black rocks of a Welsh beach in the May sun? What is truly real among the immense multitudes of perspectives in such a more-than-human-world? What is a person?

Inert, lifeless objects are things spoken about, but persons can answer back. Persons can engage and interact with others. They are relational, social, cultural, and have agency. Entering my dream, if dream it was, the oak tree became an actor in a participatory world. Does that make it a person? Is this how trees and rivers, springs and mountains have announced themselves as persons throughout history, beings with their own interiority, rich with feeling and desire? Who knows how long ago and out of what strange depths of life such people first began to find themselves reflected in human minds?

There’s no one on the beach here as usual. That hike across the miles of dunes can be unforgiving in this heat. The bay is a vast amphitheatre, and the masked actors are everywhere chanting their holy lines, their wild and vivid plainsong, into the echoing light. I kick off my boots, pull my shirt over my head, and make for the sea. The waves are lifting and seething and crashing into the hissing shingle, and I suppress a curse, striding into the shock of the cold. Wave after wave is rising ahead of me as I wade out, all far bigger than I expected, and inside each wave a surge of play and mischief, threat and laughter, arriving here from how far away? But now this is the one with my name on its white lips, rising, rising high above me, and in the long moment before it breaks, I notice it shapes a perfectly bright and sinuous question mark against the blue sky. Then I shut my eyes and hold my breath and dive.

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***

Kristian Evans is a Welsh poet and editor, and co-founder of ‘Modron Magazine: writing on nature and the ecological crisis.’ His most recent book is ‘Duneland’ available from Seren Books.

In the beginning I was a runaway who needed only to be somewhere else, far away from everything, yet another delinquent, neurodivergent problem-child nobody could solve, a truant, haunted and hunted. And these miles and miles of dunes were my hideout, my sanctuary. Out here, I discovered, I could breathe; I could breathe and I could be unseen.

In those days there weren’t many people seeking leisure here, joggers and walkers and picture takers, so I could perfect the art of being invisible, being nobody in a place that was itself hardly known, a nowhere of nothing but sand drifting mindlessly through the centuries, covering up everything, a refuge and haven for the animal fugitives hanging on in the margins of things.

Here among the sands, I was subject only to the scrutiny of the wind, feeling out its way by whispering to itself and tasting the earth; or now and then the strange sleek vixen, her gold eyes watching from a distance, puzzling over the lost boy wandering the wrong way deeper into the night.

And how many nights did I wander here? I’ve lost count. Sometimes three or four nights in a row, month after month, in all seasons. I made myself beds of sand and smoke under barricades of buckthorn; or scrambled among willow-tangle, wrapped in my grandfather’s old gabardine, hiding myself like a ghost under birches, shivering in the unquiet peace of the dark, half awake, half dreaming.

Those nights are unforgettable, scrimshawed into my bones. Every time I nodded off the cold would wake me. I could hear the world slowly creak and groan and hum as it turned under the stars, muttering to itself. I would nod and shiver and wake and nod and shiver and wake until at last the day began to break, making the gulls scream in hunger and the dune slacks throw on their shawls of silver mist.

Some mornings here in the crisp dawn-light, my boots crunching icy sand or slipping on spring dew, I saw the whole duneland as a sort of abandoned theatre, a fabricated set, hidden from the human world. And all the birds, my only companions – the oystercatchers and sanderlings, the skylarks and warblers – were marionettes jerked this way and that on strings that fell from the stars. I watched them closely as if their play held a secret. Wondered at my part.

Other mornings I heard music, sudden splashes of melody in the sighing of the waves, I would startle and turn to catch the notes as they escaped. I learned to listen closely, carefully, listening and lusting as if there might always be more and deeper world to be found in a moment’s turn – if I could just pay attention long enough to forget how hungry I was. I was often surprised by thoughts that seemed to come from outside of me, radio signals from outer space, lines of poetry, and I began to scribble them indecipherably in wet notebooks, the ink blushing with an apology as it concealed everything.

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Yes, I’ve lost count of the nights and days I wandered here, cold and alone and safe. I came as often as I could. I stopped going to school. I was hopelessly obsessed, possessed even, possessed by the djinn of the dunes. What she’d offered me I don’t know, but I’d accepted it without hesitation. The place called to me, stay for more, it seemed to say, stay for longer, like an addiction deepening it’s hold. Stay forever. And nobody ever found me out; no parent or teacher could follow me there.

And so, the years went by, and I pursued my affair as best I could, couch-surfing, renting rooms, surviving on temporary dead-end jobs, often quitting in summer so my obsession wouldn’t be disrupted. I saved and bought decent boots, binoculars, a rucksack – even, eventually, a tent.

Then one day, a stroke of luck. I heard that an old semi-derelict cottage here had come up for rent, part of an abandoned dairy farm – a few damp rooms with a hearth among a straggling tumble of medieval walls, broken fences and roofless barns. I jumped at the chance and moved in. A dream come true. A real life. And a house in the dunes.

I settled down to a life of secluded but manageable rural poverty and casual labouring on farms here and there. I marvelled at the sand pouring through my fingers as if it were pure gold. I began to see the dunes as a sort of laboratory, an alchemist’s laboratory, a temple without walls, claiming and altering my imagination as I submitted myself daily to the careful patient observation of the changing seasons and moods of the place. I charted the relation of the positions of the stars to the comings and goings of weather systems, dreams, migratory birds, discovering and studying strange new languages as I went. I became an expert in the secret lives of the foxes that coupled shrieking in the garden in the night, befriended a pair of crows who would take bread almost from my hand. It was all a slow, steady transformation of the prima materia in the cold furnace of the sand. And very often it felt like I wasn’t the one controlling the process. I was unlearning everything I’d been taught, getting free of my training and socialisation, rewilding myself, becoming alert for every miracle, and writing them down when they happened.

Even so, I never dared allow myself to feel at home. Or so I thought. People like me can never own a house, or a piece of land. We can always be moved on at the whim of a landlord. And after all, what does home mean anyway? What does belonging mean? Can any of us humans really belong anywhere, haunted by thoughts and words and doubts and dreams as we are, never quite able to overcome the sense of separation from the world, a separation that language has thrown around us, like a hedge of thorns, keeping us always at a remove from the things we seek to own or describe or love. Birds are woven into their world like threads in a tapestry, they move with quicksilver mindless grace and alertness, perfectly attuned to everything else, while we humans stumble and doubt, falter and wonder and grieve and disappear in a cloud of inadequate words. Maybe when we believe ourselves to be home, we are in fact lost. And when we find ourselves lost, we are home.

And yes, one day, sure enough, the eviction notice came, a phone call, followed by an official letter, followed by a bleak frantic search for somewhere else, anywhere else, but there was nowhere – we were at the tail-end of the covid crisis, and nobody was moving and so, quite quickly, the court order came and that was that.

But only a fool would seek to make a home in a sand dune. So, let’s put that fool back in the pack and draw another card. The lizard of cups with vetch-seed eyes. The silver bear turning in the night sky over Margam mountain. The tolling bell in the buried city. The Beaker child’s bones in the box under the hearth. “I is another.”

One morning I saw a woman at the gate. She seemed to have stepped out of the lake, out of a fairy story, and the wind lifted her cloak and her long golden hair, and just for a second, lifted her skirt also, and I glimpsed her thighs all scratched with blackthorn ink. She smiled without shame and dropped her suitcase on the driveway. I noticed her fingers were stained with dewberry juice and her brooch was a burnet rose. Well, she said, looking me up and down, what are you waiting for?

What will we make of a man of sand? Drifting between the seen and the unseen, like a word told in the clouds. Because sand is the perfect disguise, polishing itself to a mirror, or, like a veil over a face, concealing what it reveals, and revealing what it conceals. Blurring the lines we believed protected the real from the imagined. Measuring the moment, but not ever noticing the moment itself, giving surface to our persistence – like a film of dust on the meniscus of a drop of dew. How do we trick the devil? We make him count every grain of sand in every dune of course, and by the time he is done, you and me, we’ll be long gone. Far away and safe as houses. Because we don’t belong to a place by possessing it. We belong to a place by allowing it to possess us. And the face that just saw you in the mirror was never really there at all.

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Kristian Evans is a Welsh poet and editor, co-founding editor of Modron Magazine, and author of a number of publications, most recently ‘Duneland,’ (Seren Books, 2026). His work blends memoir with ecological philosophy, Welsh history and culture, and explores the natural world from a working class, neurodivergent perspective. He is drawn to edgelands and liminality, and his work often reassess forgotten, neglected and esoteric ideas and perspectives.

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