I recently watched ‘The Salt Path’, Marianne Elliot’s film based on the memoir written by Raynor Winn. The book has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons, but the controversy surrounding the story of the film does not take away from the many human issues which are so powerfully explored.
Having lost their farm, Winn and her husband Moth decide to walk the South West coastal path from Somerset to Dorset. The salt of the film’s title becomes a metaphor for the couples’ multiple losses and problems that they struggle with along the way.
One of the best bits of the film for me was the encounter with two random walkers on the route, one of whom urges the couple to taste the fruit they have freshly picked from brambles alongside the path. One of the walkers in the vignette is insistent they try them, saying: ‘A perfect, lightly salted blackberry! They are flavoured! Preserved! They are a gift! They take time!’
The exuberance and passion of the walker is irresistible – and I have been longing to taste a salted blackberry since! The salted fruit are a metaphor for so much that is represented in the film: the visceral saltiness of the tough experience, the salt of the sea-spray and of their cracked skin that becomes weathered over time.
Salt is such an interesting commodity. A few years ago I visited Cheshire, a county whose history is full of salt. Rock salt was laid down in that part of England millions of years ago, leaving salt marshes that the Romans used and highly prized for its ability to preserve foods by drawing out moisture. They even paid their soldiers a ‘salary’ – a word that derives from salt.
I love the idea that the salted blackberries act as a metaphor for the couples’ resilience to keep going on their pilgrimage. Their journey is really tough – the sting of salt represents this hardship as well as the sting of dry humour that also helps them survive.
Resilience is in itself a form of preservative. To physicists, ‘resilience’ means a material’s ability to spring back to its original form after being stressed. Maybe that is part of what salt does: it allows us to keep going, like the couple on the long walk, becoming a kind of medicine and weathered protection on the couples’ skin.
After trauma, resilience can mean developing new capacities, growing through adversity. As I write in my book 20 Ways to Break Free from Trauma:
‘Our tears and what causes them matter. Trauma can gives us the gift of perspective – teaching us what is most important in the gift of life itself..being determined to notice where goodness is found for us and others.’ (p.265)
Salt doesn’t always work alone: it enhances other flavours – like the ever-popular salted caramel ice cream. In the same way, the smarts of life can sting but they can draw out other nuances, sharpening our attention or bringing a heightened awareness that helps us feel super alive – like a biting wind, as sharp as the sting of a whetted knife.
Perhaps in this state of awareness, Raynor Winn and her husband are more open to feel the joy of surprise gifts, the salty-sweet wonder that is offered to them. Without others to point them out, they would have have walked past unaware. If they hadn’t stretched their hands out to receive, they would never have known. The unknown walker’s last words to them as they retreat up the path is ‘They are a gift! They are a gift! They take time!’