LABOUR OF LOVE
Matt Hopwood walked 500 miles across Scotland exploring identity and community through the love stories of strangers
Matt Hopwood travels around Scotland to hear people’s love stories
In Pollok Park, Glasgow, the rain fell steadily. I was 170 miles along the path on my 500-mile walking journey through Scotland; hearing, sharing and exploring the love stories of the people I met along the way. The air was cool and damp and we walked gently side-by-side along footpaths, through murmuring trees. We spoke and you shared your story openly and without fear. Before today we had talked only in passing. I listened quietly, hands deep in my pockets.
Back in 2011, after experiencing the truest love of my young life, I had come to an emotional watershed. I wanted to release and express something of who I was and how I felt, perhaps for the first time in my adult life. I needed to relate, I longed to connect.
This precipitated numerous conversations with people who expressed the same deep need to be heard. Each story I listened to was a love story of sorts, whether it expressed joy, ecstasy, loss or pain. Each tale explored the human desire to connect, to be loved, to be held, to be needed, to belong, to have a home.
These early conversations were the spark that ignited a project which eventually evolved into A Human Love Story. I decided to take these conversations on the road, to walk simply through the land, to meet people where I found them, to share my story and give people a space to be heard deeply and share their stories too.
Since 2012, this journey has taken me across thousands of miles of the UK, and I have had the pleasure and honour of sharing stories with hundreds of people. Each story I have heard is beautiful, poignant, valuable and powerful as a tool for connection.
During my first walk, I started to record people as they expressed their thoughts and feelings. I wanted to be able to share these stories with others around the world. Today, through the online audio collection, the stories have been heard in more than 50 countries and in every continent. And so the sharing grows, the roots deepen, and the conversation expands.
Walking and the journey have become an integral part of the process. Through walking, I arrive at a place as a stranger, open to an encounter, free to meet people where they are. It allows me the opportunity
to explore local expressions of communal love too. During these journeys I present individuals and communities with the opportunity to extend hospitality, to offer me food or a place to rest.
I experience the world of the stranger and the guest. How do we respond to strangers in our community, at our front door? What is the importance of a smile, a welcome? Through the years, the journeys have grown. From solo walks of discovery, to more open and inclusive journeying where anyone can come along, talk, and walk the path with me. My partner and dog are regular wanderers and sharers in these adventures now.
My journey brought me to Scotland where I travelled 500 miles in the spring of 2017. The walk began in Lindisfarne, just south of the border between England and Scotland, and made its way north and then west towards the Atlantic and the islands of the Outer Hebrides, eventually finishing at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis.
I was privileged to hear many powerful stories from local people. I met with refugees in Edinburgh seeking a home, couples in Glasgow, a Scottish gent on the top of a mountain, lovers on a ferry to the islands, a mother and son’s reunion, a restless local on the doorstep. I shared stories with people who felt lost, who were searching for connection. I heard others in the throes of rapturous romantic love.
Some described their experiences of love as a sense of ‘communion’, a feeling that they were ‘home’. Sometimes this notion of communion extended beyond the local and physical and incorporated a wider sense of belonging and nationhood.
One young lady suggested her experience of love took shape within a deeper, more spiritual context. The word she used was ‘ essence’, a feeling of connection to a wider humanity, to the cosmos, to the Earth as mother. Each story became a testimony: an assertion of a person’s existence, their need to be heard and express who they are, what they are struggling with and how they feel.
This brings me back to Pollok Park, the rain and the unfolding of a catastrophic and glorious love that was consuming my new friend. I had met him before in a bar. For a brief moment we had spoken and he had said he had a story to share. So we arranged to meet. His story spoke of the struggles of a young man coming to terms with being a father, of having this permanent ‘first forever thing’ in his life. He hadn’t known he was going to be a father, he wasn’t in a relationship with the child’s mother.
As he said in his own words: ‘ Since her arrival, I have had to negotiate a present and
a future with someone who, in a sense, I don’t want in my life. And of course it’s fine not to want to be something, of course it’s fine not to know how to do something, it’s natural. I’m just trying to be honest with myself. But what I haven’t been able to do is be honest with others. I’ve not been able to stand up and say, ‘I’m not her husband’ or ‘I’m not her boyfriend’ and ‘I’m not in love with her’ and ‘I’m not able to commit to this’ and ‘I’m not able to cope with this’. To say that out loud is very, very difficult.’
Interestingly, this story from Glasgow was representative of a surprising trend I experienced throughout my journey. During those months in Scotland, I found men were more willing to share, to go to the depths of their emotions, than their female counterparts. Perhaps they had such little opportunity to be heard that they really embraced the moment. Many of the women on the other hand, seemed to be holding their emotions in check.
A story I heard from many folk along the way was their inability to express their love to others, to be able to verbalise it. Their love stories held a sadness, a sense of something unresolved. Some of these stories were generational – women unable to tell their fathers and mothers they love them.
As I came to the islands, many love stories turned to thoughts of belonging, of being part of a place – families returning to the islands because they felt drawn there. Folk expressed the idea of the islands as ‘home’. More than a separate entity, it was something that abided within and around them. Their love was expressed in multi-faceted relationships between people, place and spirit.
In providing a listening space, I very gently began to hear people and recognise them. These conversations allowed people to see beyond the everyday and glimpse the human heart pounding beneath. The subtle narrative of Scotland, this beautiful land, became very real. Not the mythical stories of superhuman Scots, but the profound everyday stories of Scottish folk; the powerful stories of precious people living their lives today.
‘I shared
stories with people who felt lost, who were searching for connection’