A wander in hinterland - from outside-in to inside-out
Bell Selkie Lovelock
13th March 2023
Welcome to a cycle of writings that are a wander in the hinterland between inner led change and outer change as experienced by me over the last 25 years, as a social change activist in a housing co-op in Cymru (named by the English as Wales). A hinterland is “beyond what is visible or known” and yet, the gateway to this particular part of it is located on a 40 acre holding in a very real place in Cymru.
You are invited to find yourself a good place to sit… maybe your favourite chair with a cuppa to hand, or maybe go to a place where birds and sky can see you, a place outside that feels like home? You could even read it out loud to that place…
Whatever attention you can give to this, I encourage spaciousness – don’t be a “hit and run” reader. Maybe begin with a few belly breaths and stop. Maybe linger a while as you read and notice how emotions move in you, what images come or what memories/ dreams are evoked and also how your body responds in the moment as you imbibe this offering. Let yourself merge with these words and see where that leads.
Staying Close In- Imbolc
Oh it’s cold, it’s cold, it’s cold... and I’m procrastinating by doing little tasks that keep me in the warm house rather than plunging into the easterly chill outside. I’m cocooned though, layered up with wool, down jacket and waterproofs as if to trick my sleepy, slow body into believing I am still indoors. As soon as I’m outside my cheeks smart and fingers numb and the illusion disappears like mist in sunlight. In the garden I wait to hear which birds are hungrily orbiting the feeders from the safety of the hedgerow. The soft “hugh hugh” of bullfinch and the louder tattle of great tits answers my question and I greet them, glad they are here (and hoping I won’t later find an explosion of their feathers on the hall floor that would mean an unfortunate meeting with cats who patrol the garden.)
As I walk the path toward the wild land, I sense that part of my resistance comes with letting go – this is the last in the cycle of writings about my 25 years rewilding with a place. So grateful for you who’ve read these musings that began at Oestre ‘23, and for the support from Starter Culture that helped me carve out my time to present this wandering way in written and photographic form. I hope they have been of service to you, not as a distraction but as an ancient/new story of how we humans can be. Previously I’ve shared some of the revelations that myself and the community we created stumbled upon as we were confronted with our own untended wounds from power-over culture, and in doing so, were offered opportunity after opportunity to undo life-limiting beliefs and habitual perceptions of ourselves as humans and of the other-than-human world.
I stop at the wooden gate threshold where the trees begin, after passing through the cropped green desert of our neighbour’s cow land. Breathing icy air, I drop into this moment with this place (place meaning both beyond my body and what is within - inseparable manifestations of Earth). I imagine my psyche as an inner village with a mix of of noble, potent and wise characters that meet the world not only through my thinking mind but through senses, emotions and deep imagination. There are also plenty of less wholesome characters in my village that need holding well, or else they will spill over into trouble making. I often drop in to hear who’s knocking around and today I feel to listen in as I begin my wander , because wrens are chiding me from the bramble tangle. Those diminutive ones who live low to the ground seem to remind me to stay close in and pay attention to what is overlooked.
I notice that, as well as the avoidant part of me that just wants to sit and read my book by the fire (forever!), there’s the ever-loyal critic that is keen to prevent me from attempting anything edgy (such as being visible through writing). She has red pen in hand before I’ve even begun to listen in to what I am to write about. I greet them, glad for the ways they’ve helped me survive when I was younger (“stay small and safe” they warn!) and glad also that I now know how to function without their “help” (most of the time!).
It's a stark day at a stark time of year. Trees branch black against sky and the woods seem dead-still and muted. More wrens are alarming and, with the same effect on my nervous system as nails scratching down glass, I also clearly hear the cars on the A-road and the hoot and rattle of a train, though both are some distance away. In irritation I think “ it should be silent here in the woods but it isn’t”, then immediately a response returns: “ the community here should have been idyllic but it wasn’t”. The similarity strikes me of how modernity in our heads is like car noise in a winter wood – a racket that broke the peace of the wild things. I feel sadness wrap its wet blanket around me so I wrap my arms around sadness and me and weep.
* * *
Imbolc – not yet time to spring forth, but the first stirrings of life are happening deep in the dark fertile soil. Season of inspiration and poetry flowing like ewe’s milk for the snow-born lambs. All that has made itself known in the dark time of the year within us, and dreams dreamt through us is stirring – Imbolc is time for those shadows and dreams brought into awareness to begin their transformation into the material world in a generative, nurturing way. They are like flotsam and jetsom washing up on the shore of consciousness from the vast dark sea of the unconscious – a mix of treasures and broken things that are also treasures if you look at them with better eyes.
The well and the hearth are both traditionally sacred to the Celtic goddess Brigid at this time of year for the same reason – the well with its dark depths contrasts with the bright hearth that places mysterious things squarely in the centre of the life you live, the sacred mundane. Yet it is still not time for the majority of our energies to move away from the hearth. New fires initially need careful tending to ensure a fire that can tackle logs large enough to allow us to go out in the world.
In Medieval times, the Christmas season lasted a full 40 days through to Imbolc, and greenery was left in place until February – not so far from here there is a valley where the new year is celebrated on Jan 13th – Hen Galan – an ancient refusal to speed up that is still happening here in Cymru. Hearing the hurry of cars and trains today reminds me how modernity has abandoned the slowness of the dark half of the year that is the natural balance to the action and haste of the light half of the year. Imagine resting, moving slowly and dreaming for that amount of time?! Can you? Who might you be if you truly rested?
Buzzard calls sharply as it circles in the sun above the frozen woods and I think forwards to the Spring Equinox – hard to believe in warm sun and primroses that appear around the feet of trees as I stand here. I see deer tracks hardened and glistening with frost and sense to take the same path as last Oestre at the beginning of this cycle of writing, so I make my way down the hill.
Above the bramble thickets that are in abundance I see small hazel and oak trees, protected from the soft but insistent mouths of deer by sharp thorns. I notice tight catkins, waiting to be summoned into their golden flurry of life and smile at their promise and their patience. Making my way onto the bogland (easier to walk over when earth is like a stone), I greet the tumps of greater tussock sedge that stand like sentinels amidst the sea of hard rush. I remember when those strange towering ones, supposedly the inspiration for “triffids”, advised an earlier version of me against turning the wetland into a large willow bio-mass plantation that would have changed the nature of the place they choose to dwell. They whose presence is home for the rare water voles we’ve caught sight of on occasion since that time. I touch their long, sharp-edged leaves, lulled by the scratchy papery sound they make in the breeze. One of them slices my thumb and suddenly there is blood, red so bright and magical amongst the quiet browns and greens of the winterland.
Tasting the salty iron as I tend my wound, I scrabble towards the sallows where I sat for my first writings last year at Oestre. Wood cock and snipe shoot out and wheel away, clacking at my clumsy imposition. Also a deer that was probably resting, hauls herself up, grunts at me and stares, then flicks her ears, grunts once more and ambles off. Yes, indeed, what am I doing out here!
The small pond is motionless – clouds are layered on water’s shine and beneath the surface, green pond weed glows...it is as though I’m seeing through layers of time looking into its depths.
Sun seems to be focusing his eye into a small cave made of willow branches and I feel to lie down, head pillowed by my bag. Ahhh... quiet and stillness comes for a while as I snooze in my cocoon of clothes...drifting willingly into the dark flow of sleep. Then there is a warning jolt as I become aware that an ice cold is seeping into my body and I have to move now. My body reacts with adrenalin and I get that, without my warm home and shelter, I might not survive out here on days and nights like the ones we are having. I give thanks to cold and its stark reminder that, powerful as we humans appear, we are still here by the grace of this wild planet and she can end us as easily as she can bring us into life. Sometimes we need a winter to remember...
I walk briskly, aware of Mynydd Ddu, the mountain that oversees us. Today she is white and seems faraway – like someone I’ve only dreamt of visiting. I make it to the grove – a circle of alders, willows, hawthorns and holly that was the only place that felt wild when we became guardians of the chemical dairy land that now lives as a new wilderness. An old willow has fallen in the storms and lies dismembered across the ground. I’m sorry to see her fall and also look to the holly that will benefit from the opened access to light, and wish that all endings seemed so graceful. I gather twigs that hawthorn’s thorny net has caught and kept off the damp earth, and kindle a small fire in the centre, next to the skull of deer that came here to die. It takes all my concentration to coax this little being into life and I forget all else in the puffing and quick searches for more and larger food for this hungry flame. Without walls or containment on a day below zero, this tiny fire still transfers its warmth into the space gathered in by the trees, and its flame is as shockingly magically bright as the blood from my thumb in the gathering dusk. I am in grateful ceremony.
I sit and muse, remembering many gatherings in this grove – women’s circles where blood mysteries have been honoured and deep connection sought; sweatlodges alive with drumming and singing, plant ally ceremonies where folks re-found their belonging in the web of life; children – learning the ways of plants, mud, animals and how to tend fire and whittle spoons; teenagers laughter echoing out as they try on different versions of themselves amongst peers, overseen by patient trees. I am reminded that we humans hold ceremony not because some things are sacred and worthy of ceremony and that others are not, but that ceremony is meant to be a regular reminder that all is sacred all of the time. So much gratitude for all these things that this resecrating place has nourished us humans with. These activities that were first dreamt and felt and sensed, and then made manifest through thinking and planning. I ask fire to warm Earth and bring us spring, feeling at my core the longing for abundance and ease for all beings after a hard winter in troubled times. May all be well x
Imbolc
place: Gelli Aur season: Imbolc
All dead still in my woods now - starkest depths Yggdrasil* naked
Beyond sight smallest stirrings as seed-fires burn in dark earth caverns
Beyond sound sweet trickle as sap-tide turns beneath bitter bark.
Starving bird black against frost finds woken beetle ; he eats and he lives -
Branches cradle the song of his new-born joy. Yule’s cold in-breath ends with warm release and
Earth’s eyelids flutter.
* said : “ig-dra-sil” – the Nordic world tree
The Reckoning - Yule
Seasons greetings to you all in the heart of the dark year. I could go on to wish you the customary warmth, joy and good cheer. Yet my instructions, gleaned from a night dream and a day that feels as if it hasn’t really begun because it’s so overcast, say to do otherwise. I am to linger a while longer with the cold and dark of this season; not to banish the long nights too swiftly with the verbal version of whole-house fairy-light-pollution or to skip past winter with its vital invitations as if it were a mistake . And this blog will be as short and enough as a winter’s day. I’m weary and bright screens are hard to look at when my animal body longs for darkness.
So, you are welcome to be here in this dree place. Rain has fallen for days... the last few berries on hawthorn are darkest red beneath the lowering grey sky. Birdsong seems a rare thing, thin and far away. Puddles shimmer with mesmerising circles, each one seeded by drips from drooping branch tips.
Underfoot everything is sodden and I’m carrying a ton of the reddish mud of this place on each welly as I stagger around, trying to stay upright and not slip or get stuck. The song of stream and river in spate is a cold rush in the otherwise solemn valley and the bridge is flooded so that we can’t drive our car out until it’s subsided. I’m feeling tender and exposed in these wet woods where there appears to be no desire in me (or dry place) to sit for a while. Yet, as I tune in, there is also something like relief – to break out of the fug and cosy familiarity of the warm, over-lit house and instead be heavy with the weather as it is. It feels good to meet a place that feels low in energy now that sap has fallen, creatures are sleeping and the growing seasons are well and truly over.
***
So, how are you? How are you with the cold, the dark and dis-ease of this time of year? I wonder if you too feel your sap fall to your roots and energy wane? Illness is a frequent visitor for many in this season – an uncomfortable ally for rest, and with luck, a surrender of will so the list of things one thinks one needs to do can be put down. I hope that if you are with a cold, flu or covid, that you aren’t feeling too rough and that there’s enough support around you to enable that surrender.
A while back, educated by illness, I understood hibernation as a state to embrace from Samhain (Nov 1st) to Yule (Dec 24th). These days I take a month off my mentoring work and do the minimum of other work I’m committed to, forsaking socials with other humans for solitude and silence; staying close to home rather than traveling further afield. I avoid screens and go to bed early, spending more time in night-dream than any other time of year. There’s something about joining with the sleeping earth that feels “right”. If I get ill, I no longer neck paracetomol and try to carry on out of guilt and dutiful overfunction to the ceaseless beat of the drum of modernity. I’m grateful that this life of mine allows that flexibility – I realise that many humans have to keep going at the same velocity as in the light seasons and that opting out, even for a little while, from modernity’s addiction to forward motion doesn’t seem like a viable option.
***
Winters are still necessary though. Also going slow, collapsing, dying, composting in all its smelly, mouldy, sometimes unsightly glory is needed. With the other-than-humans, trees don’t refuse to shed their leaves and keep the sap pumping instead, and animals don’t choose to push through hibernation to keep to their summer schedule. Of course, now we are seeing where our human excess and refusal to obey the limits of a finite planet has changed the climate so drastically that it doesn’t get cold enough to suggest the need for hibernation to some bears and daffodils start flowering in December round here in places... but I’d say that’s not something they choose to do to themselves, so attuned are they to the eco-niche that they inhabit.
***
I heard others say in these last weeks (and said myself in the past) “I hate the cold” or “ I hate this weather” with an energy that makes it sound as though they really mean it... as if there’s a belief that the cold dark season is an aberration and furthermore, it’s intentionally making their life harder. I do know that beleaguered place where overwhelm and exhaustion is close – and then to make it worse, the weather seems to wrap me in a damp gloomy blanket and hamper my progress...yes indeed! The amount of energy in our dislike of winter sometimes makes me wonder if some shadow lurks there, projected onto weather - in that refusal to find worth in the “other”, maybe some long repressed part of a psyche (see previous samhain blog) waits to be reclaimed It isn't just humans that we project our shadow onto after all... spiders, darkness, rats, midges, wasps etc can bring forth a vehemence of dislike that goes way beyond any damage they do to us and completely ignores the valuable ways they support us through their unique tasks within the web of life.
***
I see birch trees and stop to greet the constellations of raindrops that hang from slender twigs... I see hazels whose tips also are catkins-to-be; their golden spring promise is still tightly cocooned and pale grey/green. They wait for the right time to transform and sense they are not yet ready- they remind me to yield. I know then- feel it ringing true like a bell, that I have slowly learnt to yield more (in both meanings of the word). To do what I’m told by some deeper dreaming that I can access when I’m not just in my strategic mind but in a fluid conversation with the other ways of knowing the world. This feels so different from thinking I know what needs to happen.
I see the silhouette of an alder against the last light of this day and am taken by the starkness of black against white... and how the falling away of their leaves reveals what is essential, what is enduring about this being. I experience this time of year as one of a reckoning. If I'm quiet enough, slow enough and not hiding behind avoidances and escapes that are so freely offered in this consumerist civilisation, then I can see what growth rings I've grown… or not. It's a humbling time, this reckoning. Standing at twilight, with a trickle of rain making its way down my back, I suddenly and strangely feel the warm hearth of Yule/winter solstice and, 3 days later, the return of the sun - now celebrated as Christmas and the birth of the son of god. Below all the layers of wrapping paper and excess and notoriously volatile family gatherings that comes with the modern version of this celebration, I believe there is a need to remember and desire to celebrate what endures: Life endures, connection and love endures… and these remembrances are the gifts of the cold, darkness, dying back, harsh weather that we can find if we stop judging it as wrong.
And we can enact these in the gathering in of kith and kin, the sharing of abundance (which is not the same thing as excess) through presence and feasting. (Rather than the orgy of overconsumption that many a christmas becomes)… I really wonder what that political activist and healer who lived simply and honoured it (“consider the lilies of the valley” etc.) would feel about the standard modern christmas celebration held in his name... I suspect he’d be overturning more than money lenders tables in the temples.
This quote also came back to me today as I mused with this winter-wander place… it is for me a reminder to have faith in darkness- our own, that of the other-than-human world and in the challenges that we face as humans as the tables turn on our species in the endtimes of this civilization and of life on earth as we know it.
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Laureate studied the science of systems and noted that as things move far out of balance, an extra energy can be released and that “when a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order”. And this is why inner led change is potent, so potent. Through that inner tending and bringing home all the parts of ourselves we have outcast or lost conscious knowledge of, we can become more congruent to become a small island of coherence. Knowing and loving all the parts of ourselves (even our shadow), we can change the world around us exponentially. You may know people whose very presence changes the vibe and seems to draw out the wholeness in those around them? And if groups of coherent connected humans meet and create culture together, they too can have an exponential effect and can shift the entire system to a greater wholeness and health… and this can only happen when the seas of chaos are roaring... another reckoning of sorts.
The past is still happening- Samhain
I am writing fragments to you today – fragments being part of a wholeness in the end, after all.
I’m travelling so these are postcards from my pilgrim stations. Sift-ings* that are found as I move through places on the land and in myself .
*Sift-ings being that which we sense, imagine, feel and think, in one fell integrated swoop.
***
Hedgehog, velvet shanks, oyster, liberty cap, horse, field, wax cap, white helvella, fly agaric, penny bun, destroying angel, puff ball, earth star, stinkhorn...I’ve been eyes down, greeting the fungi folk and tuning into their hyphae* webbing into mycelium beneath damp meadows and mossy rocks so it can perform a necessary alchemy of changing rot to repair and growth. Mostly this work is hidden from sight in the fertile darkness of soil or beneath the rough bark of trees, except when it sends up one of its otherworldy fruiting bodies, that is.
*Hyphae being the branching filaments that make up the mycelium of a fungus.
***
Dusk arrives so I return to where I am parked beneath a veteran ash tree near to a force (small waterfall) in Cumbria, en route to the north of these islands.
I’m a long way from Cymru, and the very specific place therein I’ve been living with for 25 years, one could say, and yet, this feels to me like a rest place on a migration or pilgrimage, so I’d say I live here too. I come here each time I follow the yank to travel north – that strong inexplicable pull that may well be rooted in my genes as I recently discovered I have about 39% Scottish and Scandinavian in my blood as well as some Welsh, Irish and a big 49% dollop of English.
This place is familiar then, and sitting in my van’s doorway, I’m gazing inward at a palimpsest* of memories of here. *Palimpsest being something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
Remembering times with my children – hammocks hung in a circle amongst old hazels and deer coming through and rocking our beds in the night, then red squirrels waking us by scampering close to our heads at sunrise. Cooking dinner on a small stone-ringed fire on the road verge whilst the children chattered and whittled sticks for a fairy house they created in moss at the base of this huge ash. The groans and shock of cold morning dips in the clear black swirling pool of the force. The deep voice of these waters is a constant bass note in the song of this place, joined by seasonal riffs - the jazz of robin, the warning trill of wren, warbles of blackbird, cacophonic chatter of hiking humans, and manic laugh of green woodpecker.
* * *
It’s night and I’m chilly but also loath to shut out the soothing blackness of still night woods. I know I’m lucky to live in places where darkness holds no menace, and also where I have a choice between dark and light. Like many of us these last couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about those in the enforced darkness of Gaza – the Palestinian inhabitants denied electricity whilst remembering and fearing the dangerous brightness that can smash through their lives and destroy those they love; and also the Israeli hostages trapped in tunnels and locked rooms in Gaza or their people waiting to hear– all shocked, wounded and fearful in that terrible fug of not knowing what fate befalls their families, friends, homes in the most recent eruption of an ancient festering conflict. Not all things in the dark are as healthy as hyphae or feel as soft as the woods outside my van door.
* * *
This season of Samhain begins the darkest part of the year at around 1st November – also known as Nos Galan Gaeaf (first day of winter) in Cymraeg and Hallowe’en in modern culture. We all know the clichés of hallowe’en – the kids trick or treating dressed as ghosts, witches, vampires as they parade around the streets, flocking like moths to the candlelight of gurning pumpkins on the doorsteps of those who will reciprocate their efforts with Haribos, tangerines and funsize Mars Bars.
The enactment of beings perceived as scary, dangerous and undead is rooted in a pre-christian belief that the veil between worlds was thin at this time of year. The inhabitants of the otherworld, (be they the “little folk”, nature spirits or ancestors from the other/ underworld) might make themselves known more than ever in the apparent world (by which I mean that world which most modern humans believe is the only one that actually exists). In Cymru it was known as an Ysbrydnos (a spirit night) and crossroads, stiles and graveyards were thought to be thresholds where the spirits gathered.
* * *
I discovered a curious thing when I was researching for work in Transylvannia; that the belief in vampires that overtook Europe and had people digging up dead folks and hammering stakes through their hearts “just in case” coincided with the age called the Enlightenment. This age was when the prevailing European culture began dismissing all things that couldn’t be studied empirically nor understood rationally i.e. held to the light of logic. Instead the idea that science was the only true lens by which to see began to dominate our cultural paradigm. Somehow that belief in empiricism worked seamlessly with a dominating religion that had an omnipotent god located in the sky and a devil in some hidden fiery hell beneath the ground running amok and causing trouble. The scientific paradigm was/ is still used to diminish and devalue animistic indigenous beliefs all over the world whilst it is bound to a religion that was/is equally as superstitious and not prove-able empirically. How did that happen?
To me it seems that when that which is intuitive and mysterious is pushed out of sight and disrespected it comes back at us in a distorted way. The Enlightenment came hot on the heels of 300 years of the torture and burning of between 3 and 9 million people over 3 centuries who were labelled witches and perceived as consorts of Satan who cavorted in darkness and belonged in hell. Those murdered were mostly older women, some of whom still embodied the indigenous nature-based wisdoms of Europe and enacted them through herbalism, magic and midwifery. This was a cultural genocide but it is so hidden from our modern awareness that hardly anybody notices how inappropriate it then is to have children dressed up as derogatory caricatures of witches on Hallowe’en – pointy hats straggly hair and big warty noses and chins. So many women were tortured and murdered – how can that be so lost to our consciousness? And I wonder how the epigenetic memory of this genocide (of being on the receiving end of violence and being in the persecutor role) is still having its way with us as a society/ species, outside of our awareness? And how has the devaluing of other ways of knowing ( – the intuitive, sensing, feeling ways that don’t get taught in schools and are seen as secondary in our society) impacted you and all of us? On our relationship with this planet, this universe?
* * *
Let's talk about shadow in humans then, as darkness deepens in the northern hemisphere at this time of Samhain. In my last writing we wandered in the hinterland of night time to explore the enactments of a conflict that tore through the fabric of culture in our radical social change housing co-op, despite us having skills in peace building, mediation and non violent communication. We also had an intention to behave differently from the mainstream way of win/lose or either/ or that frequently causes division in modern societies which is being writ large in all wars and conflicts in the world right now. In the Mabon blog I explored how inner worlds influence the outer world and vice versa in order to make a case for inner-led change and to underscore how ignoring inner-led change, because we diminish its importance in comparison to the practical tangible change actions we can make, is not sustainable in the long term. What came into play very much in that conflict was shadow.
Shadow, as I understand it, is made from some trait we are not conscious of in our psyche and can be both sinister or golden (to use terms I learnt from Animas Valley Institute). Furthermore, if someone remarked on us having that particular trait or quality we’d probably deny it as ‘definitely not me’. This is because shadow is created in a psyche when, as children, we repressed an innate quality or trait that felt threatening to our belonging in our family and/ or cultural context. It isn’t suppression, i.e. something we are consciously stopping ourselves being, but an unconscious blocking from an early age so we don't consciously know it is there anymore. An example – the trait of emotional exuberance can feel or be deeply unwelcome in a family who are restrained with, or judgemental of emotional expression. To survive, we hide the trait that feels like it could lead to our abandonment – the ultimate fear of a small child. The energy is pushed into our unconscious and made “not me”. Later in life we might be judgmental of others who are emotionally expressive and have a whole lot of story about “those kinds of people”, that is charged and rather reactive i.e. we often don’t really know the people we have a judgement about, but believe our judgement to be solid and justified. In this state of ‘projection’ onto the other, we may dismiss those kinds of people or try to subdue them; be secretly envious of them or openly admiring whilst denying our own capacity to be as emotionally expressive as them.
Until we re-member this part of ourselves from which we are psychologically cut off, it festers or shines darkly in our unconscious. Shoved out of the way and neglected, that trait can get bent out of shape. When it seeps out (cos shadow often does when the psyche is under pressure) it is often a less wholesome version of the original trait that is expressed, so the repressed emotional exuberance of childhood might emerge under pressure as a surge of screaming rage from a normally gentle and measured person, or an engulfing debilitating despair from someone who is usually very ‘positive’. The experience of acting in a way that we label “I wasn’t myself” is almost certainly universal as even though our families may have been super supportive and loving, our society isn’t.
In our conflict within our housing co-op, the habitually considerate, calm and compassionate people became reactionary, aggressive and blaming – stuck in a mental binary that we knew in our hearts wasn’t real, but we were too busy and avoidant to tune in to our hearts enough to properly tend to. The pressure of losing our homes (for both “sides”) brought to the surface repressed traits that had once been healthy but were now bent of shape. The fact that we weren’t sufficiently aware of those traits meant that we didn’t recognise the subversive and world changing power of bringing home the parts we repressed as children and so shadow became a main player in the issue.
* * *
On the ferry from Scrabster to Stromness I read “... the essence of Orkney’s magic is silence, loneliness and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light.” I’m feeling myself surrendering to that rhythm as I soothe to sea’s lapping. This island who has known the blending or forced unions of Viking, Picts, Scots, English such as runs in my blood, feels familiar too. I’m here for Samhain and some extended solo time – a birthday gift to myself and to all, as I come to listen in to what stirs in the dungeons, tunnels and locked rooms of my psyche so that those shadows can be brought into the village of my heart and be re-membered, restored and resecrated before they can reek (further) havoc in the worlds around me, a task that’ll take more than this time away, more that my lifetime I’m sure.
* * *
Traditionally Samhain was a time where things that could fester into conflict were redressed – this is perhaps the origin of the “trick” part of hallow e’en, because on that night an affronted neighbour was permitted, by cover of darkness, to enact mischief. They could open your gate and let your cows out, or put a sod of earth on your chimney to cause you to be smoked out or another temporary inconvenience could be done to rebalance something that had gone awry, that was too minor to be tended formally and yet might fester if it remained out of awareness and not rebalanced in some trickster-ish way. A short feedback loop in times when it wasn’t so easy to avoid or move away from people we find difficult, and when folks knew that “peace is not just the absence of war” to quote Geronimo.
I sift* that there’s some solid wisdom in this annual decompression of the inevitable build up of social discontent – seems more wholesome than the violent verbal assaults that take place on social media so frequently in our day.
*Sense, imagine, feel and think.
Here’s another story for our times. I wish I could share its lineage more fully – it came to me via Tad Hargreaves and his work with restorative justice and that is all I know. It's a story for our times of polarisation and it’s about a way of being human that we don’t hear much of any more: A chief’s son was killed by the young men of the neighbouring tribe. His young warriors wanted to go and avenge their friend and their tribe by killing the other chief’s son. But the chief, though distraught, was wise and knew that revenge would likely feed a cycle of conflict that would be hard to stop. Instead, and with the blessing of the other tribe’s chief, he adopted the other chief’s son who came to live with him and took on the tasks of the dead son. The young men could no longer enact revenge to assuage their grief without denying their own chief the solace and support of his new son.
Ahhh...let us own and welcome our grief for what it is. Let us welcome home our own shadows so they don’t spill out into the world like an emotional oil slick, causing suffering and more violence, and so we can do that alchemy of reclamation; to reclaim the vitality and energy we repressed in order to survive, alchemy that enables the fragment to take its place as a fully functioning aspect of our psyche in its wholeness.
* * *
Resecration – to restore to sacred those which have been desecrated
I came here to touch the rupture and
feel that seamy edge of ragged meat,
as nervy and blue as wind’s wail –
this song that all night is wearing
as she holds her breath and waits.
I inhale history and it shapes my body,
binds me like chains of carnage
going back to the Romans, the ransack and raping.
I’m going back, back, back with the softest moss
to wipe up red gobs that are like berries of felled trees.
What wisdoms are congealed in these holy clots?
I will clean the jagged wound so I can know it;
lean in close so I can listen to its tattered lips;
love it as I lay it over with spider’s web and
feel with faithful fingers for what is dead
in this firmament of flesh that is mine,
that is yours, that is earth – broken and beautiful.
The alchemy of inner led change - Mabon
I wake up slowly as dawn gilds the window of the yurt. Sound of rain-patter on canvas is with me for a while and, as I muse in that hinterland between sleep and awake, I remember the night shrieks of a mating vixen and the screech owl that kept me company in the time that I was conscious in the small hours. I’ve been going to bed when it’s dark and waking up with first light for some time and seem to have re-membered a pattern of sleeping twice in one night that humans had for time immemorial before electric light shifted us into a single block of rest time that was more efficient for industrial society. Historical records show that this time between the first and second sleep, known as “the watch”, was often spent remembering dreams, in quiet contemplation or prayer, love making or conversation. Some people believe this sleep pattern evolved out of necessity from living with fire and needing to feed them in the long cold nights of winter. I think it's from both biological and cultural necessity, and I often wonder what kind of culture we’d create if we still spent a couple of hours each night without electricity, connecting to others in the flesh and to our own inner worlds, or to those we call divine through prayer/ lovemaking, or listening into the wisdom from the wilderness of dreams in which we have journeyed.
Photograph of The Moon through the branches by Eamon Bourke
During the “watch” last night I was curious about why this Mabon blog has taken its time to come into sight – it’s a good two weeks since equinox. On a surface level, one could say that the strong dose of Covid which swallowed up two weeks of my life is a simple explanation as to why this writing was delayed. Yet I’m aware of the complete entanglement of body, mind, emotions and “fate” (for want of a better word) that means that, to me, there are no accidents – that all things that happen, (including Covid and the discomfort and repercussions of falling ill) are purposeful in some way. This is a fierce philosophy to hold, especially as I've not been tested with holding steady to it whilst journeying with a terminal illness or at the doorway to death, and I can only hope that I stay curious and open to whatever learning is there for me even then.
At this time of year from Mabon til Samhain (Nov 1st) when the days shorten swiftly, there’s a seriousness and focus that comes after the scatter of the summer that has been called “ the time of the wound” by Robert Bly. It’s the time when salmon struggle upstream to their place of birth then die. In the Jewish tradition it is called the Days of Awe from Sept 15th - 25th and it is seen as the years beginning – the birthday of the universe when G-d created Adam and Eve, and also a time of repentance and coming back into at-one-ment with one’s life and relationship with G-d/ universe/ mystery. It’s familiar to us in the British Isles as a time of thanksgiving for the fertility of summer and for harvested food stored for winter. With the focus on the abundance of harvest we can forget that we also discard that which is no longer of use when we harvest and in doing so, confront things that did not grow and that will now not come to fruition - there’s a grief there too with the gratitude. I’ve noticed, being a counsellor/ mentor for 20+ years, that folks I work with want to “ cut to the chase” of what is ailing them at this time, and I get a flurry of new enquiries that is only surpassed by the flurry accompanying New Year's resolutions in January.
It’s always been a significant season in my own life: From the dreaded return to school for 16 years to starting formative jobs and higher education courses.I’ve fallen in and out of love with 2 long-term partners. My first child was born at this time, I’ve broken 2 bones, had three pregnancies ending in the week after the equinox; there’s been the onset of 4 significant illnesses including a life changing bout of Lymes disease that often terrified me as I imagined that the mental and physical incapacity i was experiencing could continue for the rest of my life .
Whilst dozily ruminating last night, I realised that another significant event is that we arrived at this land 25 years ago on Oct 1st. Oh, it was a beautiful season that welcomed us; even though it was cow land with flailed hedges and closely grazed monoculture grass, there were hawthorns and sloes heavy with fruit and hazelnuts in the hedges.The small river valley was softened most mornings by what in Cymraeg is sometimes called anadl y ddraig – dragon's breath. It seemed as if you saw the rolling woody foothills and dark height of Mynydd Ddu through a silver veil that sometimes shone gold as the maturing sun spread its lowering light across the fields...and the novelty of learning about this land entwined with the sense of potential as we grew more intimate with who/what was here was so enchanting.
After that rich memory of first being woven in with this place, I then remembered that it was also 10 years ago to the day that we won a court case that meant that we didn’t lose our home of 15 years here …Ahhh...ouch….now I’m awake and tense. With the arrival of that less delightful memory I understood that this is where I am wandering today for this blog: This time, I’m not out in/on/with the physical terrain of land, but instead I’m listening in to Night and the dream world of this place.
As soon as I felt a certainty about writing of the “big conflict “ that ended in legal action, I also felt a resistance as it was, without doubt, the most traumatic event of living here. The responsibility I feel in my contribution to the drama still calls forth remorse in me – a healthy shame at the times when the actions of my younger self were less than ideal, amongst a group of others who also were often outside of their integrity. As I write this I feel a wave of compassion for the younger selves of all involved that softens the tension in my gut – the knowing that we were all doing the best we could against a backdrop of childhood woundings and the accompanying (and often unhelpful) coping strategies. And perhaps most relevant in the context of this blog, our undeveloped capacity to differentiate between perspectives that came from fragmented parts of our psyche and those that came from a mature wholeness. Because of this lack we enacted patterns of power-over, othering, projection and victimhood and so forth that we were sure we’d not fall prey to as thoroughly as we all did at times, because we were radical social change activists and thought we knew better !
The intention of this cycle of writings is to share my experience over the last 25 years of living in a housing and workers co-operative that was established with good intentions to help repair damage done to earth and to other humans; it is also to consider the need for inner led change in the context of activism. This episode that floated back into my memory last night seems to highlight some consequences of folks who proceeded in activism without having recognised that part of that activism needs to be the cultivation of inner led change ie a radical self-honesty and accountability that considers how we all are steeped in the story and habits of modernity and thus we need to consciously engage with how this influences our behaviours ( rather than seeing ourselves as somehow immune / on the side of “good” and the others as the problem.) The activism that encouraged us to vision a better future was instigated by a group of people who, on paper at least, looked as though they’d do a good job of creating a radical social change housing co-operative and organic veg farm, laden with practical, emotional and group skills as we were. So, how did we end up in court? There were three trained mediators in the core membership, peace activists, folks steeped in non violent communication. All the people involved were consciously committed to acting differently to the mainstream way; to creating a non-hierarchical way of living that shared power and were more emotionally literate...so how did it go so ”wrong”?
I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of what happened (you’ll probably be glad to hear, unless you enjoy soap operas !) because then I would favour my own narrative, which is just one story i.e. the colourful and often distracting weft that can hide the warp threads that are there below the surface of any event / illness/ experience. These warp threads can keep us connected to something wholer than our/ the immature egoic story so we can navigate in the labyrinth of shadow and, by grace, find the gems of the darkness.
What prompted the three years of conflict? This could be answered in myriad ways– some might say it started with a personality clash between two members when one person banned another from a communal space, whilst others might say it was just part of the wake of a couple’s messy separation, or that it began in the murk around power that saw folks who were hoping to join frustrated with the slow pace of the joining process and their subsequent lack of clout in decision making. My hunch is that all of those versions are true and that it also began with a centuries old disconnection where we humans chose domination over cooperation, separation over belonging; that we are dyed in the wool with those constructs from the dynamics and curriculum of our early lives at home and in school.
Wherever it began, what ensued was a 3 year period where people took opposing sides. One side was right and one side was wrong. It was hideously exposing with a hate website created, people reporting others to planning authorities for building low impact dwellings, and to the police with ungrounded accusations of theft. The local alternative community got infected by the divisiveness to varying degrees and it became very inflamed. In the midst (or perhaps at the centre) of this, one side wanted to make the woods more productive for their business by managing the trees to grow straight trunks, and to lay all the hedges to increase productivity of timber and plant biomass all over the wetlands for sale, whilst the other side couldn't articulate about the land but felt that this plan definitely shouldn't happen! The children of both “sides” suffered as all the parents were stressed out with the fundamental threat of losing homes and so not present enough emotionally.
I can remember those nights at the beginning of our troubles when the the sleepless “watch” was spent not in gently pondering dreams but in festering over letters and tactics and unfairness and occasionally imagining throwing rocks through opposing folks' windows…brewing in feelings of outrage, victimhood, fury over being misrepresented ... oooof...There’s a stark drama of good versus evil that pervades modernity, left over from one version of Christianity that pitched god against a devil and heaven against hell and either/or. Thankfully, this black and white narrative started to blur in me when I began wandering in the woods at night, because I loved them and missed being in them – I was too scared to go there during the day in case I had a difficult encounter with one of the people we were opposing and who was opposing us.
At night the woods were dark and yet I found I could “see” my way with senses other than my eyes. The night time that I had learnt to perceive as dangerous and somehow lesser than day felt safer and a potent time of emotional resourcing.Owls, badgers, foxes and ones that scurry and chew and rustle in the leaf litter felt like allies and moon and stars like elders.
One night I was out and I saw a lone star...I thought “ Poor thing, up there on its own”. Swiftly I heard someone lovingly laughing at my blindness, saying “ Don’t pity me – all my star kin are here around me...it is you that believes you’re alone.” The voice was clear as a bell and somewhat shocking as I was not with another human!
Something shifted in me after that. I couldn’t maintain my (self) righteous anger at the “wrongdoers” nor the sense of victimhood that kept the part I’d played in creating and maintaining conflict unacknowledged. The wall of separation started to crumble and I noticed I cared about the wellbeing of the people who’d taken over half the farm “illegally” at the invitation of the original parties with whom we were in dispute - that the two babies born there amongst the “trespassers” seemed to have a natural right to stay in relation to the land where they had been born, regardless of the circumstances or actions of their parents.
We sought mediation to find a solution that meant we all could stay here and went through that process for 3 days but it fell apart. Then, finally, a court process began with eye-watering costs covered at first by the insurance we had taken out grudgingly as part of the mortgage agreement. I had a poor view of the judicial system at that point, and was rather cynical about the motivations of those who worked in it. After the insurance money ran out, both the solicitor and the barrister continued to do substantial work for free because they felt that a miscarriage of justice would happen if we didn’t make it to trial for lack of funds, and they didn't want that to happen and for us to lose our home.
I did not expect that. I’d assumed an impersonal, financial transaction was all that existed between those folks in suits and us scruffy folk who smell of woodsmoke. An “us and them” mindset I had learnt and maintained unconsciously collapsed as the situation forced me to trust people I’d normally consider alien or “ them”, to support us in a court case where I was part of a group of activists pitted against another group of activists … “us” versus “us” if you like. There were several examples of this topsy-turveying of my world view during that time which meant I had to look again with a kind of innocence – at myself, at others and my understanding about how the world is…poet Rumi nails that shift in me when he writes
“ Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.”
How did we get into this conflict? In a nutshell I’d say that though we had brave ideas and fantasies about radical social change and though we were deeply committed to enacting them, we all got too busy in the doing of things and neglected cultivating our wholeness..ie learning to understand our inner worlds where we hold hidden scripts learnt from a society that believes in separation, in using power over others etc, that we unknowingly repeat over and over again (especially when our stress responses are activated.) The belief that the “ ends justifies the means “ that is part of the single linear idea of progress in modernity blinded us to recognising that the way we do things - the means - is what creates the ends…so that if we want to create something beautiful then we need to do it in a beautiful way and to do that, we need to attend to what may be lurking in shadow.
I have inside me a “ gratitude-o-meter” and it was a few years ago that the arrow on this inner dial moved from “ shitstorm” to “ wouldn't have it any other way”. An experience that seemed so murky, wasteful, an aberration turned out to be golden ie through discovering my passion to prevent the land from being treated as an inanimate resource in service of humans and learning to speak up for the other-than-humans here, I found a way to be service to this place ( and others) with more potency. I also learned a lot about what destroys culture - revenge , reactivity , unaccountability (including polarising conflict and not recognising that in a group conflict there are no innocent bystanders), theft, dishonesty..I also learnt about peace-building practices that can help prevent conflict starting in the first place…but most of all I learnt about my priorities and slowed down on the “righteous slog” to spend time ruminating on patterns, and deeper currents in me and around me.
May your harvest be equanimity this Mabon time and may your hearts be broken open by grief and gratitude in this season so they can grow even bigger.
Following the thread of belonging back home - Lammas
It is Gwyl Awst or Lammas...the “height” of summer and yet, the berries on rowan and hawthorn are already orange and I’m feeling (with relief!) the shortening of the days and the waning of the intense solar energy as the descent into Autumn begins. Traditionally, this was a time of tribal gathering, with the hay harvest in and the grain harvest coming to fullness. Fairs still exist that have their roots in the old celebrations in some places in the Isles of the British and my local town’s main street is called Heol Lammas / Lammas Street after the fair that took place there. In ancient times this was when travel was easiest and there was some breathing space in between the main harvests for celebration and revelry that was often at odds with the status quo, as well as it being a time when disputes were tended, marriages witnessed and in later years, new employment found at “mop fairs”.
I’m home between stints of working away and pleasantly shocked on return by the growth of the veggies in my garden – pumpkins, and ones we call weeds, have filled the blank slates of soil between plantings and raspberries, blueberries, beans, kales, broccoli, cucumbers, salads, tomatoes and courgettes are all fruiting so generously that those beyond my immediate family get to share in them. I’m about to head off with boxes of these early harvests to a tribal meeting of sorts at the 'Green Gathering' where a few thousand folk share in celebration, subversive skills and knowledge sharing and the abundance of earth at this time. Those original instructions we humans have to gather with those of a shared cosmology are still having their way with us, even though we moderns may no longer recognise the seasonal cycle to which we are responding when we head to the hedonism of Glastonbury et al, leaving tonnes of “rubbish” behind. I find some comfort in this remembering in these end times, when the constructed systems of modernity and familiar rhythms of nature seem to be breaking down at an increasing rate and a sense of chaos blossoms with hottest summers ever, and news of wildfires consuming their way across tinder dry land, arrives from elsewhere on the planet.
Wandering for this musing, I’m listening in to what I’m writing about/ for and find myself guided to the old woods within the now broken walls of the uninhabited stately home that is slowly crumbling close to the land we grow with. The grey stone wall that separated those with wealth from the gwerin, the folk who lived under the control of the estate, and paid rent to live on the land that was once held in common, has released the enclosed fallow deer who now roam freely in these parts. I no longer run the risk of deportation to be enslaved on plantations in the “new world” for daring or needing to enter here to find food, as folks once did as little as 160 years ago.
In between soft rain showers the sun is hot and trees and tracks steam as I make my way past bristling plantations of douglas fir and the harsh clearance of clear fell where trunks are piled, still bleeding their aromatic blood sap. I follow a bright stream beneath the thick canopy of evergreens and oak, high stepping through tall bracken and waist high ferns to the place where, once upon a time, someone planted specimen trees collected from other lands. The strangeness of a huge monkey puzzle tree, native of Chile, comes into sight under a grey Welsh sky and I know I’m entering the old arboretum that is no longer tended – paths are lost and the giant trees stand sentinel to a past era surrounded by rows of farmed trees.
Beneath the three giant redwoods I find a place to sit on their dry needles and lean my back against one who’s original home was California. Nearby an equally huge western hemlock tree, also originating from North America, offers its branches to gold finches and a mistle thrush who’s melancholy song permeates this place. As I breath myself to presence here I notice how quiet the woods are – the song of birds is greatly reduced compared to spring’s richness as they tend to their moulting – nothing is moving except water. I feel a timelessness arrive as my body and heart fully attune into the now of these foreign trees and bushes of much maligned rhododendrons that sprawl in the understory with hawthorn, yew and brambles.
The redwood upon whom I am leaning is thriving here on this foreign soil and I muse on what it is like for this one to be here far from the woods where it would have been with its own people of tree and animal and human. Belonging – that yearning to find your place with those of your own species and within the web of life of the greater earth community is what is with me now and I am realising again how it was this old invisible thread that pulled us to create an intentional community of humans on and with this land, with whom we shared agreements on values and ways of living; how we pooled our resources of energy, time and money to create a home for ourselves beyond blood ties and familial duties whose yield was greater than the sum of parts...the children especially, with an abundance of adults to care for them, and a freedom within that to run wilder than most of their generation, were the most precious of fruits. At the time of creating the co-housing farm we were aware of an intention to control our own housing and of taking back land through a delightfully cunning and legal way of claiming housing benefit to pay the mortgage which meant that the government paid for us to re-establish land held in common. The deeper yearning for community and belonging was not visible to us then, it seemed it was just a way to meet our objectives and it took years for some of us to realise that the community extended beyond our species and to begin to act in accordance with the ancient knowing that all are kin..tree, river, soil, birds.
* * * * *
When I was 19, I met the friend who first taught me how to wander; how to let go of the idea of destination. Often we would meander on the rain-veiled borders between England and Cymru for days, in wilds and fields and small towns where we’d rock up and see what happened, divining our direction from following a butterfly or choosing lanes with the most grass growing down the middle. On one such adventure we dowsed our way to a small pub that was the front room of the home of an old woman called Lucy. As she ushered us into the low beamed dark room, to the wooden settles that circled a wood stove on which she boiled an egg for her cat's supper, and bid us tell us of ourselves, I felt untethered from my everyday life. I no longer knew what time I lived in. She served us sweet local perry and sat attentive, encouraging those who had arrived as strangers and now shared the seats to tell stories of their life journey that had led us to her hearth.
Her skill at welcoming people was potent and her insight and curiosity stunned me. Also her humility, never pushing her opinions or leading in the conversation unless implored. I returned several times after this first meeting and asked her if she’d ever travelled ”oh yes” she said, “i went to Brecon once because my dog had been taken to the dog pound”. It was then I realised that some journeys are of distance and some are of depth as she was fully educated in some way that eluded me .... she knew every thing about her small town – the history and myths of place and buildings and people, as well as the moods of the great river alongside which the town had grown, of the weather and other than humans that lived there. I heard in her a way to be in relationship with life that was barely existent in my own.
A seed of longing began growing in me then for a life of depth like hers, of rooted connection with place and people. As I write this now I am weeping with gratitude that I was gifted this meeting with one in whom the threads of place indigineity were visible and lived, despite all the forces that have worked to separate us moderns from the old way of being human; those enclosures of land that destroyed the commons through land grabs that made the large walled estates, and made it impossible to continue a lived connection with place as so many were forced to leave their ancestral habitats to dwell in cities as slaves of, and sacrifices to the industrial revolution. Our current culture still feeds on this revolution, though we have exported most of the squalor and the suffering to other places and peoples of this planet now.
So when we began our radical social change housing co-operative and organic veg box scheme, the legacy of Lucy lived on. We at first owned no vehicles as we wanted to learn our place here, to know where the first primroses flowered in flailed hedgerows of this diminished cow land, and to scramble the broken walls of the old estate and discover lost paths to immigrant redwoods; to delight in the way that they have learnt to belong on foreign soil, with rhododendron offering sheltered cover for the feral deer, from hunters who pay to kill them for sport from the shooting hides that are scattered throughout the woods.
Sunlight is gilding the trunks of the redwoods as the rain ceases. I am dry under the shelter of these giants and glad for that. It is time to wander home, to pick vegetables and write this musing before I leave to gather in the ancient ceremony of festival with my extended family of humans at Chepstow for a while, to re-member another way to be human with others of like heart. Small red stalked ceps, tumbled by deer and nibbled by slugs remind me that wherever I wander I am linked by mycelial threads back to my place of belonging and I can feel them under my feet, and hear them singing the song of home whenever I drop down from strategies, destinations, plans in my mind into the entanglement that my body and soul never forgets.
Thank you for taking the time to meander with me and I pray that your roots of belonging may have been tugged, tangled and stirred through this musing.
Let Everything Happen to you- Litha (summer Solstice) June 2023
Good day to you! When I look with my inner eyes, you and I have just returned from a slow meander around the new wilderness that I live with/ for here in Cymru. We are both speckled with grass seed who have hitched a ride with us to new places of growth, and we’re looking tousled and are slightly sweaty which horse flies have been loving – buzzing alongside us as we part the froth of hemlock flowers that lean into the deer tracks we’ve been bimbling along.
Our plan as we set off was to listen for a plan. We did choose to get up early and head out with a question as day began, and to keep wandering at least until sun reached his daily peak at this pre-solstice time when the amount of light reaches its annual zenith. Sun appears to our eyes to linger for 3 days at his peak until Mary-mas (the mirror of Christ-mas) on the 24th. Some of us celebrate the returning of darkness as a balancer to the mainstream culturally-endorsed celebration of the birth of the sun/ son on Christmas day. Just know that the presence of you has been with me as I got lost in the aliveness of this land today.
The question I was holding as I sauntered the dusty track towards the wood gate was “ What is it I’m to write about in the blog today?”. I’ve learnt not to expect words or a direct answer. A direct answer is, more often than not, a part of me that isn’t comfortable with mysteries wanting to put an end to the “not knowing” so instead. it comes up with a solid rationale answer.) I soften my gaze to peripheral so as to move my awareness out of thinking-mode and into a relaxed alert state. I sense I’ve managed some mental quiet because there are wrens and black caps calling really close by as I move barefoot beneath giant ash at wood’s threshold. When I’m busy-minded and go to the trees I notice that birds seem to be singing anywhere other than where I am, or that they are alarming loudly, surely to warn others of this bumbling human who could well create mischief with such heady disconnectedness.
The first part of the woods I enter is known as “the control field”. When we first moved to this place, it was a closely grazed cow field like all the others. We planted its neighbour fields with native trees but decided to keep this one unplanted as an experiment to compare the planting of trees with what happens if you don’t do anything. I’m now weaving between jay and squirrel planted oaks and hazels that rustle their leaves above me and I’m greeting them, marvelling out loud at their spring growth spurt and the tiny nuts and acorns they now bear.
As I find my way to the overgrown field gate onto “ the bog”, an intensely blue dragonfly sweeps across my gaze about a foot from my eyes and I sift ( sense imagine feel and think) that this is part of the response to my question about what I’m to write about – I know now that I need to wander to the spring pond we enabled to exist again 4 years ago - a wilding pool where this blue one likely emerged. As I enter the bog a crow-hassled buzzard is flying low and straight towards my head before they swing left and away. I am startled and moved, humbled by this encounter and admiring how fiercely crow protects their young from predation. I stumble towards a solitary squat bog myrtle to rest with its aromatic presence and be still with the adrenalin, feelings and memories that have been evoked by Buzzard’s near collision with me and a reminder about my own protectiveness towards my young. (Any I meet come into that category of “my young”!This bog myrtle-one came with me from Scotland where I found them as a small whip uprooted by road widening works. They thrive and are slowly enlarging their grey-green being, despite deer adoring munching on them..)
As I sit and tune into grasshopper warbler and reed bunting, I become enthralled by the polaric qualities of the land at this season..here on the bog with no shade I am exposed to the intensifying heat of the day and can feel the pull to the dark groves of alders and willows that live alongside the little river that runs through this valley. As I stay with the tension between the relative novelty (in Cymru) of sun heat permeating me to my core and the desire to cool down, it strikes me that at the lightest time of year, the shade is also at its darkest in the woods because the canopy is so thick . This reminds me of the essence of a poem by Rilke:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.*
“Big flames make big shadows” is what I am to write about I realise then with a sense of recognition and “a bit of “Duh! Of course”. So in honour of and attunement with this time of solar peak and to flow with the theme of this blog (to explore my 25 years of social change activism through the lens of inner-led change as directed by wanders on the land here), I’m going to tell you about how wonderful our project here was in what, in the modern paradigm, would be called its heyday – how it’s flame flared brightly; about how we created a radical co-operative where up to 44 people gained some or all of their living from growing and delivering organic veg ; how 100’s of urban folk in London, Bristol, Oxford, Cardiff, Manchester, Swansea got to eat organic fruit and vegetables at a time when they were not yet widely available in supermarkets; how up to 14 people at a time had homes here that were simple and crafted/ renovated with eco-materials and how we shared resources so that we needed less cars, washing machines, cookers etc; how 100’s of mostly young volunteers learnt by living here about organic growing, plant based diets, drug free living, green building and tree planting whilst enjoying a sense of community and being radicalised by our living of social change agendas; by having no TV, but lots of cool reading matter and impassioned conversations round fires. How our home-educated children grew up running wild with a pack of kids, and around many adults who, for the most part, drenched them in love and attention in a way that is almost impossible in a standard nuclear family...how they have grown into teens/ young adults with a sturdy sense of self that I didn’t develop until my mid 30’s.
All “good” stuff! I’m proud of my part in that big flame we made...truly grateful for the collective human efforting and the benefits of it – my family still living here being a major one of them! Yet as soon as I say this I balk at the painful memories of conflicts, betrayals and difficulties that emerged from the shadow of all this unearthed achievement. I’ve already written in previous blogs about how we came in our human-centric way to this place and made massive assumptions and interventions based on the erroneous belief that humans get special treatment and that other-than-humans are not sentient, animate, intelligent and are put here primarily to be of service to human endeavours. Add to this that in a group who explicitly claimed to support “freedom from addiction”, the addiction to overwork/ progress went virtually unchallenged and created a culture that saw people exploiting themselves and each other incessantly, that supported sexism around childcare and carrying the mental load for the home and emotional load in relationships; Also that we were barely aware that we were part of the ongoing colonisation of Cymru , being a bunch of mostly English folk who didn’t have time/ interest to learn the living ancient language that the majority of our neighbours speak; nor were we aware of the way we lip-serviced inclusivity by never considering how to dilute the completely white, able bodied, heterosexual, almost totally middle class membership of the co-op with some difference.
I’ll reiterate what I said in my previous blog because it feels important that what I write lands as a personal reflective observation in service of learning to deepen connection, rather than making myself/ anyone else “wrong”. We were (and remain) doing the best we know how to do, being the best we are able to be from moment to moment...I mean, how else can any of us be after all? What I’m about here is feeling in the dark of shadow for the sacred and (w)holy gifts that are always to be found there if we dare to look lovingly and courageously for that which we have unconsciously hidden from ourselves – maybe it’ll be a way of being/ a personal trait / a limiting cultural belief that, when triggered , springs out of shadow straight at us, flying at our heads like buzzard as I entered the bog – shocking, unexpected yet oddly familiar.
I’m wondering how you are feeling right now, reading this...what is stirred (if anything) in you ?
I wander to the new pond where many blue dragonflies dart and scuffle. I can hear their wings scratch against another as they clash, and I look for emerging nymphs on the reeds around water’s edge. I remember the mess of crushed rushes and mud that the digger left when we widened the spring’s drainage channel to create this pool and also moved soil to release river from the deep straight channel the previous farmer had confined her to in order to drain the wetlands to make them more profitable cow fields.. the listening in we did again and again as we followed the lands instructions to do this work and the trust that we had to find over and over to understand that this destruction was in service of wholeness for this place.
There is a kerfuffle above me. Buzzard is again being mobbed by crows, drawn away from the nestlings and my mind leaps to the human babies I birthed here and the necessity in their being for this place..the relief of familiarity when they return from their new homes. Brewing on the early days here, my memories flow to my eldest child, born a year and a day after we came here. She was featured in a documentary (Rebellion – it can still be found on Netflix ) that looks at the inner workings of Extinction Rebellion and focuses in part on her relationship with her Dad who was a co-founder of both XR and the community here. I realise as I ponder that it's also about the relationships between flames and their shadows. That though XR was/is in itself an achievement, the two women directors create a question mark in the film as to whether the end results justify the means when they explore the impacts on individuals who worked so hard and focused so completely on progress that they hurt themselves and others around them.
When we make big flames we need to attend to what is moving in shadow too for the sake of balance. Also because it is here that the old paradigm is hidden from consciousness and from here that we can act it out. Inner-led change is a way in which we meet shadow not as some fearful darkness to be avoided but as something longed for, like deep dark shade on a hot day. When we are willing to meet shadow, we can compost what is hidden there that no longer serves life, in order to create a growing medium for a more beautiful future who’s instructions are being whispered to us by grass seed, and buzzard, and dragonfly and leaf rustle if we slow and quiet and root enough to hear them.
Thanks for wandering with me dear human..wishing you balance at this pivotal time x
* From Rainer Maria Rilke - “God speaks to us as he makes us…”
Loving the fault - Beltaine May 2023
I’m out under a big sky – towering cloud forms scud across the bright blue and deepest grey of a spring day. Yesterday I was peacefully watching bees harvest sunlight in the form of gold willow pollen whilst I sat in a sheltered spot by their hive.Today though, bare branches of oak and ash are thrashing around in the stormy force of a south westerly wind that brings sudden loud squalls of heavy rain followed by lulls of warm sun. It’s like being caught in the middle of some weatherly tug-of-war between winter and summer. It reminds me that in the ancient traditions of this land this time of year, Beltaine, was known to be a time in-between, like it’s opposite Samhain at Halloween. Maybe you’ve heard old tales of folks who go to sleep on May Day eve under a hawthorn and wake up in fairy land where they spend what seems like one day, but return to this world and discover that all their loved ones have died as a hundred years has passed?
As I weave between the trees I am struck by the dance of dark and light and how shadowy these woods are as blackbirds glide low and strangely silent beneath the budding canopy, and the black pattern of branches criss-cross the newly laid carpet of bluebell leaves.
I feel a little frisson of ...what?
Fear? Excitement ? My body buzzes alive with the sense of being watched...and that is when I distinctly hear a foot stomp, then a snort and branch-snap before seeing three fallow deer glide away into the jumble of fallen trees, brambles and honeysuckle that embrace the steep slopes of the dark gorge where the water runs both black and blue wherever the sky is mirrored back to itself. The one of me that loves to follow fresh deer prints or the tangy trail of fox; to follow the whiff of “other” into the understory is hot on the trail - not to capture or consume anyone, but to be in a deeper relationship with them.
* * * *
These woods of whom I speak are not part of the land that was registered as purchased by the housing co-operative 25 years ago...and yet, how can they not be the same ? The pieces of paper that show a red line of ownership around one plot or another mean nothing to soil, river, raven, or deer. Whose opinion matters most ?
I was up on Mynydd Ddu a couple of weeks ago, (the mountain that watches over the land we are in service to that I mentioned in the previous blog).Looking back at this little piece of planet from up high, I notice how the land the co-op “owns” nestles in to everything around it, inseparable from these neighbouring woods and and the next door farmland. Fences, hedges and roads that divide up the landscape seem less like boundaries and more like patterns or veins with that buzzards eye view .
In the last blog I told you of the ‘tick list’ by which we attempted to find a place to set up our housing co-operative – a list of practical requirements that, in itself, is not “wrong”. Yet there was an absence of awareness in us of how the mentality of extractivism was acting out through it, even as we imagined we were doing the “right thing” by taking a piece of land out of servitude to chemical milk production and putting it into use instead as an organic veg farm with an acre of polytunnels and minimal petrochemical-based interventions.
As I write this I feel sadness and some remorse about how we were seduced by a righteous story we were telling ourselves. We were going to do “better” than chemical dairy farming; we were going to do things that were scientifically proven to help create a better environment and bring less suffering for animals; we were going to create right livelihood and a nourishing home in community for more humans than were currently supported by a small scale dairy farm with one employed person in a family of 2; we were brave and clever souls that were going to “right the wrongs”.
That binary story of good/ bad hid from us that in our shadowy wake was the very same paradigm that had created the system we so urgently wanted to overhaul. A system that manifests mechanised chemical farming; the tribeless disconnection of the nuclear family; the military industrial complex that was and is increasingly destroying the web of life. Of course, a benign dictatorship maybe does create less trauma in the lives of other-than-humans and humans, yet why be in dominion when you can be alongside, be kin with?
It was/ is our blindspot of conviction that we were not part of what we perceived as” the problem” that I’m highlighting here. We could not see how colonised we were with regard to the greater earth community, and I know we were/are not the only ones who have intended to do something “good”, yet discovered that in many ways we replicated the system we were trying to replace.
* * * *
In relationship, I believe that there is a difference between seduction and courting. Seduction is a bit of a trick where one distracts the attention of the other away from the fact that the intention is to get something, by using alluring words or charm or promises..like the fairy “glamour” of the old tales where a bag of gold coins turns out to be a handful of autumn leaves.
Courting is the opposite of being “on the take”. Courting is an intention to learn another so well, so deeply that you can offer to them things they didn’t even know they needed, or call forth with your loving and generous attention, qualities they didn’t know they had. It’s an honouring and an offering and a healing.
So we approached this land with our high ideals and unconscious intention to use it...we looked at maps and swiftly drew up permaculture plans that imposed what we thought was the right design to reduce our ecological footprint and lighten the load that we put on Earth. Plantings of biomass willow for heating and woodlands that would provide us with nuts, leaves and building materials were pencilled in as were kitchen gardens and field scale veg plantings, polytunnels,caravan plots and camping ground.
As I remember these intentions and my younger self, I can feel a sweetness in that desire to be responsible and reduce damage. I hope you understand that I’m not saying it is wrong to plan or act in this way...not at all. I’m still a lover of maps and models, and enjoy the dopamine hit of ticking completed actions on lists. What I’m saying is that, perhaps it’s not enough to only plan what we think is best – that there are far reaching consequences to our culturally endorsed ignorance of the sentience and animate intelligence of beings (trees, soil, river, rocks et al) that we treat as inert objects put here for us to use as we see fit. Not once did we know to ask of the place what its dream was for itself...did it want those kinds of trees on its northern slopes or acres of willow plantings on its wet places? We didn’t know how to court the place so it could reveal its fullest self to us, we didn’t know how to listen in and to be obedient to what we were told.
* * * * *
The gorge around which the coppice and woodlands remain is deep, dark and narrow...when I descend into it, the world of cars and cattle and cost-of-living crises recedes as my nostrils fill with the musty scent of leaf rot and my ears are bathed in the constant sound of falling water, and of birdsong flowing in and out of wind’s roar .
I’m remembering how our ancestors who were place- indigenous here in these isles of the british knew water forms to be doorways to the world beyond the apparent (this material world that many modern humans believe is the only “ real” world). They knew them to be places of creation as entrances to the womb of the earth. Precious artefacts thought to be votive offerings have been found in many lakes, rivers and pools.
A 13th century poem, “The Elucidation” Elucidation - Wikipedia, tells of how the connection with the otherworld was lost in a land called Logres (curiously, in Cymraeg the word for England is Lloegr) when a rogue king raped one of the fairie-like maidens known as the “Voices of the Wells” who tended the springs and offered travellers the pure waters from her golden grail. He encouraged his men to treat these threshold beings in the same violent way. The maidens withdrew and took with them the vitality and abundance of the land until it became a wasteland. So, the stories of knights of the round table seeking the grail that came after this poem may well be more than tales of valour…they may be stories of a quest to restore the Voices of the Wells (Earth speaking from the depths) in order to return the land to abundance through an offering of courtly love for which these knights were renown…not wishing to take but to offer loyalty and service to the wild feminine…
All these musings gently tumble into my awareness like the golden flowers that are being blown onto me from the willows above. I feel like I’m dropping into the dream of this place as I rest in the roots of ancient hawthorns under oaks and a within a rock formation known geologically as a fault.I’m imagining the doorway of Beltaine opening somewhere and after some time I start to wander without thought upstream .Here’s the poem that I heard , that I know to be co-written by place and season through me.
Are not all springs holy?
Place: Berrach Fault Season: Beltaine
Often it is called a fault –
this gash where geologies meet;
where slow-slide friction of rock against rock
has found a way to be fruitfully wed.
Water runs sky blue where the canopy is open –
a pair of woodpeckers tussle and whoop in
oaks’ soaring green and ash’s bare limbs.
I choose a root-grasping slip down woody abyss,
and track upstream to the siren-singing source.
Two black flies on my sleeve are company.
They speak in synchronised semaphore -
all waving legs, wing flicks, little jumps.
Emerging where bluebells merge into king cups,
where stream goes to earth in shade of the gwern,*
I am slain by the song of courting blackbirds,
caught in sweet cross-fire of their call and response.
It is more a whores’ snatch than a sacred spring,
than a generous opening of a multi-cunted goddess.
Water emerges between two TV’s, rusty oil tanks,
and glass bottles that bob in a sea of celandines.
Kneeling, I cup my hands in the strong spring flow,
see the flicker of two water fleas that indicate purity.
I bow my head and I drink.
Tick lists and miracles – Oestre (spring equinox) March 2023
Everyday when I leave my home I bow to the supine form of mountain ahead of me. To explain: this movement began years ago as a necessity - the doorway is low and I am tall and so I stooped to avoid a painful collision. However, there has been a shift in me such that it is no longer a stoop I make, but a bow I offer, to a being in whose steady gaze have grown many things I love, and from whose elder presence I have learnt to orient my life.
Maybe this seems to you a strange way to begin this blog - the first of a cycle of tales that flows with the celtic seasonal festivals ? What purpose can there be in sharing a daily habit and the way it has changed over the years? Why would you want to read the ramblings of a woman who bows to landforms? Bear with me, fellow human, and let's see what unfolds as we listen at a threshold just before Oestre/ spring equinox that is located in a small river valley nestled in rolling lowlands near Mynydd Ddu ( see photo above).
Each of these writings will be rooted in a practice of listening. I don't have a plan of what I’ll write or bullet points of information to convey. I'll be taking my cue from what the day feels; how the shadows gather; from the silence and suddenness of sparrowhawk’s glide into blackthorn and the longing to compost the current disconnected ways of doing things to make a rich soil for what is to come.
* * *
Today seems like a bold day… maybe it’s the way sun is saying “Spring !”, even though shade feels like winter still. Magpies squabbling in ash’s branches, columns of spiralling gnats and me in my slow wandering know that tomorrow could be frozen but, today we are saying “Spring! “ too. I’m following a badger trail beneath birch and hazel catkins and hear a quiet buzzing of honey bees amongst the first primrose flowers. I see red earth disinterred where badgers have sought some sustenance and also, their latrines where they give back their dark scat as nourishment to soil beneath trees.
These trees are a new wilderness; only 24 years old, yet no longer a plantation of plastic tree-sheltered sticks but a place which has wood blewits, carpets of celandine, that is now birthing the next generation of overstory– tiny hawthorns, hazels, pines and hollies can be spied amongst the dried leaves and brambles. This, I tell you, is a miracle in so many ways.
Let me explain:
25 years ago I joined with 2 other activists to take control of our housing and employment situation. As people on low incomes with no way of “getting a foot on the house ownership ladder”, we were beholden to the whims and limitations of private landlords. We understood that having a greater sense of control over your home, your sanctuary, greatly increased well being and it was also a political act of reclaiming sovereignty. We conspired to set up a housing cooperative where we (and up to 11 other people) would be our own landlords. To purchase, we wrote a basic business plan, then accessed a mortgage from an ethical bank with top-ups of micro-loans from mates and a bridging loan from an organisation (Radical Routes) that raises loanstock to support radical housing co-ops. We signed the paperwork that formally created the co-op in spring 1998 and set about finding a physical place where we could live the idealistic and empowered life we longed for.
As we were already involved in an organic veg delivery co-operative we’d created (at a time before supermarkets snaffled most of the market for chemical-free veg), and between us had a degree in landscape architecture, two permaculture certificates and some experience in allotment scale gardening, we decided that moving our urban bodies to a holding where we could grow organic veg at scale for our box scheme was by far the best plan.
* * *
I’m sitting in a tangle of crack willow as I remember the first stirrings of relationship with this place, and write notes for typing up later. Willow’s stringy twigs cradle watery blue sky as sun moves west towards descent. I am adrift in a flow of memories and feelings ranging from embarrassment to astounded gratitude as my body rests on sparse damp grass by the edge of the pond.
I remember with bemusement the tick list the three of us made of the requirements of the place we wanted to buy: deep well-drained soil; south facing; spring water; proximity to main roads for veg deliveries to the cities we had customers in; enough rental rooms to cover the mortgage repayment; bus service close by as we didn’t want to be reliant on cars for personal journeys.
All very practical, sensible, earnest. What we did not write on the list were yearnings that we had ...for big trees, for beauty, for wildness. I doubt we could have done that back in those days, unskilled as we were in attending closely to anything beyond strategic thought and well intended ideals. There was no place for visionary yearnings or taking into account how we felt or how our bodies responded to different environments…nor was there an awareness that we’d reduced a sentient and intelligent cocreation of a place down to a bunch of resources we wanted to acquire.
So we put in offers on two farms some way from here. One a mediaeval place with its own hill that had a rambling house with a door through which a huge log could be dragged by horse to feed the massive hearth. The other was a half timbered redbrick tucked beneath a dingle of old oaks where the eccentric old farmer had put all the door handles on upside down to confuse burglars. We were gazumped on both of these places by Londoners who bought them as holiday homes. We started to wonder if we’d find a place and looked again at the properties that ticked the items on our list but hadn't intrigued us enough to visit.
The first, second and third time I visited this land it was raining. It rained at some point for 319 days that year. The grey pebble dash farmhouse next to the shit-smeared farmyard was muffled in drizzle and as we wandered the shorn acres of chemical cow pasture we could barely see the flailed hedgerows and had little visual sense of what was around us, though cars could be heard whining in the distance and somewhere we could here the rhythm of a muck-spreader.
Setting up something like a housing co-op requires a sustained momentum. After the peak and trough of those two near misses, our collective energy was faltering. We took a leap towards this place that ticked almost all the boxes (water sadly was on mains) and fitted our financial projections before we ran out of steam completely.
Not exactly the wildish place I had unawares yearned for with its drained wetlands, monoculture rye grass fields, square hedges and absence of large trees, (bar the blessed horse chestnuts and a massive bramley apple by the house). It all felt a bit of a compromise or anti-climax, even though we were getting everything we thought we wanted (bar the spring water). Then 3 things happened:
1) Back In Eryri in the north where we were renting, I got talking with an old neighbour who was often at his gate. I was practising Cymraeg and noticed that his words were a bit different and accent softer than the voices I usually heard around me. I commented on this (in English!). He said he was from South Wales. We soon established that he was born at a house up the lane from the place we were buying, and that during the war he’d worked on this farm growing vegetables. He spoke of how fertile the south facing slopes had been, how surprisingly deep the soil and he welcomed us to his “milltir sgwar”, the square mile that raised him. There is a knowing in some words and phrases in Cymraeg that doesn't directly translate into English, of being in community not only with humans but with place and all that is part of it.
2) After our offer had been accepted on this place we made a fourth visit.The granddaughter of the elderly farmers took me on a walk around the land. It was mizzling (that sideways wetness that those of us who live here know well) and so the green rye grass fields were again swaddled in mist. As we went uphill out of the river valley, she chatted in her singsong voice, showed me her den, her favourite bit of stream and deer tracks …my heart leapt…deer tracks! The clouds thinned then right on cue and suddenly, there was a glimpse of a dramatically lit and clearly defined view of a mountain that I hadn't realised was there, with patches of woodland and rolling foothills nearby. I wept, so moved was I by the closeness of mountain and wild animals.
3) When I returned to the sad farmhouse that smelt of sour milk, the old woman brought out a cake she’d baked for the occasion of us having signed contracts (we were all devoutly vegan and so declined it). She encouraged her husband to tell us something. He seemed embarrassed and flustered but she insisted as they wanted to be “tidy” with us. “Thing is” he says, “this farm is on mains but we don't ever use it because it has a good spring. We’d have to pay more to have our water tested for the dairy if we say we’re on a spring, so we don't mention it. You’ll have to do some pipework to be on mains, I'm sorry.” ….oh the joy!
This triad of discoveries: the missing list item of spring water manifesting so easily; the child leading me to meet the wilds I didn't know I was longing for; the statistical unlikelihood of us living 90 miles from here, but almost nextdoor to a man who was intimate with this place and welcomed us to it. All this landed in me in a way that I couldn't have put into words then, but now I'd say something like ”I knew that I’d be claimed by a place”. What I recognise more easily these days is that, below all the worthy plans and idealism and strategy, there is an understream that can carry me if I surrender to it . Its flow guides me to what is being asked of me, and away from the human hubris of thinking we know what is needed , without listening in to what is being asked of us. I had washed us up exactly where I was supposed to be. That triple whammy of the feeling of “meant to be” was very humbling.
* * *
I realise that I am cold now. That sinking sun through the black fingers of willow had me mesmerised. Also, I was waiting for the reveal of a fluttering, creaking being (maybe snipe?) in a clump of reeds close to my sit spot. I gather my notebook and make my way using the eyes in my feet that feel the paths flattened by deer across the wetland to the woods once more. Back on badger trails at dusk, I worry that I'm disturbing their evening feed and ask forgiveness for a human who surrendered to a sunset and a flow of memory so completely that she slipped into timelessness.
