It is still April and I am still looking for magic and miracles, still looking to see the month’s kinder, gentler sides…and finding some of them.
I'm reading The Wild Isles, Patrick Barkham’s personal selection of the best of British & Irish nature writing, a borrow book that I’m going to have to buy, because there is no point turning down corners if you’re going to have to take it back to the library, and I have corners to turn down, because I have things to respond to, and authors that I need to follow up on, books whose extracts have me thirsting for more.
That there is always more to be had is its own kind of delight.
Meanwhile, that – I have decided – is the mark of nature writing that does its job. It is not in the oh yes – it is in the yes, but… and also the yes, and… Simple agreement (or, I suppose, disagreement) gets us nowhere. The best nature writing is that which makes us want to pick up our own pen and throw in our own two-pennorth, despite having no training, no long committed foraging and self-teaching, even if we are late-comers to finding our connection to the earth, to the inter-galactic-ness of it all. The best writing encourages to say what we think in response to it. It also demands of us that we read more – more of this or that argument, more of the counters, more of the story-telling that wouldn’t work if the backdrop weren’t so finely captured.
The Wild Isles made it too easy to grasp my disconnect from nature, too easy to think that if we cannot emulate these people, the writers with their scientific degrees and their adventures in far away places and their decisions to give up the ‘real world’ to live on the edges of it, watching and
writing, living and painting, off-grid, growing their own food, swimming with orcas and seals, traversing the deserts, or even trying to live like a fox in the East End of London…then what we think and feel and how we live is somehow less.
I take a deep breath and decide that it is not so.
I decide that these people are a rare species – brave and creative and wonderful in various ways –
but like all rare species, they can only survive because of what the rest of us are doing. By which I mean, keeping the much-deplored system going which enables their driving around, their flights
across the world, their buying of food (those not literally living off their own land), the publishing and selling of their books, the funding of it all. It is those of us doing ordinary jobs and doing our best in small ways that allows them to do what they do.
That is not a gripe by the way. If it were, I wouldn’t buy the books, and I do, even if I sometimes borrow them first.
It is something of the opposite of a gripe in fact. It is an acknowledgement of the interconnections, and a hope that they see it too, a hope that the people whose books we read, whose wayward lifestyles give birth to their creative output, their stories and poems and myths and all the rest realise they are still standing on the world functioning as it currently does. A hope that they spare a kind, thankful, thought for the rest of us.
We can’t all wander off grid, go to the western isles and live in a croft, or count birds, or decamp
to the eastern marshes and live by the light of the moon. For one: there isn’t space. For another: the world as we know it would stop functioning.
Yes, I know. Part of the argument is that the world as we know it, needs to stop functioning the way that it does…but really…are you prepared for if it did that tomorrow? Or even in five or ten years from now.
Cards on the table: I am not.
Quite apart from the doomsday scenarios of no water, no power, complete infrastructure
breakdown… I would miss the first things to go…the internet, my connection with the friends who live at a distance and I keep embroiled with by phone and text and email. I would suddenly have to go out and shop for everything, rather than choose to have everything I can’t carry on a day to day basis delivered to my door. I would need to let people go…the ones not within walking distance from where I live…because if the public transport ceases, that is the limit of my world. I do not drive – or ride a horse – I use buses and trains and taxis, and I walk.
Then I wonder…if we got to that point…what would those friends and I do? The reality is that our connections revolve around a swimming pool, a dance class, restaurants, gigs. Would we continue them if they had to revolve around picnics in a field, sharing produce or ‘vintage’ discards, barter? Would the food producers still tolerate those of us who weave our spells in words which, for all their worth, don’t keep the family fed?
Obviously, my current income, my pension would no longer flow into a banking system that had
stopped working, and the capital currently bolstering the pension would be equally meaningless.
On the upside I have a small plot of land. I could grow things. I should already be growing edible things beyond the few that I do. If I were planning for the doomsday, I would be stockpiling seeds and hard-copy books that could tell me what to do with them…though I guess at need I could figure it out. Probably using my current method of putting things in the ground, seeing what comes up and then deciding if its edible or not.
Did I say I was looking for the kinder, gentler side of April?
Yes. Then let me add that there is much in Patrick Barkham’s selection that is pure celebration of the world out there, as it was, as it still is, as it could be. Much to make us want to reconnect with the plants and fungi and other animals. Much to make us understand our place in the web, and also to treasure it.
As I said, it was too easy to allow the reading to lead me into a sense of disconnect, and I am
sure that was not Barkham’s intent. The point of writing about the whole of the world (humans included) is not to alienate us, but to draw us back in. For me that requires the volte-face into recognising the ways I am still connected. If we all noticed those, the ways in which we actually do touch the wider web of life, maybe that is a starting point to bigger things. Maybe not, to be fair, but optimistically: maybe so.
So back to the April morning on which I started writing this.
I spent the morning working in the garden…by which I mean I spent 90 minutes on my hands and knees, and stretching and squatting, pulling up weeds – or uprooting wild flowers depending on how we want to look at it. Ninety minutes is about my limit (at the moment!) for stretches and squats and at times bearing the whole of my overweight on my heels and one elbow.
In the Morning Pages I was concerned that the problem with gardening is that it gives you too much thinking time…and thinking leads to over-thinking leads to the downward slide into darkness. I had forgotten that gardening also gifts us non-thinking time. While on my hands and knees or bending or stretching or squatting, it struck me eventually that I was not thinking… not pondering or ruminating. I was simply picking up leaves and deadwood and pulling out plants which in any other place I would be delighted to find.
I’m not claiming any astonishing clarity of mind here…no zen-like enlightenment, even if I pretentiously do call that segment of my plot ‘the zen garden’. It is not zen at the moment, and neither am I – both are ok states – we will survive them – but it was a kind of meditation in the sense that thoughts wandered through. They came. They went. I thought them. I let them go.
Thoughts like…
...I wonder what would happen if I didn’t pull all this out…how soon would I regret that?
…Is it speedwell? I should photograph it beforeI’ve ripped it all out…but there’s some in the drive as well and that can stay.
…How much of this do I really need to do today?
…Oh, that’s interesting, the two close-planted acers are growing around each other, intertwining.
I’m told there is a point where two trees, even if of different species, will actually meld. I can’t remember the word for it – it is somewhere in the depths of that anthology – but it means tree-kissing. My acers are embracing. I wonder briefly what they might be saying – but to be fair I wonder that now, at my table, working words. Working the garden I got no further than ‘oh, that’s interesting’ as I scooped up handfuls of dead leaves and pulled out grape hyacinth bulbs that the birds clearly think should be growing in this space, but which I will limit to edges elsewhere on the plot.
I took time out to eat lunch and have a zoom chat with a dear friend. I went back out and pulled out a few more things. The sky was greying by this stage; the first few drops of rain were falling.
I spoke to my brother on the phone. I admitted that I will not complain about being in shorts in April, as unseasonal as we should think it.
I walked around the plot. The pear tree is in full bloom. Alkanet and grape hyacinth blue the borders. I stood barefoot on the grass feeling the cold earth. The acers are beginning to leaf. The witch-hazel is budding reds and greens. I drag last years leaves from under the raised paths and hope I’m not disturbing sleeping hogs. Ladybirds object to everything I’m doing. Masonry bees are checking out the holes in the garage wall, most of them are occupied already. Hoverflies seem to pause when I speak to them. I saw the first small blue butterfly against the ivy.
So here’s a thing: when I read the work of the experts I am despondent that I will never be who they are, because I did not start when they did – either in the centuries we’ve lost, or at the age they
were – and I need to remind myself that all of that is more than OK. I can learn from what they have learned, without having to do it all for myself. I can use whichever tiny bits of what they’re teaching will slot into my own way in the world.
Here’s another thing: I don’t agree with everything they say, and maybe one day I’ll find a way to get my disagreement out into the world to light another conversation.
Here's the important thing: I do have my own connection…even if it is in pulling up flowering plants I’d rather were somewhere else, in taking a moment to love how the pear tree looks in bloom, to see how the two acers are growing into each other, to wonder how the gunnera has shifted a metre or so to try again under the shelter of the forsythia, to notice all the bits and bobs the birds have picked up and dropped elsewhere. Maybe my connection to nature is in the recognition that we are in this constant tug of war, tug of peace, I want you to grow but not here, I don’t care what you want, I’ll grow where I can. In the irrationality of what I let take over, and what I try to keep in check. Living with nature is like living with people: there are compromises to be made.
Another thought that wandered through today: what if I did just give up and let it all be?
Of course I know the answer to that – I have seen it. I have seen this plot run rampant. I don’t want that – not yet awhile anyway – so then the returning thought was: when will I make that choice?
How old will I be, when I can just let it all go and know that by the time it is too much…I will be gone already?
I am not sure that that is a plan. I love that I have reclaimed the plot from its last wildness which had such beauty in it but was in danger of threatening the structure I call home; I love that I have brought it back into being a garden, one that is somewhere between what Richard & Joyce wanted it to be and what Clive let be. I don’t intend to let it all rewild itself…not yet anyway…but at the same time, I have to admit…it is an option, and one day I might.
