Open Notebook

What would it be to weave seamlessly into the fabric of the beast? To bodily wriggle, hunker or mold into soft landscape of her being?

In the woods, I slip into the silence at the heart of things, moving, in hope, to create the smallest possible ripples in the fabric of the here-now.

And then I am trying to write, to try to capture something in phrases. To say the something which is buzzing in my body. Wordless vibrations set off by the nearness of the land; the way she has, to the smallest degree, set off her dance beneath my skin.

I am making such small progress and am so lacking in the apparatus to notice and name the ripples and sensations that fleetingly arising in me each day.

But I work on.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

You need to feel the beast. You need to sit with her long enough. Walk through her often enough. Pause in her carefully enough. Till her rich and subtle being rises in you. As she rises in the old oak tree and the twisted birch and the dark winter pools and the flight of the crow.

You will not be able to name her or explain her, but she will rise in you nonetheless. There is the universal Tao, the Tao of the mind. And then there is the moist, dark, green Tao of this land, the inscape of this wooded, stream-carved place.

And the beast is not a fearful thing. She is not the beast of horror films and books. She is the animate presence of this nearby, more-than-human world, the living, visceral stirring of this dark soil.

 

 

Image mine.

Saturday evening. She has gone and I am alone again. The ice is leaving too.

I stand at the door of the hut feeling the sharp chill of the frozen air. I know this is the last night. The warmth of the rest of the year will sweep through in the coming wind.

Walking over Chailey Common that morning. Trees still frosted, muddy paths still crisp, pools and streams trapped in brown ice. A sharp magic everywhere. In my breath. On my skin. Under my feet. But soon this magic will be gone.

And now. A day later. This evening. Air from the west. Warmer now. Big sky over darkening meadow. Blue-grey cumulus quickly on the move. Thin crescent moon. Evening birdsong. Joyance.

The ice has gone and something new is here. My thoughts, resisting the abstraction of time, dwell on the movement of sun, moon and earth. No, to say that again. There comes a moment when the relations of the elements open a pathway to a new season. When the earth is at certain place with the sun and the moon hangs as it does just now and the jet stream snakes as it does and the dance of high and low shifts to a certain juxtaposition. Then, and only then, the air changes and the birds sing the spring and the buds break open and the grass is wet not iced.

Or did the Blackbird sing this into being or did the Ash sway this into life or did the lake soften everything into moistness again?

Everything is relations. Everything is movement. Everything dances with everything. It is not the things that make the moment; it is their movement, their relations and their dance.

I stop my thinking and swing with the sway.

 

Image mine.

Who are my neighbours dwelling around my green tin hut?

First and foremost the air. The air is always here. She shapes the mood of everything that happens in this place. First week, she flung herself wildly at the hut, night after night. I feared she would tear the corrugated sheets from the hut. She flung rain against hut, and trees, and hill slope, and buildings and every living thing. Mostly, she moves gently through the pasture and the trees, in her winter dress of grey. She is sometimes icy cold, sometimes just cool. Generally she is damp on my skin. She fills every inch of the hut, dances with flame and smoke in the stove, and mingles with my inner darkness in the chambers of my lungs.

And, though really they are air, I must name the clouds. Endlessly changing: grey blanket; stacked in shades of grey and white; low mist; raining; snowing; white billowing; high wisping. They are never the same, but the moment of their changing eludes me always.

Then next most present, is the green sward of the pasture. I know little about grasses but suspect that there is one main green being carpeting the huge rising slope of the field, in tussocks, dips, mounds and furrows. Sometimes grass carries the white of frost, often a million million drops of rain or dew. Beneath the sward is hidden water that squelches under each step I take.

After that, I name the creatures beyond the fence. Tall Ash, lower Hazel and Hawthorn leaning over the wire fence. All of them bearing vast communities of lichen that dazzle silver from a distance in the sun. Some Ashes are home to massing stands of Ivy rising up two thirds of their height. There are many more plant creatures beyond the fence – Wood Anemones are pushing their green shoots up – but I will not name them now. Buds are growing black Ash, brown Hazel and Hawthorn.

But the strongest presence in the wood is the thick brown stream that weaves his way strongly, silently between steep banks, eddying quickly round fallen trees and over shallow beds, moving slowly through deep reaches. He threatened to burst his banks after the heaviest rain but now has receded and moves endlessly downstream to meet the Ouse.

And my winged neighbours. Most frequently observed, or heard are the Great Tits and the Crows. The Great Tits are not large but in many ways they seem the most present of all winged or legged creatures here. The crows forage continuously on the pasture, make their way with purpose across the sky, sit as sentinels in the highest trees. They too are ever present. Then there are the geese – Canada and Grey Lag and some kind of domestic breed. Always down by the lake or foraging on the campsite meadow beyond the trackway. And the daily Cormorant with its watch tower tree. And the passage of ducks. And when the sun breaks through an explosion of blackbirds, robins, other tits all joining the Great Tits in the wood.

I know, I know there are thousands of neighbours smaller than these around me but it these cold days apart from the flies, moths and spiders that share the hut with me they have remained unnoticed.

And surprisingly only the tracks of creatures I expected to see. The well-worn paths of rabbits through the lattice of the fence wires down by the lake. And small hoof prints of deer in the wet mud of the woodland floor.

And lastly of course, the fields of sheep all around me, and the incongruous Alpacas, and the even more dissonant two-humped Camel.

And Mark, up in the huts by hardstanding on the rise, and Jack, the wood man, and Andy, who lives somewhere over the back of the barns beyond the lake, and Philip, the farmer, his wife and his son and daughter. And a guy I haven’t met, but always see away in the distance, in the green hi-viz jacket, working on vehicles all day over in the neighbour’s barns. And sometimes the fishermen looking miserable down by the lake when weekend comes.

And me.

 

 

Image mine.

It’s raining again. Pretty much everyday. The pasture is waterlogged, in places puddling. The hut wheels sit in water filled ruts. Always the sound of rain on the metal roof, then the drip-drip off the roof onto the tarp sheltering firewood and the plastic water container beside the hut.

Mostly the sky is grey. Sometimes grey blanket clouds. Sometimes low grey fog blanking out everything beyond the pasture. Sometimes hurrying big clouds, dark and light mottled. But pretty much always grey.

Just twice it has felt like spring has come. An evening a couple of days ago, after a day of grey. Blue skies, racing white cumulus and birdsong the strongest I’ve heard since I arrived three weeks ago. And yesterday again, once the morning fog lifted, a glorious day of blue, and white, and green. And again the birds. Great tits joined by blackbirds, robins and a warbler in the hazels over the fence.

I check daily in anticipation of some snow, a blanket of white, the beautiful crispness of frozen air. But no, just rain.

But this evening I realised that this is it. The sitting waiting, listening, watching is to learn, but to learn with the body and the emotions, not the rapid mind that longs for action and completion and a tidy story.

This is February, on this farm, by this river, next to this wood. To settle into it, to adjust myself to its steady mood and its minor undulations, is to dwell with it, in it. Yes spring time, and snow time, and storm time are it too. But this continual water, this continual grey, the quietness, the uneventfulness, are the very things to settle into and find a rhythm in.

They are the living land here, now, in this.

Smiling to myself.

I am struggling to make any progress on my book. Instead I am taking delight in reading and re-reading other works. The latest diversion is going back to Turtles All The Way Down. But it’s always slightly tainted by the thought that I am both avoiding writing and muddying my mind and making writing more difficult.

I also notice that I have these delightful moments of insight when I am reading something. And I guess that seasoned writers stop everything and capture those insights, because they are the things that really sing. I kid myself that I can come back to them but, no, they are gone and that moment of clarity is impossible to reach again.

But anyway, that’s not the reason I am smiling to myself. I smile because I really question what it is I really want. I sit here in front of the window of my shepherd’s hut. A glass of Black Sheep Ale on the placemat beside me. For the last half hour I have watched the movements and impossible to detect changes in the white cumulus clouds coming over me. They rise from behind the ridge of dark trees the other side of the green pasture that my hut sits at the bottom of. The continual rumble of the weir in the brown stream in flood in the woods behind me is the backdrop, strangely occupying the same sonic space as the extractor fan in the Chinese restaurant in my Lewes house.

Just watching the clouds, the brightness of the blue between them, the strength and warmth of the sun when the clouds allow it to shine through, the sound of the Great Tits in the woods behind, the caw of Crows from every side. This moment is exquisite and I can wish for nothing more. I am completely immersed in the slow pageant of earth and sky present in my senses. I breathe gently, I sip my beer, I feel the chill of the air on my hands, I want for nothing.

Why do I want to write anything – what does it do for me?

I reflect on DH Lawrence’s description of a character in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. This guy felt he understood the world, in his thoughts and reasoning. He felt it was his responsibility to return to Edgon Moor to instruct others in the right way. But in doing so he was making two great mistakes. One, that this wisdom could be taught by rational education. Lawrence remarks that the character finds the woman who is the perfect embodiment of the wild moor. Then he feels like he understands her and can explain her, and in doing so completely fails to experience the reality of her (and the moor). In understanding her, he cuts himself off from her. And secondly, that by seeking to teach others he was avoiding confronting his own being and way of living. I confess to feeling a pang of identification with this character!

So back to the exquisite passage and constantly shifting shapes of the massed white clouds above me. Why is it not enough just to live in the moment of clouds, sunlight, beer, cool wind, hut, and deeply imbibe them, open every sense to them, flex every filter to them (physiological and psychological, sorry Turtles book creeping in here!)? Why is it even on my mind to try to capture the moment in words, or to abduct some sort of lesson, metaphor, or insight from the experience?

I remember a moment years ago when I diverted my route home from Phoenix, Arixona, via Houston. I wanted to visit the Rothko Chapel and sit for a while amongst those amazing (for me) panels of dark colour. I sat there for a couple of hours. Near the end of the time, the attendant came out to check I was ok. Often people come trying to have some transcendent, spiritual experience in front of the paintings and get quite disturbed when they don’t. She was just wanting to be sure I wasn’t one of those! Maybe, in a way, I was. I was sat there, straining my whole being to have a relaxed, spontaneous experience of what was before me!

And I have done the same elsewhere. The Matisse Chapel at Vence, just outside Nice. The monastery with the Fra Bartholemew paintings in Florence. Cave paintings in southern France (can’t quite remember where!)

For a long time now, my attention has shifted from art to the natural world. But maybe the intention remains the same, to access or create a gateway experience to something more foundational, more essential than the level of experience our everyday filters create for us. Something that is more essential.

But why bother?

The clouds are the air clouding. The sensation of that creates ripples across my neurology. And that is it.

And to be present to that moment … that is everything … and then it is gone.

And the next exquisite moment has arrived now.

 

 

Image mine.

On the table
The debris of a meal
That looks like it was for more than one.

The whiskey almost gone
The wine bottle empty too.
The litter of mugs, glasses, plates.

Bowie on the speaker
Man who sold the world.

In this green clad hut
The curve of the roof
Oak beams like ribs.
The hobbit burner
Flames flickering
In the midst of black iron.
The still air outside
Demands care on the inside
To keep the wood burning.
I watch the dancing beauty
Of the lively flame.

What is my life?
Is it to be alone
In this remote hut
In a big field
Shrouded in mist and dark?
Is this the fulfilment
I really seek?

A sip of wine
An alcoholic daze?
Is the tingle in my skin
The wine
Or the stove?

Where is all this going
Am I slowly withdrawing
Down the path to a long held dream
Or heading towards fruitless isolation?

I honestly don’t know.

Guess I am going to find out
One way or another
Coz there is no going back
Now

Image mine.