Hut Words

Cormorant Watching

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This morning, through the hut window, a Cormorant in the sky entered my knowing. Making measured checking-out circles, it finally came in, deliberately, to land in the highest tree down by the lake. And there it stayed for a long, long while. The landscape had a watcher other than me. A fitting watcher, as my watching is no use to the beings of this place. I am something to be watched, my movements and actions are causes for alert. I can’t yet see any positive contribution from my existence here.

The Cormorant, grips the top of the tree, motionless, sometimes he turns his head, but in essence, still. However the nature of the place has changed now it has a watcher. The total feel of the place shifts, incorporating, relating to, this new presence and its watching eye. There is a gathering, a presencing, of tree-bird-standing, tall-seeing, bright black eyes opened out over the whole expanse of the landscape. The field, the tree-line, the waters, are now watched, and that changes them. They are tree-cormoranted in their presence. And the tree-cormorant-seeing gathers up the whole expanse of the land into itself. I feel myself watched, even in the inner shadow of my hut.

Or, attempting to say this differently, my experience of the bird is one where the cormorant holds the whole landscape in its body, its eye; and the landscape is now cormoranted, is experienced by me differently now that black watcher is within the sphere of it all.

Busying myself with washing up, making bed, tidying, the tree-cormorant-watching slips out of my awareness. Then a glance out the window catches some undefined flicker of movement on the ridge line of the green field. It comes and goes for some time. My own eye can’t make sense of it so I take down the binoculars. In time, it becomes clear that a whole flock of thrush-sized birds is foraging from left to right across the greensward of the field. Fieldfares, visitors from other lands, moving through, under the watching eye of Cormorant high in that highest tree. I feel the presence of tree-cormorant-seeing, expanse of field-lake-trees, jerky cross movement of peck-pecking, alert-still then hurried-walking, peck-pecking fieldfares, and my eye, my binoculars, my feeling, the moment, the now, the here. This moment unfolds, cormorant stillness, fieldfare activity, openness of the land, attention of me. Under lightness of cloud-carpet sky, and on upwards-curving earth. And all very still.

Again I forget the scene. Then later I leave the hut to attend to things outside. Suddenly I sense the Cormorant in flight. His black, watching eye detected me and the sentinel alerts. Its flight tells all the landscape that I am on the move. The Cormorant heads off over the wood behind me and leaves the wholeness of this land’s presencing. The Fieldfares run-stop-peck their way across the green curve of the field, sloping down to the thick brown stream. The lake-wood-field settles to being unwatched, at least for a while.

Photo by Rajesh Rajput on Unsplash

Hut Words, Longer Pieces

“Go back to your own land, she will teach you again”

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At one of the first gatherings of eco-psychologists in the UK, maybe ten years ago, a new acquaintance of mine recounted a story.

He had gone to the US to attend a training course run by Native Americans promising to teach how to live in a closer relationship with the natural world. During a coffee break, my friend was talking to one of the tutors. He explained the reason that he had traveled to the US to train with them. In the UK our indigenous culture, deeply in tune with the natural world, had vanished a thousand or so years ago. He had traveled to learn from those still in touch with the land.

The tutor paused before replying, then said, “Don’t come to us to learn these things. Go back to your own land, she will teach you again”.

That simple injunction, “Go back to your own land, she will teach you again” has stayed with me, deeply haunting me over the past decade.

What would it mean to be taught by the land? Who would I need to be? What would I need to do? … in order to become receptive to this wordless enformation.

Scanning the landscape, I see several movements or approaches that might appear to fit this notion. But each one of them, in the end, I feel is not going to create a place where we, I, could be in the place of being truly tutored by the land.

The current environmental movement – very needed at our current moment of crisis – but ultimately a global exercise in self preservation for the human race. When we re-introduce wolves in Yellowstone Park arguably we are restoring the wisdom of nature and learning from it. But when we plant wind farms in wild places we have not become wiser. We continue to see the land a useful resource for human civilisation. There is no fundamental change in mindset from a coal mine or an oil rig – nature is to be used by us to support our own way of life – just we aren’t producing CO2 anymore. But violence is still being done to wildness.

The fascination and adoption of what scant knowledge we have of the myths and wisdoms of our ancient ancestors. Rich and rewarding territory no doubt and I love to participate in this to a great degree. However the idea that it it is useful to return to ancient ways is flawed in at least two ways. Firstly, there was no perfect past, every stage of human existence has its goodness and brokenness and it is act of projection to imagine a model past to be recaptured and emulated. Secondly, myths and stories are only filters – it is useful to put on other filters to gain insight. However, whilst any filter allows us to see things in new ways, in the same moment, it obscures other aspects of reality from view. It is interesting to consider the birch tree as an expression of feminine wisdom and to do so causes us to experience that specific tree in that woodland clearing in a particular way. But we must then step back from this. Holding that “truth” causes us to experience the tree in a certain way but obscures endless other ways that the tree can show up in our experience. I get interested wondering what un-languaged experience led the ancients to weave their story. It is the pre-cognitive experience that is the deeper training. The story of the ancients can be a hint of where to look but it blurs the unspoken teaching if we hold to it as “true”.

So what could be a possible path to a place where we could be once again taught by the land we live on?

Photo by Eriks Abzinovs on Unsplash

Hut Words

A Winter Landscape

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Reflections on a painting.

Cold air has laid herself, softly, gently, on this place for many days now. With a stillness, with a gentleness, and a sharp, clear iciness, she has changed everything. The clouds, the snow are white, but the air, she has a whiteness too – a clear, sharp whiteness that flares in the eyes.

There is a place here, a place where river and road cross, where the way of nature and the way of the human gently fold around each other.

The river has been frozen for many days now, has become a path, just like the road. Both can be walked on, be played on, both offer support. River for the children; road for the people, the horses, the cart.

And the meeting of road and river in this landscape, by means of the bridge, gathers a world around it. The fences, the trees, the houses, the sky, the clouds arrange themselves around the meeting place, somehow shift their relationship to it, and each other. In that moment of gathering, in that adjustment of relating, there is the possibility of an opening up in the gaze of the watcher.

I watch, though the painting, and through time, through the brush of paint, and through the artist, and I am present to and part of this gathered world.

The tall tree by the roadside is a watcher too. Its treely awareness inclines to the hunched humans in the cart, and the spritely prancing horses as they pass beneath it.

And the air, oh air, painted in exquisite detail by the long-dead painter. Filling the space above the river, the road, the bridge, expansive up, up into the ether – so cold, so white, so still. And under the bridge, darker, lurking, pushing fingers into every cranny of stone and wood and plant. And in the mouths of all the people – warmed, wetted, rippled by their breath. In the bright places it shines like glass, and in the dark folds close to the earth, it holds the shadows, with a soft fist.

There is a human narrative here too. Children playing in the joy of a winter day. The idle watcher on the bridge, a parent? A passerby? The couples in the cart taking the air in this world of beauty. The couple striding briskly, and to what end?

And there is a wider, bigger story too. The expanse of the land, the presence of the sky, the upthrusting of the trees, the stillness of the river, the unseen birds and animals, the myriad of insects, the lurking fish. This is a vast field, a grand moment of being.

And I sit in my kitchen, the coldness of the air wakens the hairs on my exposed forearms. The train rumbles by beneath me. The weekend’s frost and ice has gone from my world now. But, as I gaze at the picture, it lingers in my experience still.

All these things gather to me, in this ancient room, through this printed picture, lying on the pine table between my elbows.

And what of all this? To what end? If, indeed, an end is even a useful thing to enquire after.

What is the lure of these old paintings that bring landscapes now long gone to life? What is important in the intentions, the attentions and art of these long-gone painters that feels like a portal for today?

They invoke a place, a moment. I want to avoid using the word “re-enchant” but they do allow the natural world to presence with an open aliveness that shifts the human presence to a smaller place, sets up the human in a wider field of being. Even with this picture, where the human presence has an intended focus, it doesn’t take much to pull back and widen the lens of perception, so the wider natural context becomes the larger thing. The wider field has a presence that engulfs the human even though the people are not as small as in a Chinese painting. And yet the human action is vital in causing the place to arise. In a perfect Heideggerian moment, the bridge passing over the river creates the place that anchors the whole felt sense of the whole. Even the people going about their various activities, in the end, contribute to the bridge being itself and thus causing the whole scene to open up.

So I guess the helpfulness in these images is that, even if the intentions of the painters has now become outdated, their work gives us some material to experiment with in encountering the world, places, moments with a shifted mode of attention.

The painting is Thomas Birch’s Philadelphia Winter Landscape c. 1830 – 1845

Most Promising, Short Pieces

Here #2

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The shore at dusk is sea-land-skying. The air is wind-tint-dropletting. My skin, my eyes, my ears feel the rush.

To see the place through time is to be blind to the never before moment of the collapse of that chocolate brown surfing into the shingle sloping. The sea knows nothing of a million years as it rises up and casts itself, somehow gently, but with weight ,on the shore.

Nothing has ever been the same as that moment of falling before, and nothing every will be again.

Never before has there been that rush as the sea slips back down into itself, rolling pebbles over pebbles as it goes.

Most Promising, Short Pieces

Here #1

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The green lane, passes through the frozen, open fields. The field’s borders are lost in the icy white fog. Sounds have crept away to some secret place, biding their time for some warmer, wetter hour.

Wren darts and busies himself through the dark, damp lattice of the hawthorn bush. “One, and one, and one, and another one”. Though the land seems barren in its coat of ice, there are snacks a plenty for the bright-eyed little brown bird. Ceaselessly he forages, dropping low, close to the ground, then dart, dart, dart, up through the branches, bobbing to stab another hapless bug cradled in the rough bark.

In dusty blue, a solitary figure scrunches its way down the lane slowly, cracking crisp grass, hard water, stiff mud as he goes.

Overhead, geese are on the move. A long V, breaking, shaping, forming. Constant chatter “I’m here, You here? I’m here”Their voices, the sound of their wings, the shape of their flight carry the feel of the salt marshes, the open spaces, the edges of the land. And not just the nearby marshes, but way beyond, far away, over the sea, the icy tundras and rock fields of the north countries. These unseen places echo in their honks, in their formation, in their purposeful path. Somehow their very being speaks of other places, cold, wild and open. And in carrying these echoes they weave them into the land below, the wide flat fields, the tall hedgerows, the woodland islands, the brick-and-flint houses. The land somehow holds those distant places in its field, brought by the passing birds.

This is a place called here.

Wren senses the approaching blue figure. His body responds, no thought here, two dipping swoops and he has passed down the nether side of the hedge, past the figure, unseen. Bluecoat’s eyes are on the geese. Wren returns to foraging, “one, one, another one”.

The oak oaks further up the hedgerow, shaping the gesture she has held for a hundred years or more, standing with still strength, up, up, up into the air, teeming with the life of countless million others. She acts without moving, speaks without sound. If you listen you can hear the language of her silence.

And all around, the presence of the ice. The air has brought her here, laying her gently on everything in the night. Now the day carries the beauty of white frost, the sharpness of breath like a knife, the stillness that wraps everything in its touch.

Bluecoat drinks hot coffee from his flask.

The sun pushes a faint disk through the fog. The fog has retreated to beyond the edge of the green-sown field. Wren still feeds, working back down the hedge now bluecoat has gone. Like a thousand other beings in the green lane, most of whom bluecoat never saw, his moment of alarm is forgotten, his instant of hiding over.

This now is the here of all things alive in the lane, the hedge, the fields, the air.

Short Pieces

Land

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There you go. After all this time you are starting to feel me. Step, step, step.

Drop your heart into your feet. Feel with that. I roll under you. You cover the ground. Feel me as you move over me. To use a human analogy, like a rolling movie screen as things pass by under you. But I am not a movie. I am alive, I am skin, I rise you meet you. With each step, I give as your weight comes down to meet me. You give as I rise up to meet you. It is a lover’s embrace, it is touch, it is feeling. Walking is a form of feeling, a form of knowing, a form of intimacy.

I move under you as you move forward. You lose me behind you, even as I arrive beneath your next step. Feel me moving out in every direction. Out across the fields, dipping down into the waterways, sliding under the woods.

Out on the marshes, you walked and walked and walked. Sometimes, just occasionally you felt me. I always felt you. Just occasionally you weren’t in the abstract space of your head. I was always holding your feet.

You asked how the land could teach you again. I am the land. And lesson one. Learn to walk on me. Feel me. Be on me. And know me in your body, with your feeling, not your thought.

Photo by Harishan Kobalasingam on Unsplash

Most Promising, Short Pieces

The Silence of a Wren

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In the biting cold of this December morning. Everything frost-edged and crisp. Mist white, soft grey, screening the south, over the vast flat fields lined with the plantings of white-rimmed winter growing.

I set out to listen, and to notice what I hear. To settle on some single wild thing and know it only with hearing.

Past yesterday’s road kill outside the village church, a sad grey squirrel, much flattened by the frequent passing of cars. And the shimmering sound of the crisp brown leaves of the beech hedge by the road.

I quickly come to my favourite lane – a green lane, untroubled by cars.

I listen. Listen for wild sounds but hear only a generator in farm buildings away in the mist, and the wasp-like buzz of a chain saw. The wild is silent.

The wild is silent, beyond the rare rustle of some small creature in the litter and a solitary bird hissing alarm further down the lane ahead of me. And the silence is the absence of sound, the lack of what I am listening for. There is nothing to hear.

I move down the lane, slowly, in fits and starts. It’s too cold to linger. But I linger anyway. Right cheek tingling in the cold, finger tips numb in gloves that fail to do their job.

Transfixed by the frost. How it dwells so differently on each plant form. Frosting the green leaves of the brambles, highlighting the red of the haw berries, becoming part of the very structure of the thistle heads. I take photos but wonder why. The magic is always lost outside the moment of seeing.

Transfixed by the fog. Is it fog or is it mist? What do those words mean? It seems still and unchanging, but every time I look back to a place that was once just white glow, something has appeared. The broken line of a hedgerow – bushes, trees and gaps. Or the angular lines of a modern farm building unseen before.

I immerse myself in the icy, white glow of the monochrome land around me.

But not much hearing.

Then up ahead, the alarm call of a wren. Aware of me long before I notice him. I find him with my binoculars. His energetic, twitchy movements up through the hawthorn bush. The high churr-churr of his alarm. But the churr-churr comes in bursts. Such a loud, intense sound for a tiny bird. But I know all that. I have watched wrens a thousand times. However as I listen and watch, I hear his silence. The darting movement up through the bush continues. All that tiny energy but in silence. I become transfixed by the contrast. Jerky but stationary on a branch, churr-churr-churr. Then darting upward in silence.

Then a dart across into a clump of frost-starched grasses nearer to me and he disappears. For a long time. In the ice cold I watch. And listen. I know he is there. But the only thing that emanates from the clump is his silence. I become transfixed by it. I know he is there but no leaf shifts. Just the presence of the silence. As I listen it spreads out over the area. A radiant silence. I become intensely aware of the quality of the absence of sound. But not a generalised absence, rather the specific radiance of the silence of that one particular little bird, invisible to me now.

Just for a moment I sense all the other silences in the trees and bushes of the hedgerows that line the green lane.

The wren emerges from the clump. One long swoop to another thorn sapling further up the lane. I raise my binoculars to him as he jerks and bobs on the dark stem. I attune to his silence once again and realise that I am using a sort of heart hearing. Such an unsatisfactory way to name it. But I am inclining more than just my hearing system to pick up the silence of that tiny bird.

And I realise that I am inclining towards the unique silence of that single bird. Yes, with its general wrenliness but also the unrepeatable presence of that one and only creature.

My attention tires in the cold. I sup my hot coffee. And move on. The wren darts away out of my consciousness.

But the world had changed a little.

I start to hear the silence in everything. No longer is silence the absence of sound. No longer is the silence I hear the absence of the sounds I was searching for at the beginning of the lane. I start to suspect that the world is full of endless unique silences. The silence of every being, the silence of every place. All just out of awareness until I tilt my hearing in a certain way and the presence of each silence steps into my experience.

I continue up the lane. I linger in front of each bush and tree in the hedgerow. First, a deep green holly, listening to its silence. Then three young thorns, still in their deer protection sheaths. Then an old twisted oak buried in the hedge. Each one emanates a different feeling of silence. Is the language of a wild thing, in its essence, a soundless sound?

Earlier I had engaged my mind in wanting to fully enter into and name the unique landscape I was walking through. Now I shifted my mode of perception. Listening into the silent presence of the fields, the hedgerows, the big oaks, the white fog, the smudged disk of the sun, the unlooked for crescent moon in the thin blue sky. Not now just the silence of the wren and the holly but of the whole land.

I have always valued, sought to drop into, a sense of arriving, being present in any new place. But, in leading me to follow him into the ice-green grass stand, had that little brown bird, knowingly or unknowingly, led me into a new way of listening, a new way of relating with the more-than-human world. A world that speaks to itself, and to us, as much through silence as through sound.

Wren Image uncredited

Landscape image mine

Short Pieces

Air#1

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I hold the world. I am the home of life.

I am the weather, I tint the light, the colours and so the earth’s moods. I shape the temperature of everything, I carry sound. Birds, planes, leaves hang in me. I join everything together. I am the reciprocity of all things, all species, that draw me through their own bodies. I am within and without everything.

I am the homeostasis of the world, the carrier of the chemicals of life. I carry the load of human abuse – the spewing of dirty chemicals into me, the disruption of my beautifully choreographed balance of atoms perfect for balance and harmony in the earth.

But that is to say all things too quickly, to matter of factly. For I do all things with poetry, I am the orchestra of the symphony of life. I am vast, endless, stretching to the very edge, where earth fades into universe. And I am in the smallest thing – nudging the smallest leaf in the most inconspicuous cranny.

So rightly does David Abram, name the earth Eairth. For all earth dwells in me, moves in me, rises up into me and I dance around it all, or settle close in stillness.

I dance and play in the tallest tree tops, I shimmer in the reed beds, I shiver the little plant at the side of the footpath.

I am the weather. I am a clear blue sky, I am thick mist over the salt marshes, I am hurrying cumulus over the open plain. I carry the biting cold, that clings to stiff winter branches, I am the heavy dampness of a sultry summer afternoon.

When you speak of the weather – you speak of me. I am the chameleon of a thousand moods.

And I am the light. No, of course I am not the source of light but as it passes through me I colour it in a thousand shades. At dawn and dusk, I paint myself with it in endlessly changing hues. Out in space without me is just blackness, but to gaze on the earth is to see a beautiful jewel, coloured by my embrace.

I carry scent – the fragrance of flowers, the faint musk of a thousand creatures, the salt off the sea – you only know them because of me.

I carry sound – the heavy thunder, faint distant voices, each and every sound reaching your ears I bring to you and in endless different ways.

I am the one in whom you live and move and have your being. I smile that you once gave that honour to some abstract god when I am sensuous, tactile, flowing, dancing, ever changing, ever the same.

I am ruach, I am psyche, I am spirit, I am breath.

Breathe me, touch me, feel me, dance in me, be present in me.

Respect me and know me.

Photo by Abeer khan on Unsplash

Most Promising, Short Pieces

The story I am here to write

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The story I am here to write is a story of the land and the body, of inner and outer landscapes, of living in flow and ease and beauty. Of Hozho, Tao and Wyrd. I am here to write a story written at the margins of the civilised world, in the liminal space of wild places – Norfolk, Ushant, Lewis. I am here to write the story of the land, with the voices of the more-than-human beings of the land, but also the voices of my own body and the bodies of others – that speak their own language too. I am here to write my story in language that curves round the presence of things, that is a “Saying”, that is Geopoetic, that is sensuous. That is a listening speaking. A language that follows the contours of the land, the contours of the body, the contours of the inner world of image and feeling.

Short Pieces

My intention

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The intention of my life is so clear, so singular. I am concerned only and always to learn how to play the human life. Like I was gifted a precious violin and the entire focus of my life has been to play it in the most aware and creative way. I aspire only to be the maestro of my own existence, for the short while that I am here.

Photo by Providence Doucet on Unsplash