SPRING: MAIDEN

Spring at La Paperie, the time when light begins to grow from crescent to full moon, the youthful, Maiden phase of a woman’s life.  The Maiden represents beauty, fresh potential and new life: innocence, exploration and discovery.  In cycles of Nature, Maiden is associated with dawn, sunrise and spring.  She is the Greek Goddess: Persephone and Artemis, the Celtic Goddess: Rhiannon and the Nordic Goddess: Freya.  The moon is the universal image of the eternal Goddess and is symbolic of feminine power.  I’ve been lucky enough to be introduced to Goddesses by Jill Amison (Thank you, Jill 😊)by going to her workshops and Walking Wild Ways with her and other Wild Women.  And since, I’ve done lots of reading and studying on my own too.  I’m currently taking an online course with Sharon Blackie: Sisters Of Rock.

Outside of patriarchal social structures, women have always supported each other.  I recall how a group of women I met years’ ago, when I was a first time Mother, had banded together, as you know, you are among my FB friends.  Our friendship endures still sharing thoughts and feelings, talking on the phone, meeting for meals or drinks, celebrating good times together or offering a shoulder to cry on and a sympathetic ear when a crisis comes around.  We have been party to most of the defining moments in each other’s lives.  I consider these women family.  And over the years, I’ve made lots of new women friends too.  Meeting these women in on yoga retreats, workshops, at MOY, through my creative writing practice and in virtual communities: The Mythic Imagination, Sacred Trees and the Wild Woman Moon, kindly set up by Jill.  I was reading a post on our group chat the other day about a workshop I’d signed up for: Empower & Nourish: Wise Woman Support, I got to thinking… 

The new spiritual sisterhood have experienced an awakening of consciousness. So, that now, in the twenty first century, The Triple Goddess of ancient times: Virgin, Mother and Crone, has been extended to the Four Phase Feminine Way, an evolution to include: Wild Woman.  Wild meaning to live a natural life. (A concept explored in Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarrisa Estes.) The Four Phase Feminine Way, therefore, is:  Maiden, Mother, Wild Woman and Crone.  Cycles which mirror the four phases of the moon, the four elements and the four seasons.  I think I will explore these stages of women’s lives in this blog, if you’d like to accompany me. 

As Jill says, our rhythms and cycles change as we age: changes in body, emotions, hormones, attitudes, roles, mindset.  And that yoga teaches us to honour and support where we’re at; this has proved right for me.  Yoga has been invaluable in all sorts of ways.  I have learned, over time, wisdom and creativity resides within me; I need to tune in via: rituals, ceremonies, yoga and creative practice and, of course, having the support of my sisterhood helps; they mean so much to me.

 Clarissa Pinkola Estes says that when women reassert their relationship with their wildish nature, they are gifted with an internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an intuitive, a creator, a guide, one who supports their inner and outer life.  La Paperie offered me this gift of reclaiming my wildish nature.  And it’s the place that has born witness to my aspirations, hopes and dreams, the place of so many of my memories.

During spring I woke to the sound of the dawn chorus, the song of a blackbird, song thrush, great tit and robin, a symphony of trills and warbles, coos and whistles, a biological necessity, male birds singing to attract mates and mark out territory. 

Poet, author and photographer Melissa Harrison has noted the unfriendliness of March in the UK.  It was at La Paperie too.  We had sleet and snow, hard frosts, hail, but luckily sometimes warm sunshine too. Every cloud has a silver lining.   It was the time of year when the ash trees in the fields were studded with sticky, black buds.  Parliaments of rooks gathered in untidy, twiggy nests, flapping their ragged wings, cawing.

I watched hares boxing: small, dark-tipped tails, long, lean legs, all muscle, with huge, floppy ears standing on hind legs, the doe hitting the buck with her paws: an eruption of power and energy, testing to see if he was a worthy suitor. Sprinting twice as fast as any human being.  Speed is one strategy the hare use against predators.  Another is to lie flat against the ground in a depression known as a ‘form’, ears down, completely still.  The doe gives birth to her leverets in open meadows in a form in the grass.  According to Walter de la Mare, hares are witches in disguise.   Yet, I’d read that Buddha was a hare in an early incarnation.  Apparently, he lived in a forest with a river the colour of lapis lazuli running through it.  Hares, so rich in mythology.  

As March moved into April, billions of migratory birds, embark on epic journeys from Africa.  Around the spring equinox, when the day and night are nearly the same length, they arrived at La Paperie.  For me this marked the true arrival of spring, the most eventful season of the year, a time of great activity and urgency.  Days lengthened.  The earth warmed.  The air was suffused with scents.  Luminous-lime leaves and buds uncurled and unfurled as enzymes turned food starch into sugars, pushed sap, enabling growth.  In the hedges, birds were busy nesting.  Flowers were blooming.  Bees were buzzing.  Insects clicking.  Then at last they arrived.  I dashed into the garden to watch the swallows explode over La Paperie’s roof, showing their royal-blue backs and scarlet throats. 

Folklore has it that if swallows don’t return yearly to the eaves of one’s house, it foretells that ruin will come to it.  Luckily, the swallows always returned to La Paperie where they had just what they needed, mild springs and warm summers.  Eaves where they built their mud cup nests and an abundant supply of insect hatches, to feed the fledglings.  I loved to see their beaks peeping over nests, adult birds flying to the young, feeding them all day long. 

As I watched, I breathed in the scent of primroses, growing in clumps all over the garden, wandering into the fields, glistening with dew drops of sunshine.  Primula Vulgaris, delicate, lemon petals with egg-yolk yellow centres, green rosettes of leaves, literally ‘first flower’ and my mother’s favourite.

And as day and night moved towards equal length Oestre, the Goddess of Light, is welcomed into our lives: the festival of new life, balance and awakening.  

A wren often built in the rectory wall.  I’d see her darting jerkily, between the stones, tiny tail cocked, singing incredibly loud despite her small size.  And most days I saw a great spotted woodpecker, a male because it had a red patch on the back of its head as well as under its tail. It made my day to see it; I felt grounded by the wildlife.  Years later, reading Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington, I strongly related to what she wrote: ‘There must be something about this contact with wildlife that lifts the veil of separation between ourselves and other species and helps us heal and bring out our sense of connectedness.’ p. 231

In the middle of the field at the bottom of our garden sometimes there was a rank stink: foxes’ scat, which marks their territory.  One summer morning, I saw a dog fox in our garden.  Like a character in a Beatrix Potter book he was standing on its hind legs, plucking raspberries from bushes. His brush was darker than the rest of its pelage and was rich, long and full, ideal for balancing.  In spring foxes have been known to climb trees and steal fledglings from their nests, but I’d never seen any. Yet, on January and February nights, when we were snug in bed, we’d hear the high-pitched blood curdling screams of a vixen.  It’s a haunting sound but thought to be a ‘love song’ during mating. 

I believe gestation is fifty-two days.  So, by spring, the adults have cubs, usually four to six in a litter.  The vixen has six teats so she can’t feed anymore.  Their eyes are shut at birth gradually turning from blue, to amber, when they open.  As further time passes, their fur grows full and rich and red, dark front legs that look like long elegant gloves: Audrey Hepburn style in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  Many times, I’d observed a vixen grooming herself, one eye on her litter of fluffy, downy- brown cubs chasing each other over the fields, bounding and leaping, play-fighting, testing each other’s reactions. 

I was led to thinking how foxes are depicted as sly and cunning in literature: a trickster. Edgar in King Lear refers to the fox as ‘sneaky’.  However, there in the Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the fox is shown to be generous, offering knowledge and guidance to The Little Prince who has fallen to earth from an asteroid, warning him to be aware of men because they have guns and hunt.  More recently the artist, designer and writer Caroline Bickford-Smith published The Fox And The Star.  And like the Little Prince, far from being shown as sly and self-seeking, this story also illustrates a different side to the fox.  He is a vulnerable creature, living deep in a dense forest with only one friend, Star.  Star lights the forest paths for him each night.  But then one night, Star is not there.  Fox faces the forest alone.  It’s a poignant story, one which endeared me even more to this multi-faceted, glorious creature.

Sometimes there were cows in the back field, ears and tails twitching, the occasional soft fall of muck and moo.  They gawped at me with treacle eyes as I walked by, through grass awash with primroses and cowslips.  Occasionally I came across a scatter of feathers: a decapitated woodpigeon, a sparrow hawk’s kill.  When hunting, they fly low, flipping over hedges, piercing, bloodthirsty eyes searching for victims, surprising any unsuspecting bird.  I always felt slightly unnerved by their ferocity.  The female is twice the bulk of the male, dark, greyish-brown, whilst the male has a blue-grey back, pale breast with red barring.  The males tend to hunt smaller birds.  I once saw one plummet from the sky.  Landing on the roof of the lean-to, snatching a blackbird right before my eyes.  Here one minute, gone the next. 

First thing in the morning, I’d open the salon’s shutters.  Once, not long after we’d moved into La Paperie, I was opening there was a clatter and a scuffle in the chimney.  As I turned around, a little owl landed in the empty grate startling me as much as it startled him.   He rolled onto the rug.  Brown, streaked white, the bird lay there, frightened its wide eyes following my every move.  I left the windows and shutters wide open and retreated outside, not wanting to panic the little owl further.  From the sun terrace where I sat, I heard it scratching and flapping about inside.  When the sound ceased, I went back inside.  He had gone, but left guano splattered on the floor.  I cleaned up glad the bird has escaped unscathed, reminding myself that if a bird poops on you or your home, it’s a sign of good luck and riches to come.

EVERYTHING’S CONNECTED:

Buddha : ‘When This is, That is.  From the arising of this comes the arising of that.  When this isn’t, that isn’t.  From the cessation of this comes the cessation of that.’

Robert Macfarlane :  ‘The first law of ecology being that everything is connected to everything else

’

LA PAPERIE

The small, stone cottage was a living organism.  Its oak beams were made from the trees of the forest and its walls were built from stone quarried from the hills.  A Virginia creeper scrambled all over the front walls in which all sorts of insects lived, providing a rich diet for the swallows when they were feeding their chicks, residing in mud-cup nests under the eaves, a space they share with the bats.  During the summer months, a variety of butterflies, peacocks, painted ladies, small tortoiseshells, red admirals, alighted on the back walls of the cottage encrusted with burnt-orange and pale- grey lichen.  They spread their wings in the sun, showing eye spots, designed to deter predators.  Small green-brown lizards scuttled between cracks in the stones searching for spiders.  Moss grew between the slate roof tiles, nourishment for millipedes.   And it had been known for a smooth snake to live in the timbers of the roof space, along with mice, often their food.  It was home to roosting barn owls too, whose pellets were gobbled up by the grubs. 

 Crickets lived in the cracks between the stones of the cobbled path which ran from the sun terrace, alongside the ramshackle shed, almost to the bottom of the garden.  The shed was shelter for spiders and mice.  Inside, its beams were swathed with netting and twine.  There was a collection of tools which belonged to the family before us.  All pitted with age: a pitchfork, hoes, rakes and spades, a scythe and an old- fashioned wheelbarrow, which we used in the garden.  Seed trays jostled for space on rickety wooden shelves.  There was a broom made from twigs and sets of ladders. 

Beyond the shed, there was a lean-to filled with logs, home to wood lice and hedgehogs.  The logs were our source of warmth.  We always checked there weren’t any insects on them before lighting the fire.  A metal pipe rose from the wood stove in the salon and ran up the wall into the roof space where we slept, warming the stones of the cottage before poking into the chimney which released the smoke.  From early autumn, until late spring, when the fire was kept burning, the aromatic wood smoke scented the cottage, permeating our hair and clothes, even our skin.  In the summer however, when we didn’t light the fire, the stones remained cool, ideal when the temperature often soared to thirty degrees centigrade.

The corrugated tin roof of the lean-to provided an ideal place for the adders to bask in the sun during June, July and August, even September when we had an Indian summer.  The male had black and white zigzag patterns, whilst the females were brown and cream.  At the very end of the garden, there was a wooden shack where spiders lived; butterflies, bluebottles and moths were caught in their webs dangling from the roof.  Against one wall there was a plank with a hole in it, balanced over a bucket half-full of water below.  This was our toilet.  The door had a big, diamond shape cut out of it, so when sitting on the plank, there was a fantastic panorama of the valley, where in spring and autumn, mist collected like clotted cream in a deep green bowl. ‘A room of one’s own’ (a loo with a view!)

The hazel nut, nectarine and peach trees were food for: squirrels, finches, thrushes.  During summer, lavender bushes flowered in profusion by the door, attracting a variety of butterflies and bees.   Throughout August to mid- September, honeysuckle clambered along the hedge, from the window sill; its sweet sent mingling with the lavender.  By the hawthorn hedge, there were raspberry, gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes.  We also grew artichokes, peas and beans.  The herb patch was an intoxicating mix: coriander, mint, parsley, basil and dill.  And we had lots of fruit trees: apples and pears, cherries and plums, nectarines and peaches. 

To the left of the cottage, near the pear trees, was my favourite spot in the whole garden.   From here, there were fields stretching like a patchwork quilt of varying shades of green, a lane running between them like a thread.  Every day, rain or shine, night or day, cold-snap or heat-wave, through spring, summer, autumn, winter, I stood in that spot, gazing into the distance, allowing the silence to rinse through my veins like cool, clear rain water, washing me clean.  Standing here was akin to being in a sacred place.  It was a sacred space, one that transformed me.  I was able to reconnect with the intuitive part of myself and the rhythms of the seasons.  I was able to ‘forgo the controls of the modern age in order to reconnect with older, deeper truths and needs’, says Dan Richards writing in Outposts in 2019. (p. 189) Those walking Wild Ways are already doing it.

My ‘needs’ back then, were fulfilled by slowing down and observing the changing landscape around me. The shifting colours, smells, textures, sights and sounds which defined the time of year.  Through each season I delighted in the comings and goings of the wildlife. 

During spring, birds nested, hares boxed, clumps of primroses sparkled with dew.  In summer, smooth snakes sunbathed, butterflies rested on stone walls, a sunset blushed pink.   Hedgehogs hibernated when autumn came, trees hung heavy with jewels of fruit, owls skimmed fields at dusk.  And in winter, I heard the vixen’s screams as she mated with her dog fox. 

Each month brought something memorable.  Each month brought something new.  This place showed me how to experience stillness and silence.  There was no sensory or information overload, no constant activity or continual interaction with others.  Here I could just be.  Sharon Blackie comments in Woman Rose Rooted that the modern world ‘keeps us forever moving, forever doing.’ (p. 43) I was lucky enough to escape that way of life standing in the garden at La Paperie.  I felt free.  I was me.

We hadn’t any water plumbed into the cottage, a conscious decision, part of our plan.  We bought bottled water for drinking. The water supply to La Paperie was pumped up from a well, which we used for washing ourselves, clothes, crockery, cutlery.  Each day, during the colder months, I pulled on a pair of old joggers and sweatshirt, shorts and T shirt when it was warmer, to go and pump water. 

In the Book Of Silence, Sara Maitland wrote about the letting go of the rituals of daily grooming, the stripping of the persona, the public self, leaving one’s true self naked in the world.  This was something that happened to me when I lived at La Paperie.  There was no pressure to present an image to the world, to play a role or define myself in relation to others; it was incredibly liberating. And I never wore a watch. (To be fair I never have done) I judged time by light and dark, whether I was alert or tired, hungry or not.    Each morning after throwing on my old clothes, I took our galvanised buckets from out of the kitchen and filled them to the brim at the pump, enough for us to have a strip-wash in front of the fire in the colder months.  Whereas in the summer months we ladled saucepans of water over ourselves in the garden. 

Nan Shepherd wrote Living Mountain during the last years of the Second World War, but I related to the satisfaction she felt when drawing water or gathering firewood.  I too slowed down, paid full attention to what I was doing, savouring every moment.  I thought of myself as ‘a thief of time’ to steal an expression from Neil Ansell, author of: Deep Country, a book he wrote following his five years living alone in a remote cottage in the Welsh hills. Like Ansell and Shepherd, performing simple tasks enabled me to appreciate the passing of time.  As I did them, I felt myself settle, even my internal organs and mind.  I took it as an opportunity to realign myself and develop an awareness of my body and its actions.  Looking back, it was a meditation; I realise that now.

At the turn of the century, yoga became a big part of my life; it still is.  In 2007, I studied Yoga Philosophy and Everyday Living with Angie Blowers.  It was fascinating.  Angi was a wonderful teacher.  Then I studied with Jan Wilding for a few years and lots of other inspiring teachers too. More recently, I’ve taken some fab courses with Shelley at MOY😊 and on these courses I met Lou, Liz, Carole, Emma, Sarah, Jo, Jenni, Marianne, Jules, Kelly, Julie, Karen, Elizabeth, Kerry-Ann, Frances, Maria, Lesley, Donna, Mel, Emma (who I also see at Jill’s workshops 😊) Hector, Martin, Lynn, Debbie, Claire, the gentle woman, Ann with the healing touch, and lots of other lovely people too. 

I was into dancing bare foot before yoga featured so strongly in my life.  In my twenties, I studied Contemporary Dance at uni.  It was then that I came across Isadora Duncan.  (And by Kate Bush who I saw on her first tour.  That’s another story. I’ll write of her fabulous work another time.  She is a wonderful Wild Woman) Isadora was a Wild Woman too, one who looked as if she’d just hopped off a Grecian Urn, with her bare legs and feet, wearing a white gown: no corset for her!  When many women were at home looking after families, she was dancing her way round the globe, natural as the waves and the wind, creating a sensation wherever she went, crying: ‘Don’t let them tame you.’   Good for her!  What a character she must have been. 

What is dance?

 ‘…for all Nature is dance: the dance of wind and waves, the rounds of seasons and tides, the swirl of planets and galaxies, the coming and going of thoughts and feelings, going on endlessly.  What is dance, but the continual loss and instantaneous regaining of balance?  Shiva’s dance is the fine edge of the universe tumbling into chaos and destruction and the simultaneous recreation of poise, in a continuous, ecstatic, spontaneous whirl of creation-destruction, creation-destruction.’

Shiva, Wold-Dieter Storl (p138-9)

 RECYCLED THINGS

At La Paperie the salon was furnished from recycled things.  The bookshelves were made from the ladders in the shed.  Dave sanded and varnished two sets then balanced planks of wood between them.  Cider barrels were transformed into coffee tables.  A quirky chandelier, made from the front wheel of a barrow, hung from the hand-hewn beamed ceiling.  There was an open fireplace, hearth, wood burner and a wicker basket of logs.  Bellows were hung from a hook on the chimney breast.  Two cane chairs with faded burgundy cushions were either side the fireplace, where we sat in the evenings to chat and share a bottle of wine.  And the occasional Calvados.  (Or some of the local farmer’s moonshine: Monsieur Chanel: skinny as a rabbit, no teeth.) A large rug, the same colour as the cushions, covered the floor which was originally concrete, but tiles were laid by Dave and my uncle, Doug. 

The stone walls of the cottage were so thick I sat in the windowsill and looked out over the front garden, where there was a second pump.  We didn’t use this one much, just sometimes during dry spells for watering the plants and shrubs and trees.  From the windowsill, I watched birds, animals and an occasional tractor trundle by.   

Nature writer and university lecturer, Richard Kerridge, explains in his book, Cold Blood, that creatures tend to exist in the present moment which is something humans, ‘envy’ because we find this difficult to do. Therefore, we don’t live fully.  At La Paperie, I was learning from the creatures around me and the tasks I did daily, to try and live in the moment.  Even now I don’t find it easy, but it absolutely makes sense to me.

I’d often see a creamy-caramel stoat with a black tip to its tail, threading its way through the hedge, a bundle of brown, speckled feathers in its mouth, usually a fledgling robin or blackbird, small prey.  Stoats have been known to kill and carry creatures ten times their own size, I’d many times seen them with crow chicks in the back field. Fierce predators, creeping low, covering ground, getting nearer, until leaping on to their prey.  And when a stoat can’t chase a rabbit down it ‘dances’ leaping and thrashing, spinning and jumping, even back flips, hypnotizing the rabbit, all the while stealthily moving closer and closer, until it can deliver the killing.  No wonder stoats are shown to be cunning and manipulative in Wind In The Willows. 

As Miriam Darlington wrote in (Owl Sense, p.104)  ‘We are diminished without these wild things, and to know them, to understand them, we need to come face to face with their impermanence.’

 And I’d like to add our impermanence, the impermanence of everything, for me, easier to get intellectually than emotionally.   

And it was here sitting in the windowsill, before I wrote my novellas, I tentatively started sketching again.

WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU: A SPARK OF THE DIVINE

The naturalist, poet and broadcaster, Paul Evans, who was, for a time, a colleague of mine, wrote in Field Notes From The Edge: ‘...places are dynamic, changeable, moody beings which shape their inhabitants and are shaped by them.’ 

Absolutely, I was reshaped, remoulded, rewilded by this place in northern France.  I became part of its landscape.

I recall one afternoon, when I was cutting back some briars the air suddenly changed, charged with a ferocious energy.  There was a sulphur-yellow cast to the sky flaring to electric-green with patches of dull ivory.  I tasted it, I smelt it, faintly metallic on the wind.  Flashes of lightning and dark rumbles of thunder. Clouds raced in shifting colours: lavender, violet, indigo, navy-blue, black. 

My senses were fully alert.  Sparrows were balls of feathers huddled in hedges.  The wind was picking up, a plectrum plucking branches, rolling and whining across the field, rushing into the garden, flattening the grass, bending the willow and sycamore trees, tearing blossom from branches. It whipped my hair and yanked at my fleece.  Fire- crackers of rain pitted the grass.  Fistfuls of hailstones stung my cheeks and scorched my ears and face.  I took shelter, watching from the kitchen door. 

As if by magic the hail suddenly stopped. 

The garden was a landscape of water and blossom.  There was a plop here and there.  A watery sun appeared in the milky-blue sky dribbling like a runny egg yolk over the garden.  There was the scent of rich earth and rain and ice.  My mind was silence.   I was stillness.  And at that moment.  I was nothing but the moment.   I was a stone in the wall, a leaf, a branch, a tree.

Then time moved on.  The moment had passed. 

Yet, I felt transformed by the experience.  There was this sudden awareness that my life was a jigsaw puzzle.  By slowing down, I was discovering pieces of myself that had always been there, but now I was slotting them together. 

I understood why I’d played Within You Without You again and again, driving my parents bonkers when I was a wild girl.  The lyrics truly resonated with me.  I got it on some deep intuitive level because it was how I felt too.  ‘And the time will come when you see we’re all one.’

Darshan is the Sanskrit word for glimpse or apparition, it means the essence of something. In Hinduism, a darshan refers to having a momentary connection to the divine in worship.  Without wishing to sound too heavy or flaky, I truly felt I’d experienced a connection to the divine that afternoon.

Avatamsaka Sutra, The Flower Garland Scripture, The Jewel Net Of Indra.

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great Sky God, Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions over his palace on Mount Meru. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single, perfect jewel at the net’s every node, and since the net is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.  There hang the jewels glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number.  Not only that.  Each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite. 

A MINDFUL MOMENT A MONEYLESS MAN

A MINDFUL MOMENT A MONEYLESS MAN

Before we had Min, Dave and I had lived in cities: Manchester, Amsterdam and Brussels.  

Much as I enjoyed the experience:

‘Anyone who lives in a city will know the feeling of having been there too long.  The gorge-vision that streets imprint on us, the sense of blockage, the longing for surfaces other than brick, concrete and tarmac’. (Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Place, p. 6)

So, when we became three, we moved to a village in Cheshire to be near our family and live in the countryside we’d thrived in as children. 

We were happy at first, surrounded by fields and woodland, streams and ponds, ideal habitats for wildlife, a biodiversity hot-spot. Hedgehogs came to our back door most night to feed.  Our garden was alive with birds and frogs, newts and squirrels. 

Simply for myself, I wrote sketches of the village and landscape in my journal.  (The Beat, Jack Kerouac, author of On The Road, apparently the book that’s been most stolen from libraries!  used this term saying: the writer was the same as an artist who sketched what he observed in a notebook while a writer did the same using words. Sketching changed the traditional narrative form)

Here’s one of my sketches:

A Mindful Moment In Cheshire

Haslington nestles between the railway town, Crewe, and the market town, Sandbach, not far from the home of Alan Garner, whose magical novels are rooted in the mythology and landscape of Cheshire.  In 1280, the village was known as ‘Hasillinton’ which means ’A Farm Amongst The Hazel Trees,’ now it’s a hotch-potch of old and new: thatched cottages, small estates, Edwardian and Duchy houses, surrounded by rich, pasture land. 

My Springer Spaniel, Sophie and I are walking past Crewe Cottage, 1888, once known as the Doctor’s House; I imagine the horse and trap outside waiting to take the doctor on his rounds.  We turn right, head down Slaughter Hill, where, in 1643 during the Civil war, Crewe and Haslington were pillaged by the Royalists. 

The ditches are confections of frost.  And the air is so cold, it is like breathing needles.    A dying sunbeam lights up the stile; I scoop Sophie under my arm and climb over.

The sky is brushstrokes of violet and rose.  I crunch over grass which is sharp as calligraphy.  Rabbits nibble the silver tufts, their eyes bright as ice.  On the distant hill, bundles of sheep graze in halos of gold.  A kestrel hovers, drops like a stone.  A grey squirrel performs acrobatics in the oak tree.  With her stumpy tail wagging, Sophie scampers towards the brook, which, so the story goes, once ran red with blood. 

The earth is bone-hard but it pulses with life beneath my feet.  I observe the harmony of light and shadow, patterns of branches and skeletal hedgerows.  I hear the low moo of cattle from Clap Gate Farm, smell snow on the wind and taste it on my tongue.   In the present moment, I appreciate the deep mystery of being alive in the natural world, aware of sounds and textures, like layers of rock, the vastness of the universe, all its complexities and systems, and I am part of it.  Everything is connected.

This habit of sketching in my journal came in handy many years later when I was lucky enough to write for the Guardian’s Country Diary.  All my diaries were set in Cheshire, many of them in Haslington.  It was a similar format I’d written for myself for years.  Now I was sharing my work in a national newspaper.  It felt a bit weird.  Good though.

As I said, we enjoyed living in the countryside.  

Until the workmen with diggers and bulldozers and chainsaws moved in. 

Trees were uprooted.  Hedges butchered.  Flowers crushed.  Ponds drained.   Streams damned.  Fields churned into piles of earth.   Barns converted.  Habitats trashed.  The wild was tamed.  Where I’d once walked over fields and through woods with my friend Jane and our dogs, Jane’s an Old English Sheep dog, Maya, and me with, Sophie, there were office blocks, a bank, health club, hotel and restaurant:  Lunch In 15 Minutes-That’s our promise.
 

The sound of traffic roaring along the new bypass replaced birdsong.  Wildlife had lost the precious countryside it needed to live and survive.  Granted a small patch had been reclaimed, a designated conservation space.   Where there were signs telling its visitors to keep to prescribed paths and to look carefully for the wildlife: oh, the irony.  There were rustic picnic tables and benches, bird boxes and an ornamental pond.  All very worthy, but it was a contrived environment, one I didn’t feel comfortable with.  Despite its attempts to be welcoming, it felt unfriendly, a place of rules and regulations to be obeyed, a place of control. There had been a complete and utter transformation of the landscape I’d loved as a wild woman.  Something died in me.  I stopped writing. 
 

Founder of Freeconomy Community, Irish activist, Mark Boyle, lived a ‘moneyless lifestyle’ for a year.  (I can’t say I’ve actually done that, but Dave and I lived a six -month furnitureless lifestyle’ in Amsterdam.  I lie.  We had one chair.  Between us.  And a hot plate.)  Boyle who later adopted a life without technology for a year, says in his book about the experience: The Way Home, ‘we needed to reconnect with the natural world again, as much for our own sake as for nature’s’. (p.  6) It was time to put our fingers ‘on the pulse of life again…to feel the elements in their enormity, to strip away the nonsense and lick the bare bones of existence clean’ (p. 8)

I can soooooooo relate to what Mark Boyle says.  I was hankering after Wild Ways again.  As Eli H. Radinger writes in The Wisdom Of Wolves:  ‘Since prehistoric times humans have gone into nature to reflect on things, to find answers or get to know themselves’. p. 176) 

It was time for me to do just that.

LIFE IN THE WILD: Ben Fogle: Eat Your Heart Out

The clocks had gone forward.  Days were beginning to lengthen.  Evenings were drawing out.  The land was waking up.  Budding horse chestnut trees flanked the lanes.  The ditches were awash with primroses and cowslips.  Celandines glowed like gold coins.  Dandelions stood bold as brass in the grass.  The wood we passed was a haze of bluebells.  Scattered under silver birch trees there were star-like, white flowers: wood anemones, lifting their petals towards the sunlight which poured through the branches like liquid honey.  

We were on a camping holiday enjoying precious time together.  I was trying to get back on track.  As I said, something had died in me.  And I’d stopped writing. 

We were driving through northern France. On and on, kilometre after kilometre, without seeing another car.  Only a solitary farmer wearing earth-brown overalls and mud-caked wellingtons driving a tractor.  And an old woman in a navy-blue pinafore and head-scarf, splitting logs with an axe in a farm yard, surrounded by chickens squabbling and scratching and strutting.  Nearby a brown and white mongrel pup tethered to a kennel yapped trying to tug free from its chain.

I was reminded of the words of the poet, Gerald Manley Hopkins: ‘Nothing is so beautiful as spring’, as we rounded a bend and came upon a lake shimmering like grey-blue silk, encircled by poplar trees and jonquils, lifting their golden trumpets in the wind. 

The lanes were narrower now.  Trees creeping closer.  Branches over hanging: twisted and knotted with ivy.  A dim-green tunnel, leading us deeper into the landscape, far away into another realm.  The feeling was like stepping out of time: spellbinding. 

We drove through the ville-fleurie, St Fraimbault, up the hill towards a cluster of stone cottages.  Charcoal lines of smoke drawn from their chimneys to the sky.  The air was pungent with woodsmoke.  Passing a church made from granite and a village school, we idled along Rue des Tilleul lined with lime trees, alongside a stream glinting in the sunlight like a coil of copper wire.

Then we came across it for the first time, sheltered by a tall wall bounding the rectory, a small, stone cottage from a fairy tale peeping through peach, nectarine and hazelnut trees, tall grass and briars.   In an instant something shifted in me.  My whole body was singing. Every cell vibrating with energy and joy.  It was the strangest feeling as if I was re-rooting into the earth, coming home to myself.  I knew it was where I was meant to be. 

Twenty nine years later, while watching: Ben Fogle: New Lives In The Wild (23^rd April, 2019, Channel 5) British born, Karen Hadfield who had made her home in the Moroccan Sahara, said to Ben Fogle:

‘You do not necessarily belong where you were born, you can belong elsewhere.’  Exactly my experience when I first encountered La Paperie nestled in the lush landscape of northern France, like Karen: ‘I’d found home’.

STORY-TELLING AND ICE MAIDENS

Most of my narratives and poems are rooted and expressive of this place in northern, France, my dream space.
   

 By being in nature, living Wild Ways, I was led to ask the big spiritual questions:

How did the universe come to be?  Who am I?  Why am I here?

To try to discover answers to these questions, I wrote my first novella: Mirror Cities.  
Annick, my reinvention of Anne Frank, has a task:

‘Find a path through Mirror Cities.  Listen to stories, hear how it all began.  Discover how it will all end.’

It was through the writing of this book, I was exploring my spiritual life, I guess.  I came across a child’s book: World Of Difference which explored the world’s belief systems, in particular Creation Stories.  I was hooked.  Mixing belief systems with postmodernism (which I was studying at the time) and studying the tenets of buddhism (I was taking a yoga philosophy course) was an intoxicating mix.  I’ve never got over it!! 😊

My second novella came about when I meditated on my powerful reconnection with this place.  

Had I been here before, maybe in another life?  Like Eve, my protagonist in the novel I wrote: Dream Space? Whatever, it was it was the place where I belonged, my homeland.  
In this work I was reflecting on the question: What does it mean to be human?  What is the point and purpose of life?  Sufis have yearned to know what makes life living: The Epic Of Gilgamesh is about a hero’s quest to figure out how he should live knowing that he will die.  

Dream Space was also inspired by the discovery of the remains of an Ice Maiden, who’d lived near the Chinese, Mongolian and Kazakhst borders two and a half thousand years ago.  

Her remains were discovered at the bottom of a sepulchral pit.  The pit was filled with 6 horses, dishes, food, jugs, knives.  Her head was resting on a pillow covered with fur.  She had personal things around her: a mirror, amulets, beads, pendants.  But what blew me away were her tattoos.  She had tattoos on her arms, shoulder blades and thumbs of a deer with a grphon’s beak.  It was thought that a woman buried with such respect meant she possessed remarkable gifts: a shaman, a healer, a story-teller.

I read everything I could about the Ice Maiden.  She became Eve’s female ancestor in my book: a woman of wisdom who walked the Wild Ways.

It may sound a cliché, but my creative life is my spiritual life.  They are one and the same. Like the natural world, seasons and wildlife they are the ‘divine’ in my life. Yoga and meditation too, I’d weaved Hinduism and Buddhism philosophy into the fabric of my stories.  Instinctively I believed in much of their teachings even before I’d studied them, but that’ll come later. 

I was reading recently about a woman, who’d reconnected with her religion after lapsing for a period of time.  She claimed, in this feature, that for society to function people need a philosophy or a political ideology through which we connect and sustain each other: I’m all for that.  For her, she said, it was her faith.  For me, I thought, it’s my reconnection with Wild Ways.

RUNNING WITH WOLVES

As cheesy as it sounds, when I re-connected!!??? With La Paperie, I found me again. And I understood what had died in me.  Why I’d stopped writing.  It was because the land where I’d lived had been tamed.  I’d become alienated from nature.  I was grieving for something I’d lost, my ‘innate instinctual Self’ the ‘powers that are natural to the feminine’.  I’d become ‘overdomesticated’ (Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, p. 10) 

Yet, when we came across La Paperie, intuitively I knew it was the place for us.  It was the place I’d been dreaming of: stillness and silence, roots and adventure.  In the words of the philosopher, poet, nature and prose writer simplicity, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).  Like his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s work was steeped in the Hindu scriptures of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.

‘I find the notion of voluntary simplicity keeps me mindful of what is important, of an ecology of mind, spirit and body and world in which everything is interconnected, and every choice has far-reaching consequences.  You don’t get to control it all.  But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more. ‘

Absolutely but it was more than that.  This was the place where I could be free and reclaim the feminine, re-awaken the ‘wolf-woman’ in me, the guardian of my primal instincts.  This was the place where I’d become whole and regain my creativity.  And, as I’ve explained, I did.

Dave and I took out a loan with a French bank for the sum of one hundred and twenty thousand francs.  We bought La Paperie from an elderly couple who had raised their family without running water, indoor toilet or bathroom.  There wasn’t any central heating either, only a fire grate and wood stove.  Nevertheless, they’d been content, but now it was time to join their adult children and grandchildren, who lived one hundred and twenty kilometres away in the capital city of the Sarthe department, Le Mans.  

Even though the French had first option on properties for sale in villages, many families were choosing to move to towns and cities instead.  

The rural way of life was disappearing, a way of life we were keen to embrace.   

Finally, after eventually completing the paper work at the end of the year, we moved into La Paperie and our reconnection with Wild Ways began…

WHO HEALED THE EARTH HISTORICALLY? WHO IS HEALING THE EARTH NOW?

Our ancestors believed that older women, crones, ‘healed’ the Earth.  Historically, the crone was an empowered wise woman, the embodiment of feminine wisdom; these women were honoured and respected as goddesses. I believe the word crone is derived from the old word crown, suggesting wisdom radiates from the head like a halo.  Crones were healers, herbalists, midwives, sages, leaders, whose knowledge was sought to guide others.  She represented the power of the tribe.  In myths she was stronger than any god.  In her Teutonic name, Elli or Old Age, she conquered Thor, the god of strength in a wrestling match.  Crones took charge of official sacrifices and religious rites, conducting ceremonies for each event from birth to death, setting up calendars for seasonal spiritual festivals, seeing life as cyclic rather than linear. The crone became relegated to the Wicked Witch and Hag archetype of our fairy tales.  Yet, this is a corruption of the original meaning of the word witch and hag originally derived from ‘wit’, denoting wisdom and ‘hagio’ meaning holy. 

Under Christianity, the woman-despising church stripped women of their spiritual prominence and mocked their songs, rituals and stories.  They were persecuted and executed as witches by a patriarchy who were jealous and threatened by their economic and social authority within society.  But the good news is, women are becoming empowered once again!  

Women are rediscovering their voices, bonding together to reclaim their feminine values born out of intuition and feeling, rather than the rational and the logical.  Rewilding women have a vision: to re-invigorate their authentic power and re-shape the world through the perspective of the feminine for future generations, a place of nurturing and healing.  Practising ancient arts: goddess worship, yoga, chanting, storytelling, weaving, singing, spinning, knitting, cloth making.   They are myth makers, gardeners, bee-keepers, herbalists, understanding that there is alchemy in mindful dancing and moon rituals, peace to be found in quiet places and blessings, knowledge gained through the study of shamanism, mythology, the Tarot, fairy tales.

I’ve been doing some of these things at a wonderful place: Ministry Of Yoga, an oasis in Crewe, where Shelley and Dan provide a sacred space to practice: yoga, elemental dance, led by Kerry-Ann, meditation and chanting.  Again, I’ve met fabulous people.  At MOY the community share knowledge, skills, thoughts and ideas.  

Louise and I shared a course: Creativity as Spiritual Practice.  And I’m running Creative Writing workshops there.  It’s a nurturing place: people working together, co-operating, sharing common values, practising mindfulness and compassion, caring for the environment: reconnecting with Wild Ways, so important these days, likewise having access to green spaces.  As the World Health Organisation says, walking in green spaces improves wellbeing and helps in the treatment of mental illness. 

In her ground-breaking book: Woman & Nature, Susan Griffin says: ‘It is observed that women are closer to the earth’. (p.9) Is this why women from all over the globe, from all walks of life and all ages, are taking the initiative to live Wild Ways and become guardians of the land once more?  Perhaps you’re one of these women?  If you’re reading this, the chances are, you are!

The late, Polly Higgins, international lawyer, described as one of the most inspiring figures of the green movement, was committed to criminalising ecocide-significant harm to the earth. She was the author of Eradicating Ecocide and creator of the first commercial trust fund for Earth. Following her death author and activist, Naomi Klein tweeted in April 2019: ‘Her work will live on.’

Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg, is currently raising awareness of climate issues. Saying climate change is an ‘existential crisis’.  She staged a climate strike outside the Swedish parliament, inspiring thousands of young people across the world to carry out similar protests.  Since then, she’s become a global phenomenon, speaking at the Davos and United Nations. 

Founder of Women Fest: Tiana Jacout, says: ‘the festival’s roots date back via the Suffragettes and other freedom-fighter to the women of the ancient world.’  She created the festival to celebrate ‘women’s creativity and potential: it’s all about realising what we can do and what we can be, and it’s about sharing our gifts freely with one another to create a new spirit of womanly giving.’ 

She speaks of the ‘new wave of female empowerment ‘, adding: ‘It feels to me as though most of the problems we’re seeing come from patriarchy and an imbalance in the energies in the world, and this is all about working out how to rediscover our womanly power and put it to better and wider use, in a way that will benefit all of humankind.’ (Guardian: 01:07:18) 

‘To benefit all of humankind’, I agree, whole heartedly, but I’d like to add, to benefit all beings.  

Returning to WILD WAYS acknowledges that we’re not separate from nature, we’re part of it. 

Elli H. Radinger, who was once a lawyer, but gave up the profession to study wolves, says in her book: The Wisdom Of Wolves that she became aware of this interconnection of all things through the study of wolves:  

‘…we are all part of a whole.  Our ecosystem is a fine and sensitive network in which every plant and living creature has its place-even us.  If we take something out, the puzzle shifts’. 

Too true, there are serious implications for the loss of wildlife habitats, something that troubles me deeply, something I’ll return to in this blog. 

You see, I was a wild girl, but I lost my wild side and became ‘sanitized’. (Women Who Run With The Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, p. 10) Yet, by living Wild Ways, I’ve come full circle and found it again, but I’m not a girl anymore, I’m a wild woman!  

So, I guess this isn’t just a blog, it’s a journey, one of losing and finding, some of the places I’ve been to on my quest to rewild, and some of the wo/men I’ve met along the way.  Wo/men who’ve kindly shared their experiences, practices and stories with me.  Maybe you are one of them?  Welcome, I hope you enjoy keeping me company.  Let’s be on our Wild Way…

We need a spiritual and cultural transformation...

 ‘We need a spiritual and cultural transformation’, said founder of the World Resource Institute, Gus Speth, ‘And we scientists don’t know how to do that.’  Maybe scientist don’t but it’s possible that WO/MEN who’ve reconnected with WILD WAYS do? 

What does it mean to return to Wild Ways?  What are the implications for future generations and our 

planet if we choose to live this way?  

My blog is a search for answers to these questions.  It’s also about my quest to live WILD WAYS 

‘being in nature’ in a small, stone cottage in rural France, my practice of creative writing, mindful dance, yoga and the people I’ve met along the way.  

Welcome to the first post on this journey...

To live WILD WAYS we need to rewild which is not about going back in time, it’s more about being in touch with the intuitive part of ourselves, our primal natures, by reconnecting with the natural world and the rhythms of the seasons.  It involves ‘taking care of the land’. (Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer, p. p9.) rekindling a respect for the planet, wishing to become part of its stories, mysticism, enchantment, ancestors and memories. 

Many women are in touch with their roots through myths, symbols, ceremonies, rituals, making pilgrimages to sacred spaces to reconnect with goddesses and holy places.  

I’ve been on journeys too, many memorable: Samye Ling Monastery in Scotland and The Chalice Well in Glastonbury, with the amazing yoga teacher: Jill Amison.  Who shares her practice so generously inviting us to unlock our potential with myths, ritual and sacred practice by singing and fashioning crafts, as well as yoga and meditation.  I’ve been to lots of Jill’s workshops, meeting lovely women: Issy, Lesley, Marie, sharing our journey, leaving inspired and enriched by the experience.  We are members of a Wild Woman Moon Circle.  And have ventured to Wales and the Peak District, thriving in the landscape.  

I’ve also rewilded with Francesca and Andrew at Casale Pundarika in Tuscany, spending silent time, practising yoga and walking in the wood early morning.  Sadly, not hearing any songbirds due to poaching!  

What incites people to poach songbirds, destroying ecosystems?  

We’re living through bewildering times.  Post-truth, fake-news, political unrest, angst about social media, climate change and the meaninglessness of celebrity and consumer culture.  Many eople are uprooted, displaced, homeless. We’re worrying about our carbon print but travelling all over the world anyway.  Ticking places off our bucket list: Cuba, India, Peru, Thailand: Been There, Done That, Got The T Shirt. Wherever we go leaving rubbish and waste.  Gorging on fast-food living at a fast pace, addicted to gadgets, exploiting the Earth’s resources, polluting our oceans with plastic. 

As the Pulitzer-winning author of eco-novel The Overstory , a novel which explores questions of activism and conservation, says ‘We’re at this watershed moment where our destruction of biodiversity and old ecosystems is accelerating.  At the same time, it’s also clear to anyone who’s paying attention, that we’re in a moment of slowly transforming consciousness.  What’s not clear is 

whether that moment has a chance of becoming more than a moment, whether we are now moving towards a new relationship with the neighbours with whom we share the planet.’ 

(Observer, 12^th May, 2019)

I’d like to think that by returning to Wild Ways, becoming guardians of the land, rediscovering the mysticism, magic and sacredness of our living planet, enjoying its stories, practising rituals, ceremonies and our creativity, this transformation of consciousness ‘has a chance of becoming more than a moment’.