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…