The Night Sky
There is something magical about sitting in the garden at la Paperie during the evening. Virginia Woolf wrote that we are no longer
ourselves in the dark. I agree, mysterious
things can happen, like in fairy tales. I
look at the moon which influences our lives in so many ways. Moon Yin: her cycle of twenty-nine days
corresponds to a woman’s menstrual cycle.
It was the new moon, the Maiden, the seed phase, the fire festival, Beltane,
which celebrates fertility and the coming of summer. A time when the boundaries between consensual
reality and the Otherworld, the one of the imagination, were erased, a
time when faeries inhabited hawthorns: the faerie tree. Beltane was also associated with water
rituals with visits to wells or lakes.
There was a canopy of stars, such amazing clarity: the
Plough and Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt and Venus. Creation and destruction, stars
forming from gas and heat, others burning out, dying, black holes forming. I identified with Robert MacFarlane, who
wrote in The Wild Places that he
wanted: ‘to reach somewhere remote, where starlight fell clearly, where the
wind could blow upon me.’ I was lucky to
experience that at La Paperie where
there was no light pollution. Until I’d lived at La Paperie, I had never known anything like it: the darkness,
stillness and silence. I loved it,
feeling safe and unreachable, deep in the countryside ‘The feeling of being
hidden, unknown, maybe untraceable, is exhilarating.’ Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure.
In the UK, many of the last couple of generations have grown
up without being able to see the stars properly; there is so much light
pollution. This also has consequences
for wildlife. Birds chirp throughout the
night in anticipation of a dawn that does not arrive for hours. There were no birds chirping at La Paperie, just the hoot of a tawny owl
and the sound of the bats darting from dim mauve shadows under the eaves. Apparently, they can live for thirty years or
more and occupy the same roosts for their life span, so the bats I watched had
been at the cottage longer than I had: old friends. Flapping and fluttering, they flew in circles
above my head, so close, I felt their wings almost touch my hair. Diving and swooping, heading for the fruit
trees to pick insects from the leaves.
To locate their prey in the dark, bats use a technique called
‘echolocation,’ whereby they emit high pitched sounds, usually too high for the
human ear, which ‘bounce off’ insects and moths, enabling bats to track and
feed off them. They make different
sounds and sing to attract mates.
As I studied the night sky, I discovered another jigsaw
piece: D.H. Lawrence. I came across him
in my mid-teens at school. When one of my
favourite collections of poems was: Birds Beasts & Flowers. D.H. Lawrence was said to have started this
collection in Tuscany in 1920 and completed it in 1923 in New Mexico. The poems were written as he made his
pilgrimage through less developed countries as an antidote to ‘mechanised’
Western society. His journey prompted
fresh insights into birds, beasts and
flowers, including: The Humming Bird,
The Mosquito, Snake, Fish and Almond Blossom. The poems truly spoke to me for their
evocation of the natural world, but it was the man that captivated me too.
In his essay The Real
Thing, D.H. Lawrence wrote of being in touch with the ‘vivid life
cosmos’. As a girl, I reflected on his
words, the idea of drawing strength from the depth of the universe, from the
depth of the stars. Lawrence believed that
there is a life-flame wreathing through the cosmos, which renews all living
things, and that the purpose of life is to attain mystical union with the
world. When people ‘lose their contact
with the eternal life-flame things go wrong’.
Most of Lawrence’s books are critical of modern life and
growing materialism, claiming that people were becoming alienated from their
selves and the natural world. His ideas and passion resonated strongly with
me. Now, many years later, I sat on the
steps, at La Paperie, looking at the
stars, his ideas, which I devoured voraciously as a teenager, now made complete
sense to me. Our sense of separation
from the natural world, our seeing nature as something ‘other’ to us, is the
route of some of our ecological problems.
Maybe, like D. H.
Lawrence, Nan Shepherd and Thoreau we need to re-develop a heightened sense of
connection to the natural world around us before it is too late?
As Michael McCarthy wrote in Moths, the bond we share with nature ‘is at the very heart of what
it means to be human; that the natural world where we evolved is no mere
background, but at the deepest psychological level it remains our home.’ (p.
61.) This place was my home. From the moment I first saw La Paperie, I
knew it would change my life
irrevocably, and it did. Over the time
we spent there, my relationship with the small, stone cottage and the
surrounding landscape, was one of the most profound and significant of my life.
SUMMER
‘The air is ponderous
with summer scents.’ Stevie Smith.
Summer has arrived.
There is light eighteen hours a day now, so I need less sleep than in
the winter months and I don’t want to waste a minute of the days. So, I’m up early each morning and out into
the garden. This fine June morning a
blackbird is singing in the pear tree:
‘I saw his tongue, and crocus-coloured bill/Parting and closing as he
turned his trill/ as Thomas Hardy described it.
Above, swallows and swifts wheel through a cloudless, azure
sky. The sun, a hot palm pressed between my shoulder blades as I sweep the
grasses aside, sauntering along the path.
The grass needs scything it is long and dry, flickering with movement,
sparkling as if sprinkled with semi-precious stones: alive with butterflies. A swarm spin and spiral as one entity, a
flexuous shape. There are painted
ladies, swallow tails and red admirals, cabbage whites, common blues and orange
tips too. The poet, Robert Frost,
likened butterflies to ‘flowers that fly/and almost sing.’ His words encapsulate my feelings about
butterflies; they are ethereal creatures that have always fascinated me, ever
since I was a child, when, I’m ashamed to say, I caught them in nets, to get a
closer look, as they settled on Dad’s cabbages.
I watch them now, thinking that the life of a butterfly is short,
likewise human life, so it’s important to celebrate the here and now.
The nettles are thronged with peacock butterflies. They have red wings with black markings,
spectacular patterns, their eye spots evolved to confuse predators, are reminiscent
of a purple,
peacock-feather.
These butterflies will also flash their wings and rub them together to
produce a hissing sound in front of the predator to startle it. The undersides
of the wings, however, are very dark, almost black, an excellent camouflage
when resting on trees. They mate in
May. Females often lay their eggs
underneath nettle leaves, sometimes as many as five hundred at a time. After a couple of weeks the caterpillars
hatch and spin a silky communal web.
Yet, they pupate alone, encased in the cocoon, finally emerging as an
adult butterfly.
Undoubtedly, their delicacy and sumptuous colours attract me
to butterflies, but it is so much more; it is their link with spirituality and
fairy tales that I find so appealing.
Psyche is the Greek word for soul and psyche is represented in ancient
Greece as a butterfly. Many myths honour
the butterfly as a symbol of transformation because of its metamorphosis as
I’ve described from: egg to larvae to
chrysalis and from chrysalis to butterfly.
The process of transformation that the butterfly undergoes is also said
to mirror the process of spiritual transformation. So it goes, each and every one of us has the
possibility to be reborn, by retreating from the world, going into our inner being,
until we are transformed and reborn, ready to fly. Maybe this was the case for the Vincent Van
Gogh.
From May 1889 until
May 1890, during a severe bout of mental illness, Van Gogh was a patient at an
asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence. During
this time, he was confined to working in the abandoned gardens of the grounds
where the grass was unkempt and mixed with all kinds of weeds and wild flowers:
a wonderful habitat for butterflies.
Towards the end of his stay, inspired by working in the wild patches and
his love of nature, he painted a series of butterfly paintings: Poppies And Butterflies, Two White Butterflies, Grass And Butterflies, Tall Grass With Butterflies, and another
which showed a moth, The Great Peacock
Moth. I imagine working in the landscape was very much part of his healing
process.
According to Marina Warner author of: From The Beast To The Blonde, metamorphosis defines the fairy tale
and like the butterfly they are associated with transformation: a frog becomes
a
handsome prince, mice become coach men, a pumpkin a
sparkling coach, rags to riches. The
fairy tale, then, like the butterfly, are symbolic of transformation, freedom
and hope. How can I not be
charmed and entranced by butterflies?
Beyond the nettles is where the raspberries grow. For a moment I imagine my daughter as a little
girl. She is wearing her straw hat with
the pale-blue ribbon, cerise swimsuit with lime green stars and spangled flip
flops. Her knees are smeared with earth
from crouching behind the wall making a den.
In my mind’s eye, I watch her picking the raspberries and eating them,
hands stained red, juice dribbling off her chin.
A peacock butterfly dances in front of me, landing on a
thistle behind the shed where, as Ted Hughes had it: ‘ Thistles spike the summer air/And crackle
open under a blue-black pressure.’
Apparently, these herbaceous plants, with their prickly stems and
leaves, rounded heads of purple flowers, are symbols of an enlightened person,
one who has gained their crown. I wish.
The word charm suits these little birds, they are so
attractive and their song a joy to listen to. I am listening to them now, a
light, liquid twittering and trilling.
Goldfinches are often to be found on these thistles. We have deliberately left them and the nettles,
food for the butterflies and goldfinches; their thin beaks are ideally suited
for extracting the seeds. Flitting,
flashes of colour, buttery-bars across their wings, red faces because they
dipped them in Christ’s blood, trying to pull thorns from his crown, so I
believe.
Squeezing through the gap in the hedge, in the words of
Thomas Hardy, ‘I enter a
daisy-and-buttercup land’. I love
daisies. They are unpretentious, well
known and plentiful, which is why we tend to take them for granted, barely giving
them a second glance. I pick one,
studying it, as if for the first time:
snow-white ray florets and deep-yellow centre: perfect, no wonder its
botanical name, Bellis perennis comes
from the Latin word for beauty. Daisies
evoke many childhood memories in me, as
I’m sure they do in many people.
I recall distant summers sitting in tall grass with childhood friends: he loves me, he loves me not, all the
while pulling the white florets away.
Years later I made daisy chains with Min as a small girl in this
field. We hung them round our necks and
wrists and even placed them like tiaras on our heads. And we held buttercups under each others’
chins, if there was a gold glow reflection, it said we ‘liked butter’. Daisies
are our silver/buttercups are our gold/ this is all the treasures we can have
or hold, I sang to her sometimes, a song I had sung at Primary school.
There are farmhouses, their window boxes spilling a blaze of
geraniums, hanging baskets bright with petunias, busy with butterflies and bees
as I drive to St Fraimbault for some groceries.
Lemon gladioli stand to attention in gardens. Cows with treacle eyes chew grass in the
apple orchards. They stop to gawp as I
pass by, pale flanks rising and falling.
There are meadows dotted with scarlet poppies ‘little hell flames’
according to Sylvia Plath. For me, they
are an Impressionist vista, cut through by the river Colmont, swift flowing and clear.
When he returned from England in 1871, Claude Monet settled in
Argenteuil where he often painted the poppy fields en plein-air. The fact that
a poppy, a ‘blown-ruby’ according to leading art critic of the Victorian era
and painter, John Ruskin, is the most ‘transparent and delicate of all the
blossoms of the fields,’ and yet so enduring, is part of its appeal for
me. Poppy seeds can live for hundreds of
years.
Vivid azure cornflowers or bleuets mingle with the poppies.
Bleuets are the equivalent of
our Remembrance Day Poppy and
associated with the French soldiers who fought in the 1st World
War. Tall grasses, poppies and bleuets wafting in the breeze: a blur of
red, blue, green passing by the car window: a painter’s palette of colour, such
an evocative sight of summer, so moving too, when I think of the associations.
I take a bend in the road and see something on the bridge
over the river that completely takes me by surprise. As I get closer, I pull up and slowly get
out of the car so as not to disturb them.
Otters are known to be such elusive creatures and yet a mother and her
cubs are right in front of me. I can
hardly believe my eyes. There they are,
smooth and supple, as if made from oil, playing
and cavorting along the road, existing in their own private
world, seemingly oblivious to me. What a
special moment: a gift on this glorious morning. They stop nonchalantly on the
riverbank. Miriam Darlington, in her
book Otter Country, says that when a wild creature is
observed, especially unexpectedly, it takes time to adjust as our senses
register strangeness and shock. This is
exactly what I am experiencing now. I’m motionless, trying to process what I
see before me. A smooth head sleeks
through the water. It has little ears,
long whiskers and its body, as it twists and turns, is as lithe as a
muscle. In a flicker of light and shade,
the family, all in one swift movement, slide down the bank, dissolving into the
river, as if they are a part of it, leaving only a hint of wake. And I am left standing in the middle of the
road, speechless. I drive back, through
the village, up the hill exhilarated, eager to share what I had just seen. It is only when I arrive back at La Paperie I realise I’ve forgotten to
buy the groceries.
SUMMER SOLSTICE
The Summer Solstice has arrived. The longest day and shortest night of the
year. Solstice means ‘sun stands still’
as the sun appears to stop in its journey across the sky. I watch it now, blazing from a bright blue
sky, thinking of the bonfire built by our ancestors to protect against faerie
spiritsroaming freely. Apparently,
faeries appear to those who stand under an elder tree on Midsummer’s Eve and
carry you off, where to, I don’t know. I think about foraging the elderflowers
for cordial. There will be berries for
wine, come autumn time, but I don’t want to think about autumn now, better to
enjoy the moment. Although the lightest time of the year, the Summer Solstice
is the moment when it begins the reversal of the long light, returning us to
the dark.
