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 1^st 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.

    

Gather & Share Of The Earth...

WALKING

Most days I took an early morning walk at La Paperie.  Past the rectory, a tall house made from granite, imposing despite its neglect; its garden a tangle of grasses and weeds. The shutters were always closed.  Next door there was a tumbled down cottage, rusting farming equipment propped against its front wall, a wreck of a tractor by the gate.  I meandered through the village, along a track across the fields and back down Rue de Tieulle. 

In April the banks and ditches were a violet-blue haze, fairy flowers, magical with an intoxicating scent.  Tilleul means lime tree, not related to the citrus lime.  In France tilleul are a symbol of liberty.  During the war, lime blossom was used to make tea, drunk to calm and soothe the nerves.  I never tried it, but I’m told it’s reminiscent of chamomile: a light, sweet flavour.  The plaque above the solid oak door of the granite church read: THANKS TO US ARMY POUR NOTRE LIBERATION. 

I imagined what the village looked like during the 2^nd World War: jeeps and soldiers and gunshots.

In the village, the garage and lone magasin were sleeping, the cottages too. Their shutters closed.  It was as if it had fallen under a magic spell.  And yet, chickens gossiped and squabbled in gardens or pecked through rows of peas and beans and lettuce in the allotments. Lean-tos were stacked with logs.  There were watering cans and rain butts, wheelbarrows and piles of kindling.  Hanging baskets planted with peonies.  Window boxes with geraniums growing sturdy and green.  Often there’d be a song thrush with its ear to the ground. 

I walked along the track across the fields, listening for the high-pitched squeals male moles let out when searching for females.  As a child I saw moles hanging by their fleshy snouts from barbed wire fences, black velvet fur, blind eyes, shovel feet and long, curved claws.  Sometimes their fur was delicate as lace showing every detail of the skeleton within; a consequence of flies laying their eggs under the skin and maggots eating the mole from the inside out.  Thankfully, I hadn’t seen such a grisly sight in a long time. 

It’s widely known that moles are shy creatures, rarely seen, staying deep underground burrowing for food, surfacing during the wetter spring and autumn months, when earthworms are plentiful on the top soil.  I always saw evidence of their presence: mole hills.  It’s no wonder a group of moles are called a labour, they spend so much time tunnelling underground, throwing up earth as they go, searching for a mate or earthworms.  I’ve heard the moles’ saliva contains a toxin that paralyzes earthworms which are stored in underground larders.  Before eating them, they squeeze the worms to remove dirt and waste from their guts.  As I walked, I thought of home loving mole in the Wind In The Willows an introvert, introduced to the world around him by Ratty who teaches him to swim and find the meaning of the Wind In The Willows.

 

I am of the same mind as the theologian and existentialist, Soren Kierkegaard, who claimed that every day he walked himself into a state of well-being and away from illness.   Likewise, the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who, between 1879 to 1889, walked alone for up to eight hours a day scribbling in notebooks.  He attributed his walking as a ‘cure’ for his crippling migraines.  And it was during this time that he wrote his greatest books: Beyond Good & Evil and On The Genealogy Of Morality.

The benefits to health both physiological and psychological, associated with being in the natural world is well established now. There is an increasing body of research which shows that people spending time in green spaces are less likely to report psychological distress compared with those living in urban spaces.  It’s proven to reduce blood pressure, heart rate and the production of stress hormones, which, in turn, aids concentration, lifts mood enhances self-esteem and combats depression. 

Nature Cure by Richard Mabey is a frank and honest account of his depression and the positive impact nature had helping him cure his illness.  Without doubt being close to nature does appear to make us happier and healthier.  I can certainly vouch for that, being in the countryside is invigorating but also restful, a winning combination. Walking in the natural world infuses me with a sense of wellbeing and enables me to enter the rhythm of my life and the seasons.  There is a meditative quality to walking along the lanes and through the fields, moments of calm and reflection, silence and the spiritual. 

I agree with Paul Evans who claims that:   ‘...the walk changes the walker…What the walker started off thinking at the road stile may not be what they end up thinking at the lane stile/The path becomes a fluid state of mind between, away from and towards other thoughts, moods, intuitions, ideas.  It is a state of disorientation like that which occurs in rituals, which alter the state of mind, before during and after the ritual.’

Yesterday was a point in question for me.  I was so lucky to go walking in the woods with ‘alchemist of the heart’, Glennie Kindred, the unique expert on Earth traditions, and the wonderful Wild Women Moon Circle: Jill, Lesley, Emma, Kate, Kerry-Ann, Bev, Karen.  

In Glennie’s own words: ‘My books and life are about finding and sharing simple, heartfelt ways to make connections…to each other, to the Earth and the Earth’s cycles, to the trees and the plants, to the 5 Elements of life, to the spirits of the land and the unseen forces around us.

Jill Amison brought us together😊 What a joy!  What a treat!  This day was so restorative.  Glennie shared her knowledge with us as we walked through the woods. The silver birch trees, Glennie told us, are full of light; they are flexible, a cleanser, a tree that brings clarity.  A tree that doesn’t live long compared with other trees, yet they keel over, nourishing the earth for new growth: rebirth.  

And the King Of The Forest, the oak tree, doorway to the other world, the world within, which shows us how to tap into our inner knowledge and wisdom.  I’m currently re-writing the Green Man and May Queen folklore, using the narrative as a vehicle to commentate on the destruction of wildlife habitats.  Glennie’s profound knowledge and gentle passion moved me deeply, likewise the ceremonies and singing, and of course, the company of the Wild Women.  I’m sure this day will influence the writing of my latest work.  A huge thanks to Glennie, Jill and everyone who shared the day, a day to treasure.

I think about some of the writers who have walked as part of their creative process: Kenneth Graham, Alan Ginsberg, Charles Dickens, Patti Smith, Henry, Rebecca Solnitt, David Thoreau and the Romantic poets.  William Wordsworth walked most days in the Lake District, near his home, Dove Cottage either alone, or accompanied by his sister, Dorothy.  He spoke out loud as he put one front in front of the other; much of his blank verse was composed this way.  And writer, philosopher and composer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, claimed he was unable to think, create or find inspiration unless he was walking, when his imagination was stimulated, and ideas came.

The artist Richard Long viewed the act of walking as an art form.  On his journeys, as far afield as Japan and Alaska, he arranged stones by roads, made circles from boulders, aligned pebbles in riverbeds and traced furrows in sand.  He then recorded this work through photographs and poetry.

The conservationist, John Muir claimed: ‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.’  I think for me, that is part of the joy too.  I go inwards when walking, not unlike the caterpillar in its cocoon, coming out when I return home, often feeling energised, yet calm, refreshed and creative.  Thank you, Glennie and the Wild Women, after our day in the woods, that’s how I felt yesterday evening.  Looking forward to seeing you all again 😊

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…