15 the wells, the Wasteland

& not planting or pruning the fruit trees

All Europe’s rain has come to Finistère
…and you know, I’m very glad.

Did I say last year we dug a small pond, a wildlife pond, at the bottom of the Home Meadow? It’s fed by rain from the roof of the barns, channelled down via a ditch (from which came the bank where we planted dogwood and rosa rugosa a few weeks ago in streaming rain), and although it is yet lacking enough greenery, it’s pleasingly full of water AND we have a very healthy amount of frogspawn in it. There’s something magnetising about even a small body of water, and after walking the dogs in the morning we always stroll down to it – passing my new tall broad bean shoots and the garlic, both from my winter solstice planting.

It’s true that the rain has made it very hard to do the many things that need doing on the land before the sap starts flooding trees and plants again. I haven’t started to prune the ancient thickety Bramley apple trees (where do I start? There are 16 of them):

… nor to dig up and transplant the little self-seeded oak saplings, the few of a great many, currently growing beside them. Both these things need doing, ideally, before the end of this month.

We’d only just started to chip the new lot of brash, to make mulch; rain has completely stopped play there, too, but also ideally this needs to go down now as weed suppressant and for nourishment onto the next bit of meadow that TM is reclaiming for extending the veg garden in order to trial buckwheat, soya beans, green lentils, chickpeas and quinoa, all excellent sources of protein for a vegan diet (and needing, incidentally, about 20 times less land than providing a similar amount of animal protein would). We still have, we reckon, a couple of days’ work to do to chip the rest.

I’ve written elsewhere that I’ve become a woodchip nerd. And I love how fast it breaks down. Putting my hand into the heap in the photo above 2 or 3 days later, it’s hot; and it’s already begun to be colonised by the mould and fungus that will help it break down into rich compost.

I mentioned in one of my last posts how we try to keep a circular dynamic going here, where what comes from the land goes back in to the land in a different form. So as I write this, in a rare hour of sun, TM is mulching the 16 fruit trees we planted last year with wood-ash from the stove first, then a layer of cardboard, and on top of that a load of sawdust/bits of bark/organic sweepings from the wood barn floor, already partly broken down.

We still have to make holes for and plant the first 9 trees, the canopy trees, for the tallest layer of the new forest garden that will eventually join orchard to woodland.

It has just been constant wet.

On the other hand, I have planted the rest of the dogwood, and another 100+ willow slips for our coppice-row windbreaks.

The main reason I’m glad though
is because even Finistère experienced drought and water stress last year. This winter, the aquifers will have filled up.

To my shock, I read yesterday that there are villages and communes further south, notably in the Pyrenées Orientales, where there is no longer water coming out of the taps. This is February, and drinking water is being delivered in tankers or plastic bottles. In France. In winter. My friend in the Aveyron already fears water stress too, as the aquifers are probably barely half-full, she says. So my broken arm – see post #1 – that prevented us going south – golden stone, red pan-tiled roofs, sun and more sun – has been vindicated, if a fractured limb can be vindicated.

Yep. Industry, but especially industrial agriculture. This is over-extraction and climate change on a global level due largely to intensive animal agriculture. It’s not just France. The land in so many places now has become a Wasteland, because of human neglect, human ignorance and speciesism, and a lack of vision in the policymakers, not to mention a capitalist economy. (I keep thinking of that quote from the Bible: ‘Without vision, the people perish.’) Certainly there seems a lack of imagination, which is required for empathy and compassion.

Water and the heart
The world, while being fully itself, is also so rich in metaphors and symbolism. I have written ad nauseam for 3 decades now about the story of the Wasteland, the wounded Fisher King, and the violated Well Maidens from the Grail corpus, and the story’s prescience for our times: about how a land, archetypally speaking, mirrors our own collective state of mind, or rather our collective state of heart, perhaps; of how that wasteland imagery is fed back into our interior lives (as within, so without, and as without so within).

I won’t repeat myself here; if you are interested there are many posts on my old blog, Qualia & Other Wildlife, (put ‘wells’ into the search bar lower down) and also in my 1994 book Riding the Dragon (you can read about this under the Fire in the Head section here).

But I can’t resist posting this image of a beautiful, tended, well and lavoir in the forest.

Since my teenage years, I have undertaken as spiritual practice physically clearing out wells and water sources. This is partly because we need those sources, now more than ever; and also because it’s a symbolic tending of what I have called the lost feminine in our culture.

So I do want to say briefly that, according to Jungian thought, water is associated with the feminine principle and the feeling function, among other things, while the earth is to do with the physical body and matter.

Without wanting to over-simplify too far, I guess many of you reading this will understand what I mean when I say that in our times in the West, certainly at least since the so-called Enlightenment, heart has been demoted and reason has been promoted: logic and detachment trump feeling intelligence. We need both to work hand-in-hand. We have instead inherited a dualistic approach to head and (or) heart, and spirit and (or) matter.

In addition, probably almost all of us spend more time indoors, often at screens, than we do outdoors. Of course people feel detached, disconnected, deracinated, from what gives us all life. (There’s nothing like being outdoors in a howling gale and storming rain to wake you up!)

But in this rain I too have spent more time on the screen than I have in quite a while.

So back to the greenwood
Whatever we do or don’t manage to do, TM and I, one way or another this place and the way we live in it keeps us very busy indeed. But we used the excuse of our anniversary to lift our eyes from here and head off into my beloved Forest 15 minutes away that has enchanted me and my heart since 1987.

I needed so much this unfocused time in a green moist place. I used simply to be able to walk out into it, this forest; but where we live now means I can’t.

There is still much storm damage in the forest. But the streams and pools are fuller than I’ve seen them in a while; the lip of the lake in town where it tumbles into Le Chaos and becomes the Rivière d’Argent is raging; and everywhere is green and beautiful. Plus we meet no one at all, and have this loud green silence to ourselves. (I took a video for you, but the songs of the stream are partly eclipsed by one of the dogs, impatient to keep moving, howling so loudly that anyone would think he was being tortured; so I’ll content myself with sharing some photos with you.)

My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water…

What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

(T Roethke, ‘The Far Field’)

So till next time… When I will be writing more about the practical aspects of growing one’s own.

Thank you for reading this. I very much value your presence; and if you are new to this blog, welcome. If you know anyone who might enjoy this writing, I’d love you to share it. Also I really enjoy the conversations that can happen through comments.