26 O beautiful westerly wind...

light and dark days of June

Winds
In the shade of the oak tree nearest the house is a small poplar tree, invisible most of the time. When it starts shaking its leaves like a foliate tambourine, if you can imagine such a thing, I know the wind is in the west, a zephyr, and my heart lifts. I’m a Western Atlantic seaboard person and I love the westerlies, even though their skirts are often laden with rain, or storm. On the other hand, easterlies make me uneasy. Each wind has its own flavour, no?

The above is an excerpt from one of the most exciting collaborative projects I’ve ever been involved in. Poet Rupert Loydell and I agreed to write 100 prose poems of exactly 100 words each in 100 days, using a linking key. The end result was a limited edition book, published by Stride in 2001, A Hawk into Everywhere. I’m still extremely proud of that little book (we alternated authorship; the passage above is one of mine).

Winds. So much to say about them (in fact Lyall Watson wrote a whole book about them: Heaven’s Breath, I think it was called).

But this post is not about wind, really, except that after heat it was lovely, this morning, to stand out in a gentle drizzle and smell the trees, plants, and land inhaling and exhaling this freshness. (I’m also hoping it will exonerate me from watering the large stands of broad beans on which we’ve been feasting lately.)

In the garden
suddenly, we are harvesting. My daughter joined us the other evening and we made a meal together, and realised that something in every dish had come from the garden. An enormous salad bursting with many herbs, rocket and sorrel included, nasturtium flowers and leaves, and aromatic herbs in addition to the lettuce. A potato salad with the lovely red-skinned new potatoes, Chérie, with (again) garden herbs, finely-chopped onion and home-made vegan mayonnaise; broad beans in the garlicky marinade I posted the other day; and the first beetroot grated with carrot and dressed with coconut, sunflower seeds, lemon juice and olive oil; sautéed courgettes with more garlic. And I was still thinking we hadn’t really started to pick yet.

Last night I assembled this warm salad, below, mainly from the garden: new potatoes, boiled, alongside new beetroot; steamed broad beans; slowly-sautéed courgettes with garlic (and a little seaweed seasoning); basil; cherry tomatoes; and – I almost never buy processed foods but I was SO HAPPY to find Violife vegan feta locally the other day; in a very meat-based culture that was unexpected.

In a huge platter/bowl I’d already mixed olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper, raw crushed garlic and chopped parsley, so I turned everything, still warm, in it. It was a delicious whole meal, though another time I might not boil the beetroot in with the potatoes, as it coloured them and the beans steaming above them a dingy orangey-pink.

(Yes, the vegan cookbook is coming on; and I can say this now, I think: I have a publisher. More anon.)

In the garden there are of course losses and unpredictable failures. When one is subsistence growing with the intention of producing as much of one’s own food as possible while not impeding or obstructing the other-than-human species with whom we share this land, one has to remember and allow for losses – to weather, to rodents, to invertebrates. With the extent of anthropogenic climate change, there will be more and more unpredictable events. How fortunate, how privileged, that we here in northern Brittany are not suffering (yet) in the way that so much of the planet is. I remind myself over and over of this.

And yes, it’s worth rejoicing that, even allowing for our human-made climate change, there are still forces bigger than us at work in the universe: the winds, the seasons, the weather, the cycles of it all, still in charge of their own destinies, in the main. We need this reminding that we are not lords of the universe, despite our appalling and mainly unconscious interfering with the rest of the natural world.

But. We had to cut all the haulms off 170 blighted potatoes, and although there is a crop of early potatoes (smaller than usual and fewer), we don’t yet know if the maincrop tubers will have survived. So much wet, until late June. I’m still watching the outdoor tomatoes keenly: there has been a touch of blight; we don’t know yet if all the plants will succumb. Also there has still been very poor germination of the many climbing beans we’ve sown (several times!) for our winter protein. I suppose I should delight in the fact that I now have TEN carrots in my previously-sown ten ROWS, instead of just the one; and yet another sowing is showing as a little frill of green.

This year we are trialling green lentils, quinoa, soy beans and chickpeas – protein for us, and for the dogs. They are all up and thriving, especially the chickpeas. We don’t know, of course, if we’ll have the conditions for their ripening this far north.

The year turns
and today marks two years since we moved in and began our project (oddly, it’s also the anniversary for my friend and fellow Zen meditator Pat’s move to Tasmania, one year after we moved).

In the Celtic Tree Calendar the Oak King who rules the first half of the year, mythologically speaking, and presides over the midsummer turning has given way now to the Holly King. In the field, which is a riot of mainly unmown mallows and yarrows and trefoils and clovers and grasses, complete with skylarks, and the beginnings of our forest garden with its paths, the holly trees bear hard little green buttons of berries.

At the edge of the Home Meadow, several of the row of sweet chestnuts now bear flowers, and the canopies hum with bees. This whole spot, thankfully, is a sanctuary for birds and insects (our wild garden was planted up before our time with many scented roses and insect-and-bird-friendly shrubs flowering from about late February – early butterflies - on), and various small animals including an occasional pine marten, and supposedly red squirrels, though we have yet to see the latter.

‘My’ winter robin, daily house-visitor, is back at the kitchen door, making the shrill squawk that juvenile robins make. I’m not sure whether s/he is alerting young to a spot where food might be found, or demanding that of me. But I’m pleased to see him/her back after the nesting.

June
is normally a month I love, but on a personal note I’m very glad to see the back of it. It was a horrible month for me, with frightening episodes of ill-health. I’ve been thinking about the phrase ‘beside myself’ which describes it perfectly: no longer inhabiting the true ‘still point’ at the core of oneself, unmoved and steadfast despite external circumstances.

I have, I think, started to turn a corner now; aided by the most wonderful acupuncturist who, like all true healers, is so much more than the sum of her trained parts (acupuncture, naturopathy, phytotherapy, plus a doctorate in pharmacy). In her waiting room is a poster of the Toltec Four Agreements; useful reminders about how to live. I recognised a kindred spirit straight away: the book by Don Miguel Ruiz on these was given me by my sister many years ago and the agreements have been helpful to me over the decades. These are the key phrases, and each chapter speaks more of each attitude:

1 Be impeccable with your word: don’t gossip, lie, contravene your own conscience;

2 Don’t take anything personally: it says more about the speaker than about you;

3 Don’t make assumptions: check out what you think or believe you are hearing;

4 Always do your best: you don’t need to strive to do more.

My fighting spirit is coming back, in the nicest possible way (honest). And a good friend is also helping, with insight and herbs. Thank you, Jan.

In bigger news…
In the first round of elections here in France our immediately-local village voted Le Pen’s party in. (On the other hand, Huelgoat and its environs voted for the left wing alliance. Almost all of Finistère, traditionally left wing, voted either for this socialist alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire, or for Macron’s party, thank goodness; whereas in France as a whole the Rassemblement National, Le Pen’s party, is currently in the lead. Everything hangs now on July 7th.) This surge to the right in Europe (and potentially the USA) is of course troubling; potentially catastrophic in a world reeling from any number of other catastrophes. It is some small consolation, I suppose, that the Tories are likely to be vanquished in the UK; though I fear that Starmer, while unobjectionable, is rather right-light. And once again the environment is a kind of afterthought tagged on to the manifesto.

I believe our soul-work, or task, now is finding a way to balance the micro, one’s own small world and the way one lives in it, with awareness of and allegiance to the bigger picture: the picture of the future we need, not just as a species but as one among many billions of species on this beautiful small planet, the only one we have, all utterly and irrevocably intertwined. We need to remember how many of us are working for positive change; we need not to give up, not to despair, not to bury our heads and be complicit.

Thanks for reading. I wish you joy, a peaceful heart and courage to keep on in these strange times.