31 The only time we have...

& still not the post on the politics of food

Intimations of autumn
In the mornings now the air has a light nip to it. Owls are active before dawn, calling up the light.

I think of a short stanza in a poem by Paul Matthews in The Ground That Love Seeks:

Owls do not agonize.

Having a question
they ask it once

then listen
for the dark to answer.

This multi-level little piece has been such a helpful reminder to me recently in restless and perturbed nights. I will not agonize.

The robin’s song has a plangent poignant note. Yesterday the sky above us was filled with house martins and swallows hunting over the meadows here; today, there’s only one. Perhaps the others have already gone, surfing a northeasterly towards the south – too early, surely, though they have been gathering on the wires. Ah and now, later, there are more. A reprieve, for us, for a little while – surely one of the saddest things as we enter winter in northern Europe is the skies empty of swallows and martins (the swifts have indeed long gone).

This morning, at the market, the wind skidding over the lake was definitely cold. But I love autumn: I love that the air is rich with melancholy and wistfulness; I love the ambiguity of the shoulder seasons and their transient temperaments; I love the abundance and goldenness. ‘September is hers’, wrote Louis MacNeice, ‘Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, / Whose nature prefers / Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace…’

Winter and summer are both emotionally demanding, I find; spring and autumn are instead ripe with promise, albeit very different promises.

To mow or not to mow
As usual, we walk the dogs in the North Field this morning. Mist slides in and hangs dewdrops on the many (many) cobwebs and slender filaments slung between dock, gorse and thistle.

To cut the dock or not? This is one of several dilemmas. Thistle offers so many seeds to finches that TM is more-or-less agreeable to leaving it, but docks are taking over. We have a large Home Meadow, and the North Field is accessed by a gate from it. Together, they make several acres.

Within the Home Meadow is the veg garden, my circular bed for bee-plants and herbs, a small old orchard, a pond, and various shrubberies and trees or bushes. We agree on cutting an area in front of the house and at the back, but otherwise cutting paths only as necessary. In the North Field the meadow flowers have been prolific, and there too we cut paths around the perimeter and between the 30-ish fruit trees and the two willow rows for coppicing. I’d like to leave it at that, but TM is bothered by the incursion of dock, and prefers therefore to cut the whole thing once, or maybe twice, a year. And it’s true there is an argument that this will encourage wildflowers.

To mow or not to mow at all is a tricky question. We have simply too much land here, and we began working it too late in our lives, to scythe all the parts that one way or another we are cultivating, although the intention is to scythe, at least, the long grasses of the big arc in front of our first fruit-tree plantings, and the bracken at the edges, both of which will offer mulch. But supporting biodiversity and living as harmoniously as possible with our other-than-human kin is my driving impetus, and TM understands that, though he will make compromises I don’t want to. Yes, living out in the sticks we both use cars, though as minimally as we can, as we’d love to move beyond fossil fuel, and being here was supposed to be a step towards that. So we are both acutely aware of the irony of using yet more fossil fuel in our machinery, albeit in small quantities.

The Bramley Field adjoins the old Holloway which separates it from the Home Meadow. At the moment, we are leaving half to itself, to regenerate via probably a hundred self- or jay-seeded oak saplings, but keeping the old orchard trees clear.

We are responsible for two other more distant fields; in ‘normal’ parlance I might say we ‘own’ two other fields, but I struggle with the whole idea of ownership, as I’ve written elsewhere; after all, we hardly own our bodies, or our thoughts or emotions, let alone another, whether that’s human or other-than-human, whether bird, animal, tree or parcel of land.

So whatever one thinks about ownership, we’ve exchanged money for the responsibility of tending land; and at the moment those other fields are also in the process of tumbling back down to woodland, probably to the neighbouring farmers’ consternation (our tiny pocket is beautiful, and wooded; but wider Finistère is mainly farmed conventionally, that is with uprooted hedges and a heavy pesticide load, largely for maize and silage for the many intensive farms: chickens, pigs, veal calves, bullocks – all rather heartbreaking I find).

To be, or not to be, resilient
There are many dilemmas living here: somehow this is not ‘the simple life’ to which I have aspired all my adult life; but extremely complex. We’re working hard on the land, TM in particular, and it has been a shock to realise that, despite attempting some kind of subsistence living, we are still very dependent, like most people in the West, on so many aspects of twenty-first century living.

This means there is no resilience if the grid goes down and we haven’t installed solar panels; if as a consequence there’s no mains water, the borehole was too costly, and the wood-fired cooker won’t run because the pump is electric; if the loos block, as they did this morning, and we didn’t ever construct that compost loo; if the washing machine packs up, as it did a few days ago – we don’t have time to tread the clothes in the bath, plus it’s raining again so they won’t dry outside. Or if supply chains break and we don’t yet grow enough grain to mill for flour for bread.

But, at least, most of our supper, and much of the dogs’ food, is in the garden, courtesy largely of TM’s hard work. For that, I’m grateful.

Not being fully present
There is frequently, these days, and has been for some time, at the edges of my consciousness a kind of shadow of distress and despair at this fractured world of ours that so breaks my heart. I reached saturation point some little while ago, and every small thing breaks my heart all over again, and (metaphorically) the overspilling water spills further. I know I’m not alone with this, and I know several of you reading this will know what I mean, and share it. That is some comfort.

But on a personal level I have also been ill, and swallowed up by anxiety. I have come to truly experience and understand the reality of the phrase ‘to be beside oneself’; not to inhabit Soul fully. I have had many nights of sleepless despair, not helped by the frequent visitations of that phrase – was it Anaïs Nin, Annie Dillard, or neither, who said this? – ‘How we live our days’ (and our sleepless nights) ‘is of course how we live our lives.’

And of course the only time we truly have is now: this moment, right here. How am I going to live it fully, despite everything? – Present moment awareness. Buddhism reminds us that we spend much of our life lost in fears for the future or regrets about the past. Can I instead inhabit this moment with my heart quiet and open, my mind peaceful, my feet on the good earth – and let that be enough?

I should be able to. After all, that is something I’ve been teaching for over 30 years. But.

Having struggled with this loss of truly being present for two months and more, I can at last feel the flame begin to flicker in me again.

When what one is writing here is a kind of journal, a memoir, for public consumption, there is always the question of how much personal material one discloses. I like writing that is authentic, and where the author is human, visible and vulnerable; but there is a point at which it tips into the confessional, and self-immersed. I prefer to rein back before that point; but sometimes it helps to read of another’s troubles, doesn’t it? - Anyway, suffice to say here that, having had the great fortune to sign up with a good, and thorough, GP who is not only available at short notice but also gives each patient as much time as they need (unlike in the UK), I have also discovered that my allopathic medicine has been instrumental, quite probably, in both increased palpitations and insomnia. This rather reinforces my sense that a holistic approach is usually more helpful, and also fortunately I have both herbal and acupuncture support.

Now, I am myself supporting that flickering flame with gentle attention to each moment: the ripening walnuts, the miaowing magpie, giving attention to the poor dog with Lyme, the scudding clouds, being outside, and being outside again. Harvesting time in the garden; making a meal from that abundance.

As always, thank you for reading. I always love your comments, if you have any. And I’ve recently noticed that a couple of you have also pledged support if I ever switch on paying posts – thank you so much for that.