34 The cost of loving;

plus a harvest; & might poetry might save us yet?

The cost of loving
The price for loving deeply, of course, is the risk of almost-unimaginable grief; but a life without that willingness for depth will always be missing something.

As I write this it’s the anniversary of the attacks in the Middle East that precipitated the crisis in Gaza, and here in northern France I experience nothing of the daily terror, losses and tragedies in so many parts of the world. I know this. My heart is in a constant state of brokenness at the violence our species visits on other members of our own species, as well as continuously and unthinkingly on the other-than-human world. I can’t bear to read or hear the news, and can’t bear to let my over-active imagination go there any more than it does anyway. I know how fortunate I am to live where and how I do.

But still, we’ve lost a family member in the shape of a beloved dog, the grey one, a young dog who has left his brother alone for the first time ever; and our lives will always have that Bran-sized hole. Our house is sombre; and still in shock at the suddenness, trauma and tragedy of what happened last week.

I’m not able to write about it yet. Those of you who are ‘dog people’ will understand: I have shared my life with many beloved animals of many species, wild and domesticated, but the bond with a dog is unlike that with any other animal. Perhaps this is because we have shared our lives with dogs, closely, over many millennia; on the assumption that that dog is treated with kindness and compassion, there is a reciprocity and huge-hearted generosity in the bond.

Many people have noted that such a canine connection brings with it an unconditionality which is perhaps why such a death, while ‘clean’ of the frequent human accompaniments of regret, guilt, remorse and so on, is also so unutterably painful. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying it’s more painful than the loss of another human family member; it’s different. There is no human experience I’m aware of that is the same.

‘There were the simple miracles called birds’, Octavio Paz writes in ‘Fable’, one of the most significant poems of my life, offered to me by a friend in the form of Paz’s collection Early Poems 1935 – 1955 when I was a student.

Birds have saved my sanity on more occasions than I can recall. One of the resident robins is back in the peach tree in the mornings. The lines now are filled with starlings, and extended families of collared doves. As always, the sight of a gliding buzzard, luckily frequent here, lifts me; I can almost feel the updraught in my armpits. The swallows, though, truly have gone now: for weeks I’ve been saying ‘I think the swallows have gone’, only to see another half dozen over the meadow in dusk light. But no longer. Perhaps the single swan on the lake in Huelgoat will be joined by last winter’s six. Noticing these our kin helps.

In psychotherapeutic circles, and also in Buddhist thought, there is the concept of ‘balance of attention’. I also call this ‘present-moment awareness’, commonly known as mindfulness. I find this useful in my own life, and to offer in retreats and mentoring I have done with others in relation to my holistic writing-based work. Many people come to such courses or request mentoring at times in their lives when they are suffering or in a period of transition.

This practice allows one to fully feel the loss, grief, pain, while not losing sight of the fact that yes life does go on, the fact that something terrible has happened doesn’t mean that all of one’s life is shit; and we can simultaneously choose to pay attention to the small everyday miracles: here, the owl just before daybreak in the cherry; the robin quietly, tunefully, singing up the day; the corn cobs that, fat, juicy and golden, offer part of supper; the enormous sweet potatoes that I have just lifted from the dark soil; the scattered squashes lighting the potager, creamy, marigold-orange, blue-green, yellow. The fact that the sun still rises (and the rain – oh yes – still rains and rains).

Perhaps inevitably, other concerns and sadnesses simmering below the surface have also erupted. And there are many things that still have to be done, though our enthusiasm for doing anything at all towards our project has been dented this last week; not helped by my being ill and more-or-less out of action for three months this summer, nor by the start of hunting season around us.

Reaping
Currently, they are harvesting the huge fields of maize, the replacements for the patchwork of tiny hedged fields that were traditional here, for the innumerable intensively-farmed animals who spend their whole lives indoors. We are fortunate that we have an envelope of land around our organic and vegan patch that is not sprayed with pesticides; we are at least spared that.

So it is harvest time, and here there is a great deal to bring in from our unmechanised project. It has to be done, whether we feel like it or not. The weather, back currently to heavy rain, was good enough for a couple of days to let us bring in our trial quinoa, currently hanging in massive sturdy paper sacks from hooks in the joists in the utility room waiting to be threshed and dried out. Each day we’ve brought in a huge basket of our Cocos de Paimpol beans, in texture and taste rather like butter beans, to pod with our morning tea. There are more to pick from our 8 long rows, but we now have 43ish bags of beans in the freezer.

Just now I’ve been out hoeing and weeding the broad bean bed, and belatedly sowing green manure crops on it.

We’re learning as we go, and frequently there is the sense that we are not ever quite managing to catch up with tasks that need doing, so life here in paradise can feel perpetually overwhelming. It’s one thing starting such a big project in your forties; another in your sixties.

There are of course crop losses. We still haven’t learned to compensate in advance by sowing more of everything than we need, though I believe in the idea of ‘tithing’: offering one-tenth of our crop to the wild creatures who like it. We’ve a small quantity of soy beans but just about no green lentils. The chickpeas developed reasonably but won’t ripen properly; we will need to pick each tiny seedhead green and use them like fresh peas. The trial patch of buckwheat looks as if the rains have started to rot the heads before they’re fully ripe. The amaranth looks gorgeous but has been flattened by the wind and seems to have very few seeds. We’ve half our usual quantity of potatoes due to blight, and lost all our outdoor tomatoes.

On the other hand, the beetroot, carrot and sweet potatoes have done very well, and I now need to find many more ways of cooking and eating beetroot beyond our usual five (roasted, in soup, pickled, grated with carrot for a salad, and in chocolate cake), and ways of storing the carrots and sweet potatoes before the frosts come – though we have had one early frost already, which made me rush my lemon verbena pot to the polytunnel for the winter.

The walnuts are ripening, and recent heavy winds have brought down sweet chestnuts with fat but unripe fruits.

Last night we harvested the first of our heads of broccoli and, alongside the corn cobs, we had the first small baked potimarron squash, a 5th or 6th generation fruit from the seeds I brought from Devon. Some of the squash went to the dog, and our human section was basted on the inside in the oil from some sundried tomatoes mixed with fresh lime juice, salt and pepper, and piment d’Espelette, that mild chilli from the Basque Pyrenees that is, apparently, harvested and hung to dry from the eaves of almost every house in the village of Espelette.

A few late bloomers are flowering in the margins of the veg plot – silky dresses of ornamental poppies, a handful of sweet peas, many nasturtium faces. In the fields, ox-eye daisies, the ones I call moon-daisies, hang on ragged amongst the seedheads of plantain and knapweed. Finches are feasting. There’s a little meadowsweet, cow parsley, some stitchwort, yarrow and mallow, and a single corn marigold by our gate; a big lace bonnet of hogweed by the stream.

Poetry as gateway
I fluctuate between thinking that poetry might save the planet by speaking directly to the heart and by opening the doors of the imagination, a prerequisite for empathy and compassion, and wondering if it’s not just a dalliance with the superfluous, given the State of the World. (Actually, I almost always believe the former, but I have my moments of doubt.)

What I do know is that, as Adrienne Rich avers, poetry can save your life. I have been living what has felt like a half-life this summer, and poetry has been absent, whether read or written. A flame has guttered.

But I’ve had the chance this last week – light against the dark – to remember that I’m a writer, and a poet. This side of my life, such an enormous and significant part for so many decades, has been seriously absent since the spring and I’ve felt thin as a result. A new anthology has just come out: Thin Places & Sacred Spaces will see the second round of its launch on 25th October, 7pm – 8pm UK time. I’m honoured that a section of one of my unpublished Iona poems opens the book.

Last Thursday at one of my favourite places, L’Autre Rive, the café-bookshop in the Forest, myself and two local friends, Wendy Mewes and Jan Fortune, both British writers who live here (and both also with a presence on Substack – see my Recommendations), all offered a reading from our prose and poetry in relation to Spirit of Place. We were reading in English and it was a little daunting, as well as delightful, to realise that almost all of our audience was French; however, people seemed to enjoy the evening and no one left at the interval – and some books were sold.

And on Saturday morning I met online with some of the group of poets that I’d established via monthly workshops in Devon, Two Rivers. I’ve been working with some members of this group since 1991; we work with great intimacy and at some depth. Poetry in this way is always more than words; I’m privileged to experience it as soul-work, and these people as significant companions in my life. As always, the poetry that emerged blew me away.

So another pied week. I can’t say that the darkness has been dispelled; our loss here is ever-present, but at least I have also remembered what it is that I was born to do.

And I’m delighted to say that the other dog has been weathering his own loss with a surprising equilibrium – to date.