42 wandering stars, poetry,

soul contracts, woodchip & veganism

Frost
thrush song – a thread
on which the day
perches

~~~

Fixed stars & wandering stars
A January Saturday night, opening the gate for my daughter to drive home at midnight, there was already a light frost. We live in a ‘dark sky’ place, and my daughter and I tilted our heads and spent a few minutes stargazing at a truly astonishing night sky, with its billions of stars sending their ancient light our way, and a few bright ‘aligned’ planets.

We were probably just prior to the peak of that astonishing and rare phenomenon of 4 visible planets and another 2, the so-called transpersonal planets, invisible to the naked eye, making an arc of brightness in the night sky. We weren’t aware at the time of this occurrence, but we did notice the brightness of Venus over in the West, with Saturn, noticeable but a whole lot less eye-catching than Venus, just below and to her southeast. We guessed at bright Jupiter in the southeast, with Mars, a bit dusty yellow-ish, lower down. Also in the southeast were Sirius and Aldebaran; and over here too is the Orion nebula – where new stars are born.

Neptune, at the point in which we were star-gazing, sat between Venus and Saturn, though only visible with a telescope. Uranus was over there, due south, but also only visible with a telescope. I like picturing the invisible ones, nonetheless; imagining their electromagnetic impact on us; remembering that we’re all made of star-stuff.

Planets are known as ‘wandering stars’ because in apparent contrast to the ‘fixed’ stars, they do travel – sometimes slightly wobblingly – in orbit of our sun.

Our interconnected universe
I studied astrological psychology back in an earlier century. Astrology, like mythology (see my first book Riding the Dragon – myth & the inner journey) and tarot, is a symbolic language that bypasses the analytical intellect and arrives in the soul, heart and imagination. So here, this is not so much concerned with the idea of prediction, but much more to do with particular prevailing qualities of universal energy at the moment of birth, but also throughout life, symbolised by certain archetypes (astrological psychology, like the transpersonal psychology in which I trained, is rooted in Jungian thought), and how they manifest. Given the old idea of ‘as above, so below’, individuals, collective movements, cultures and events and their associated places are all imbued with this same quality of energy particular to a certain time.

~~~

The stars are in our belly; the Milky Way our umbilicus.
Is it a consolation that the stuff of which we’re made
is star-stuff too?

– That wherever you go you can never fully disappear –
dispersal only: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen.

Tree, rain, coal, glow-worm, horse, gnat, rock.

Roselle Angwin from ‘The Perfect Tense’ in Looking For Icarus (bluechrome 2005; IDP 2015)

~~~

Often, I glance out at the evening or night sky, see if I can still see Venus, the ‘evening star’, before she drops over the western horizon, as opposed to her rising in the east – not always visible – as our ‘morning star’. When I look up at Venus, I like to picture her beautiful orbit: she scribes a fivefold rosette-like pattern around us as she, too, orbits the sun. I reflect on her symbolism of the talents for love and for the creative life; and I think of ‘her’ islands with their nymphs and golden apples, the mythical Hesperides (‘western isles of the evening light’), perhaps cognate with the Celtic Blessed Isles of the West.

I think of her ruling of my sun sign, Libra, and of Fridays (the day on which I was born); I think of her as Jungian Jean Shinoda Bolen describes her in her Greek Aphrodite form: a relational goddess who nonetheless remains independent and autonomous, unlike Boden’s ‘vulnerable’ goddesses Hera, Demeter and Persephone; and unlike, too, the non-relational Athena, Artemis and Hestia.

Owls
As is usually the case here, there was no noise other than the deep singing of the swollen stream in the valley, and somewhere in the woodland an owl. Possibly I’ve posted this before; it has accompanied me for over 20 years, and always bears repeating: I cannot hear an owl without thinking of a fragment of a poem by Paul Matthews that I frequently take as instruction in living:

Owls do not agonize.

Having a question
they ask it once

then listen
for the dark to answer.

Paul Matthews, from ‘The Gleam’ in The Ground that Love Seeks, (five seasons press 1996)

Today, outside, there’s wild wind and storming rain-come-hail. But the advantage of this weather is that I don’t feel I absolutely should be out there tackling one of the many outdoor tasks on our only-semi-tamed land that this time of year – all times of year – demand/s if one wants a degree of food resilience, self-sufficiency and sustainability.

So I’m here, quietly writing in my study, rain drumming the skylight and window, and a candle lit on my shrine, where a hyacinth is just showing the tip of a blue flower.

Smallholding, even on our small scale, means squeezing writing time out of a day is challenging. Our heating and some of the cooking is wood-fired, increasingly from this land with the trees and branches down in various storms. We make our own food and the dogfood from scratch, mostly from our veg garden, and I preserve some of this food for the winter, and happy though I am to do all this (and The Man deals with most of the wood chores), often I don’t sit down to begin to write till late afternoon – just before, at this time of year, it’s dogwalking time again. So what a treat, here, to be at my (new/reconditioned) computer quietly, albeit briefly, before midday! These days ‘time off’, on a Sunday, say, consists of ‘time on’ with my own writing. And I have a lot I want to write. Plus a deadline for the vegan cookbook.

Woodchip
And that was a few weeks ago. Time is forever swallowing its own tail, and to say I’ve continued to bump up against challenging circumstances – health, mechanical, technological, financial and bureaucratic – is an understatement.

BUT there is always beauty, especially in the rest of the natural world, to walk in. It’s a salvation.

Now, we’ve had a few days of cold, but dry, weather and have spent as much as possible of it outdoors, attempting to catch up. What is a priority?

What I actually want to do is bring a chair to sit looking through the woodland and into and over the valley from the old orchard where The Man has been sawing up a fallen cherry and two fallen cider apple trees, with a view to making a summerhouse in the new little clearing there.

We face regular dilemmas in the smallholding life with a focus on biodiversity – of which to leave or not to leave the fallen trees was one. For leaving: habitat, and the fact that one was still partly rooted. For clearing: to let light in to the others; for a little tidiness in several acres of otherwise mostly-wildness; also the partly-rooted tree was deeply entangled with another healthier tree, and was a cider apple rather than eating apple. (They too have their place, but we are not making cider.)

In the end TM cut up all three, and the orchard looks lighter, clearer and actually healthier. The wood will feed our heating, and the brushwood will feed the garden as woodchip.

And so the decision as to priorities was made. I weeded a small section of the circular bee and herb bed; I cleared the feet of the dogwoods and rosa rugosas on the bank by the ditch which channels rainwater from the barn roofs to the pond; I mowed a small area of the patch of meadow we’re reclaiming as ‘lawn’ at the back of the house and put the mowings on half of the bank shrubs, then we spent several hours chipping wood for the veg garden and for paths, and I bedded the feet of the other half of the shrubs in small chip.

Causing no harm sometimes being the greatest good…
I’ve been thinking a great deal about beauty, and fragility, and resilience, and as I said above interconnectedness; and the suffering and harm we can avoid causing to others, which also causes harm, whether or not we are conscious of it, in our own psyches: what we do to another we also do to ourselves. More in a moment.

But thinking about all this as I cleared the feet of the shrubs, I suddenly remembered a song-chant drawn from the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, millennia old, one that we sang together on retreat in the Network of Engaged Buddhists. I haven’t thought of it in years. I thought that perhaps the shrubs would appreciate being sung to. So I sang.

Then I had two of those moments: one was taking a break to head over to see if the little wild daffodils were open yet (they weren’t). But I stood by the flowering hellebore for a minute or three, and caught out of the corner of my eye a woodmouse, perched atop an ivied stump, just sunning itself in the late afternoon light, before it slipped away… and then two robins flew towards me as I resumed singing. Ha! Well! There! I always knew I was a bird-whisperer. – Oh, no, it’s not my singing; it’s the call of insect titbits in the leafmould uncovered as we chipped…

The greatest good
It’s hard to know how to respond to the inauguration of You-Know-Who. It’s frightening, the plans he’s implementing, of course; of which one is tearing up the Paris agreement. Keir Starmer is also blocking environmental actions at the moment too.

Wouldn’t things be different if our leaders were chosen on the basis of whether or not they lived from an awakened heart and a commitment to the greater/greatest good, rather than from the power centre in the gut, and the idea of world domination?

Easy to feel helpless and hopeless; let this world slide towards an abyss not of our own choosing. To give up in despair.

But there are things we can each do. Enough of us making the changes might yet be – well, enough.

Most of us live, I imagine, most of the time, from the isolated ego – certainly I recognise its dominance in myself: that little lighthouse signalling its wants and desires, its dislikes and aversions, all the time ignorant of the vast ocean of soul that surrounds and connects us all, in which we all swim.

I believe we each come into this world with a soul contract:

– to wake up, to be apprenticed to the work of consciousness
– to be aware of, to realise, the interconnectedness of us all, of everything
– to bring harmony instead of conflict, to live peaceably, to practise compassion and loving kindness and non-harming (in Buddhism, ahimsa or metta).

(I’d add, in the vein of Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard: – ‘to be apprenticed to glory and wonder’.)

Veganism
If the above resonates with you, then the thing you can do which will have the greatest global impact is to reduce or minimise your consumption of animals, birds, fish and their secretions and offspring.

Even one day a week will make a difference. Some of you already do this, I know. Some others of you might like to try, but don’t know where to start, what to cook, and how to be healthy without the meat and dairy on which our culture insists and without which, the meat-producers tell us, we can’t be healthy (untrue). It’s tough breaking with traditions. But it’s cultural habit, that’s all. And appetite.

If I can help with this in any way, if you are someone who would like to start reducing meat and dairy consumption and could do with a little info or advice, please just ask.

I know this is uncomfortable for many people. But we have choices: the truth is we don’t need meat, or eggs, or cheese. In fact, study after study shows us how essential reducing animal commodification is: for the environment, for the climate, for land use, water stress, for biodiversity; and how much better it is also for human health. It goes without saying that it’s better for animal welfare. And recent studies have shown that of the mammals on earth, 34% are humans; 62% are the animals we keep captive to kill and eat; only 4% are wild and free-living mammals. Read that again – it’s shocking. There is also an impact on other humans (more in another post). Even a recent study, funded by the beef industry, came up as showing the converse of what it was intended to support.

‘Eating meat can temporarily satisfy a desire, but it breaches and damages the equal relationship between humankind and other sentient beings.’ Master Zianqing

Perhaps the main, or starting, reason for my being vegan is that animals (birds, fish) are not ours to steal, to possess, to capture, to commodify, to use, to force breeding on, to abuse, to kill and to consume. I don’t want to be complicit in this suffering and harm at our hands, on an unthinkable scale. Globally, hundreds of thousands of sentient beings, mostly having been raised in appalling and brutal circumstances, are killed every second for our appetites.

Are we really OK imposing and participating in this amount of suffering? Everybody – every sentient being – wants to stay alive; everybody has an interest in not suffering. I know it’s hard to face this – but there’s a cost in our own psyches for this denial, too; a cost that robs us of mental and emotional serenity.

There will be a time, I believe, when we look back as a species on our attitude to our other-than-human kin with horror and disbelief at our blindness in (ab)using our more-than-human family and their children, bodily fluids and eggs in the way our culture has taken for granted for a couple of thousand years.

We need to think differently: this mostly-unthinking consumption is partly about conditioned responses rooted in centuries or millennia of believing that animals – who have their own rights, their own purposes for being here, their own consciousness entwined with but distinct from ours – have been put on this earth for our ‘dominion’; and partly we need to think differently about our food, where frequently meat is the centrepiece.

What I love is a plateful of colour and nutrition, in our case much of it from the garden:

… followed by an occasional indulgence:

The cookbook I am currently redrafting explores the politics and philosophy, and the environmental costs, of eating or not eating meat. It answers the questions people have about plant foods: how to be healthy and eat well, among them.

It also includes rather a lot of recipes. Some of them I’ve posted here, but I still haven’t organised them sensibly. I will post more.

I’m imagining that some people will unsubscribe after this post. That’s OK. My ego won’t like it(!) but I will understand.

‘The truth will set you free, but first of all it will piss you off.’

Others of you might appreciate more info. I’m happy to answer qs here in the Comments; later on, as I complete the book manuscript, I’m also planning to post more info and recipes, perhaps in a dedicated section.

As always, thank you for reading.