53 The way it all seems to fall into two halves

sometimes

Roscoff: sometimes dolphins, sometimes egrets paddling the shallows, this time simply a silver sari sea, translucent, blue shining through. After gale force winds as I left Cornwall, a perfect polished-mirror crossing. Roscoff: home of the sweet pink Keravel onion that does so well in our soil. I pass the Tomb with a View (of the sea) dolmen, cross the Penzé. Summer evening. Coming home, or at least the place I’m learning to call home.

*

My journey falls into two halves. The first, from the port at Roscoff, is flattish, agricultural, tinge of sealight on the evening sky, salt – perhaps imagined – on the air flowing in through my windows. All the way to Morlaix the land is cultivated: productive, onions now, potatoes, artichokes coming on nicely, caulis and cabbages soon. Unfortunately, heavily sprayed.

Outside Morlaix I take a right turn and breathe a sigh of relief. This is very different country. This road will be empty, and winds its way through forest. For twenty miles I will pass beneath sweet chestnut trees hanging long fat golden tassels of flowers on the evening, and if I hang my head out of the window I will hear the hum of tens of thousands of bees in the canopy. We ascend gently, the road and I, up up up to the open Landes du Cragou, the moorland at the top like a mini edge-of-Dartmoor, and before we slide back down into more winding woodedness I imagine a glimpse of sea from the Atlantic coast to my west. I see a fox, and the tail end of a deer. Buzzards regard me from telegraph poles, and I pass no cars at all.

And then coming into Huelgoat, home of my heart, its lake, its ‘chaos’ guarding the forest, the martins and swifts (barely any swallows this year, heartbreakingly) at tyre level hunting insects by the water. Huelgoat twinned with my ancestral home, St-Just-in-Penwith. An Uhelgoad. Huelgoat. ‘Uwell-go-at.’ ‘High Forest.’

*

And leaving it again, because home is now a handful of miles away yet.

*

The year is falling away from its zenith here, creating another story of two halves. Suddenly all I see are these two halves of everything: Britain (the Channel), Brittany (France). Agricultural land and wildwood (ish). Flat soil and clifflike rocks. Winter solstice to summer solstice and back again.

The ordered veg garden, the free-range meadow around it. The two circular lawns we have mown out of our wilderness garden, the contrast. Some of it dilemmas: the attempt to live with a lowish impact, but the fossil fuel we use to mow said grass. The fact that we’d love to live with animals to graze instead, but for many reasons, which I’ll tease out another time, we’ve chosen not to.

My life as a full-time writer, and holistic/psychospiritual/ecocentric course leader and retreat facilitator, and my newer life as a vegan cook and grower, focus switched from concentrating on our inner lives to how we might live our outer lives lightly and creatively on this earth, harming as little as possible, stepping back and back so that the other-than-human can step forward, reclaim its place at the heart of – well, everything. Trying to hold these two aspects together: the inner, the outer, and to do this with as much awareness and attention as possible, because what else?

*

And then, Before the Book and After the Book. (OK, I rather shoehorned that one in.) But I have been writing this ****** vegan cookbook for NINE YEARS. I have sweated more metaphorical blood over this book than over any of my previous dozen-odd, though those were on the whole much more esoteric, from the psychology of myth and Western shamanism/the Western Mystery Tradition of Riding the Dragon on through to 13th century France and a timeslip novel about the Cathar persecution, to the Celtic Tree Alphabet of A Spell in the Forest via A Trick of the Light – poems from Iona. And none of those took more than a year to write.

Nine years. I really sweated over the first half, which is carefully-researched information (all the many personal, transpersonal and planetary benefits of reducing our consumption of meat and dairy written, I hope, in a non-guilt-tripping way), but equally, not being a trained or professional chef, just an amateur who needs to find new ways to cook the abundance of plants in our garden, I sweated over the recipes, too.

But it has finally gone, as of yesterday, to the publisher. Before. After.

*

The cookbook is a culmination of questions about how we might live, and what we consume.

Interestingly, someone once said of my courses: ‘I thought I was coming on a writing course. Now I see it’s really about how we live.’

Ah yes. That’s my interest. True of both ‘halves’ of my life. ‘How might we best live on the earth’s thin skin?’

Because of course actually there is no dualistic ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘black’ and ‘white’. It’s all a continuum, with some transitions, or passages, more visible, momentarily, than others.

My passion, as I’ve written before (and here), is in transforming our relationship to the more-than-human world to one in which we realise, at a profound level, that we are not separate, but all utterly interconnected, in what Buddhism calls ‘interdependent co-arising’. The book has grown out of this perspective, and in that way too is a continuing thread from my 34 years of workshops and courses/retreats to do with relationship in its widest sense.

*

I drive down our lane in the evening light. ‘Our’ row of seven sweet chestnut trees at the woods’ edge beyond the farmhouse, accompanied by the two silver birch at the southern end, are dancing their own dance, each in its own time, and each with its own character and shape. I’ve been away 10 days, and in that time 1, 3, 5, and 7 have flowered; the other three are still thinking about it. No one is rushing another to flower before it’s ready; each knows its own rhythms and needs, but is attuned to the whole.

If we could live like that.