11 Only that day dawns...

to which we are awake

Henry David Thoreau

The sky is a clear deep ink-blue-black, and I open the window. A couple of stars, unusually since we’ve had weeks (and weeks) of rain; a waning moon; and the deep rushing song of the full brook in the valley. A tawny owl hoots close by.

It’s early.

Midwinter turnings
The first day of the new year and I’m feeling both unusually awake, and smug – of which more in a minute. I love celebrations of all kinds, but the midwinter turning-year time for me is the solstice, and a small private ritual was had then. So I didn’t really make any new-year resolutions (that way I don’t disappoint myself, either), but I did think it would be a good thing to be kinder – including to myself.

Otherwise, really, I love life and I love my life as it is, as long as I scratch deep enough; and as I write that, of course I am very conscious of the fact that being alive where I am and growing some of our own food is an immense privilege.

Suffering and compassion
But I’m also one of those people – maybe you are too? – who finds it hard to let herself be happy if there is suffering in the world, human or animal. The upshot of this, is of course – well, you can work it out. I’m overly osmotic to the suffering of others, so I need to consciously remind myself that I can be aware of it but I do not have to take it on.

Nonetheless, it’s really hard to remain buoyant, isn’t it, with the terrible wars in the Middle East and Ukraine/Russia, with hunger and homelessness and refugee crises, with climate emergencies and political inaction, with the renewed licence for glyphosate, with the possibility of Trump getting back in in the USA, and the far right here in France, with extractive capitalism and corporate destructive business-as-usual? With the levels of unimaginable suffering? With the fact that we don’t seem to move beyond violence and divisiveness? If I let myself, I can feel frightened, very frightened, at the world we are creating for our children, and their children, and the way we are both exploiting and driving the other-than-human right to the very edges: have I noted already here that of all mammals on the planet, only 4% are wild, free-living? (I think this figure refers to land mammals.) Apart from the humans, most of the rest are captive livestock on which we prey.

Someone, one of my Buddhist teachers I think, spoke of true compassion and ‘idiot compassion’, which is the kind of compassion that ‘helps little old ladies across the road, whether or not they want to go’. Like all wise teachings, the humour helps. And it makes me turn towards the saying, also, to unpick it over and over.

What is wise compassion, then?

Compassion is a sane and difficult thing. Perhaps it’s what makes us truly human (though it may be that animals, at least some species, experience it in their own way too). It seems to me that compassion requires sufficient empathy deeply to want the very best for the other, but sufficient humility and non-attachment (different from detachment) to recognise that I or you may not know what that might be.

In Buddhist terms, it helps to remember that it is attachment or aversion that create suffering: craving certain outcomes, or turning away from certain truths. So we do what we can; and we keep doing what we can, whatever.

But compassion doesn’t mean I/we have to suffer equally, too. I remind myself of the words of Kahlil Gibran about not limping before the lame – two of us thus disabled helps nothing and no-one. Rather, it takes courage to be OK with how the world is, despite the immense suffering that goes on – is going on – all the time, if you can’t change much anyway. We need people who embody that courage, and who also live with hope that it could be different. This is what I meant by ‘quiet activism’, in a previous post. And there are always small things we can do – something about living right, whatever that means for me or you, and my or your values, as I’ve noted in various places here.

So I wonder whether true courage is recognising the sheer almost incomprehensible scale of suffering in the world, and learning how to maintain a balance of attention: not turning away, but not being immobilised by it, and especially not giving up. Doing what we can anyway. ‘Active hope’, eco-Buddhists Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone call it. Recognising the fact of our interconnectedness, and what that signifies.

Anyway, that smugness
Well, I didn’t think I was going to write about all that. I was intending to speak of our eco-project here, and in far less abstract terms.

To start, though: I’m smug because I’m up in the dark (that’s rare enough this winter) on the first day of the new year, and meditating. I’ve been practising Zen meditation alongside my psychospiritual commitment to panpsychism (in my case nature-based Celtic wisdom traditions) since I was a teenager. Unlike TM, though, who also meditates, and daily without fail, my actual daily practice is a bit more haphazard. Thank goodness for my ‘dharma sister’ in Tasmania, and our fortnightly Zoom Zen sessions (‘sesshins’).

By the time TM emerges, I’ve also made tea, put away the dishes, let the dogs out, put seeds out for the birds and lit the range. (Usually, TM gets there first, makes the tea and washes the dishes.)

Oh and now it’s raining. Generally speaking, that’s something we can rely on here in Finistère.

Planting in the rain, again
But we have to plant 8 bare-root dogwood, and 16 bare-root rosa rugosa today latest. They’re going to go on the somewhat stony bank by the ditch that feeds the pond, down alongside the veg plot. It happens to be almost exactly a year since the ditch and pond were dug, and the bank created: a nod to the small-field hedged or banked bocage system that was traditional here. (Later I’ll speak of the wonderful hoe-farm that friends of ours cultivate a little way to the east of us, very much an example of traditional: a beautiful, biodiverse and practically entirely unmechanised self-sufficient way of managing several hectares divided into small areas of very diverse crops.) Here, together, the dogwood and rosa rugosa will offer habitat and food to birds and to insects; create a windbreak towards the west; colour the winter, and perfume the summer. We will also coppice the dogwood for mulch and harvest the fat rugosa hips.

Last early autumn we witnessed a spectacular domino collapse of many of our 90 very-laden bean poles to the wind from the west that hops so swiftly and unrelentingly over hedges and holloway and finds a gap. In a year or two this windbreak will prevent that happening again.

So we did plant them. (I feel a bit smug about that, too.) It rained and it rained. There’s a point when to get so soaked (albeit in dry-inside waterproofs) is exhilarating enough for me not to want to go back in, so we then take the dogs into the woods in the now-pouring rain too. We look again at the dozen or more very tall thin conifers on land of which we are guardians. They came down in the tempest, and would make good timber trees, but we don’t have the means to extract them, let alone plank them. I think again of horses.

I’m wondering now whether we will be planting enough new shrubs, bushes, trees, to compensate for the storm-torn ones – and more. In any case, it is a wonderful thing to do on the first day of a new year; planting trees, in addition to natural regeneration, is clearly an important thing to do in its own right; and for us good practice before we go back to the nursery in a couple of weeks’ time and collect 8 new young bigger canopy trees to start to plant the forest garden, of which more anon.

On the way back I collect a little wild sheep’s sorrel, some three-cornered wild leek, and some perennial and perpetual Inca garlic leaves plus a little cavallo nero kale to pep up TM’s lovely soup of our beans, our leeks and the foraged chestnuts for tonight.

The rain is increasing now, and I remember we have one slice of Christmas cake left.