Tag: green spirituality

Camino 12: which way? – the dance goes on

Celtic wayside cross – now outside the door of Gerrans church

This Celtic cross in Gerrans churchyard, (in Cornwall where we are at the moment) spent at least a part of its life on its side as a coping stone on the wall; which is a fairly ignominious fate for what must be the oldest Christian relic in the village. I have to remind myself that although we like to think that artistic, spiritual or historical value is intrinsic to the objects we treasure, it’s clear that what it’s worth is what we think it’s worth. So there were obviously times when this cross was valued more highly than it is today – and what’s more, by the 19th century it was no more than a handy lump of stone.

But hold on; what goes around comes around. What if objects, like words, accumulate meaning, and like words, also shed them. For instance while we were walking the Camino we found several enormous stone frames standing outside old farm buildings. One of them had an immensely strong looking set of straps, but I had to read some history to discover that these frames were used to restrain oxen while they were being shod by the local blacksmith. I’m perfectly content for the frames to be both redundant for practical use – because there’s not much call for oxen with shoes these days (perhaps there should be but that’s another argument); but now they are charged with meaning and resonate as object metaphors for a lost age.

Looked at in this way, the Celtic cross still resonates meanings from the past and still, if we choose to allow it, carries a kind of accumulated spiritual meaning for us. But it’s important to stress that whatever that meaning is, it will take the form of a dialogue. We take questions to these powerful objects; questions such as “what is your name?” “what was in the mind of your maker?” “what kind of world did they live in? and what were their beliefs? “What is your purpose?” Happily we know the answers to some of those questions; this stone began its life as a wayside cross, perhaps in the so-called Dark Ages after the Romans had left, taking their form of Christianity with them – whilst the Celtic church of an earlier – perhaps 3rd century – period which had been most powerful in the westernmost fringes, continued as before. The two spiritualities were very different and so too were the forms of organisation. The reason I think the wayside cross is significant is because the Celtic church was monastic and its monks were great travellers; setting up cells and monasteries wherever they could. In an age where people travelled on foot or by horse on more or less unmarked tracks and footpaths, waymarkers were vital, and continue to be so on pilgrimage routes.

So much then for their accumulated meanings, but could it be possible that the questioning I just mentioned is, in fact, a two way conversation? Would, or could the stone and other treasured artifacts speak back to us? I don’t think that’s a step too far towards some kind of wooly, ill defined spirituality. It would depend on the quality of the question of course, and the intensity of any meditation on the reply. This can sound a bit religious, but for me, the answers to good questions are almost never concrete but – let’s say – Delphic. The symbolism of the crossroads is crucial, because it involves choosing – the ultimate derivation of the word crisis is the Greek crino – to choose. So instead of answering the question where now? the function of the Celtic waymarking cross is to ask it – where now? All I know is that once I’d seen the 7′ high stone I felt compelled to go close to it and see. The stone called me.

Inside Gerrans church there are other speaking objects. A 14th century font carved from granite – Cornish stone; 15th century pew ends bearing the pineapple crest of Katherine of Aragon; the remains of candleholders from the early 20th century, Victorian floor tiles – and so it goes on. But the church is on its knees. The systematic withdrawal of support from these little parishes towards the centre exactly mirrors the social depredations of successive governments. Oblivious to the cultural and social significance of village churches they are being allowed to close.

As we went into the church I read the notices and after we left, I googled up their web page and it was enough to break your heart. These parishes with their 1500+ years of history are being abandoned. Here there are three voluntary churchwardens, but no licensed lay minister and no priest helping to keep them alive. You might think it seems as if the Romans are leaving all over again – which could, just could, lead to a rediscovery of Celtic spirituality. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our tired and bankrupt churches gave up trailing thirty years behind secular fashions and arguing about challenges long-since settled by the rest of us; gay marriage stops being a “problem” when marriage stops being a property relation; women as priests and bishops stop being a “problem” when women stop being a problem.

So there’s a huge opportunity to rediscover the hospitality, the creativity and the profound love of nature exemplified by a Celtic spirituality that’s open to all and most importantly refuses to define itself in a series of attempts to imprison God into a linguistic cage. There is no theology beyond poetry, song and music.

So where does this all lead me?

18th March 2017 – the Wye in flood at Hay on Wye
This is going to be a hard one to explain ..

I had to give up my futile search for some kind of overarching meaning on 18th March 2017. I know it was that moment because I’d taken this photograph and I just knew it was over. We turned our backs to the river and then I turned back for a moment and said goodbye to God. Then I waited for some kind of catastrophic reaction – the full Kübler Ross experience; anger, denial, bargaining and depression followed at a decent interval by acceptance. No such thing happened because I went straight to acceptance, feeling nothing but a sense of relief that at last I could stop trying to hold the tectonic plates together. What I didn’t realize until this week was that the flooding river wasn’t moving away from me; it was offering me an object metaphor which I could return to six years later with a second piece of the jigsaw – the Celtic wayside cross – with which I could continue the journey in the right direction. The river flows, which is the state of everything in nature. I could go on for ever embellishing and working up the idea but that won’t do because it’s the dreary job of theology to explain, when what the river demands is wonder, that’s all. I filled the ensuing years with the allotment and with learning the plants, and intellectually as well as physically it was absorbing and rewarding – but there was no music in my life; I wasn’t singing any more. My sense of wonder couldn’t tolerate being spread so thinly.

Which was certainly why, on walking into Gerrans church I felt the most extraordinary sense of peace. How strange and how unexpected?

The way inclines but never compels. (To steal a phrase from the astrologers)

Writing up my notes on the Camino we walked in 2010 has led to some provisional insights among which is the understanding that the full Damascus Road experience isn’t really what it’s about, and also that that once you’ve signed up and set foot on the path, you’ll always be on it whatever happens on the way and however far you ranged in search of an easier route.

The initial landscape on the Aubrac plateau before it morphed into woods.

For a long while I’ve had a set of photographs taken in Estaing that I couldn’t place anywhere in the walk, and so finally I’ve gone back to the map and figured out that it’s a fairly short walk beyond Espalion, and so we didn’t hang around apart from a coffee, I think, somewhere down near the bridge and the river. Then we pushed on. So having finally got this piece into the jigsaw I could see that – far from leaving the hill country behind we were still in the thick of it. Unlike the Aubrac Mountains, this landscape was heavily wooded and the footpath – marked all the way, I’ve never mentioned before, by white and red posts- balises was mostly easy to follow.

And there we are – I’ve probably tried to say everything and actually said nothing.

27th May 2010 ctd:

Bed at 9.00pm.  It rained at night and it was raining when we set off so M was pissed of with the extra weight [the tent weighs half as much again when it’s wet].  Turned out to be a monster day again. Following the River Lot but crossing 3 tributary valleys so climbing maybe 1000 metres.  27K in all. M a bit hypo and cross.  Found campsite in Golinhac (650m) very good.  Pitched tent and had a couple of coffees before walking down to the shop to buy picnic tea.  Sadly I’m too tired to eat so we’ll have to make up in Conques tomorrow.  Easier day I very much hope.

Journal

Camino 9. The transhumance

Transhumance is about as ancient activity as human culture itself, and being so ancient means that it’s encoded with a wealth of cultural meaning. The cattle or sheep and indeed goats are moved up to mountainous grasslands where there are rich wildflower pastures that cattle understand and select from. These cows were the happiest and healthiest I’d ever seen.

Typically unprepared we hadn’t grasped that the late night drinking and music were connected to an event – transhumance – which may be associated in these parts of France with Pentecost, bearing in mind that Pentecost, being linked to Easter, and consequently linked to the first full moon after the equinox has a bit of a six week wander around the calendar from year to year. Pasture, on the other hand, pays no attention to such cultural frills and will burst into life when the weather and daylight conditions are right; so as we are discovering on the allotment year by year – spring is driven by weather and pays no heed to gardeners’ and farmers’ careful plans.

So let’s imagine that there is a solemn congregation of pastoralists in Aumont Aubrac that – after a long meal and a good deal of roughish wine – each year decide when the animals will be moved to the hill pastures whereupon plans are made, cellars stocked and musicians booked for the parties in the local villages. The huge circular stone watering ponds that speak of bigger flocks and better days are checked and the best animals are selected for a bit of dressing up.

Because, of course the transhumance isn’t just about good husbandry; it encodes meaning, history, poetry and relationships . In the way of these things, it’s important because it encodes a whole bunch of stuff that the governments of the day – or indeed the landowners – may not be so keen on. Oliver Cromwell was at least right in the reason he gave for banning music, carol singing, Christmas and dancing which were dangerous to the powerful because they embodied that thread of life-giving energy that gives the marginalised people of the earth hope for better things. And so these ancient festivals are greeted with suspicion by the powerful because they simply don’t get it. On the downside there’s a lot of potential for these ancient festivals to become overwhelmed by extreme right populists who feed on the anger of the marginalized whilst stoking up anger for their own reasons which are rarely to improve the lives of the poor. I remember well the St Paul’s riots in Bristol when the extreme right laid on a coach to take the local Southmead lads – who had a well deserved reputation for flaring up and rioting – down to St Pauls. I was working in Southmead as a community artist and I knew them all well. But they refused point blank to get on the bus because they saw immediately that this was not about St Pauls and neither would it help Southmead but an obvious attempt to use them to stir up trouble. I’m pretty sure that, had they got on the bus, there would have been photographers from the right wing press waiting at the other end to photograph them as they got off it. On another occasion our local community policeman came to see me with an inspector in tow after a flare up on the estate. The inspector – not a sympathetic man – said that it was the worst riot he’d ever seen in Southmead. Henry, the community policeman reprimanded him and said “that wasn’t a riot it was a carnival!” It reminds me of the time a bunch of Hell’s Angels turned up at a local village and behaved themselves impeccably. Then reporters from the News of the Screws turned up and offered them £1000 to kill one of Lord Methuen’s peacocks – an offer which they politely declined. Well perhaps not politely!

Anyway, to return to Aumont Aubrac; aside from the noisy parties and the menacing drunks passing our little tents we had no idea what was going on and so the photographs I took of the herding of the cattle were taken from half a mile away. They’re at the top of this piece and you can – if you inspect the photo carefully -see that some of the cattle are decorated with a French Tricolour (see above) and some with less potent symbols. We only noticed them at all because of the clanging of their bells, and the sound of some kind of band coming up behind, and I’m pleased to say that no government officials were harmed in the course of the transhumance – any sore heads were most likely self-inflicted.

But there was another transhumance going on at the same time; the relentless passage of pilgrims in search of some other kind of rich pasture but nonetheless inspired by the ancient culture of pilgrimage. Some, very few, were doing it the old way but others, and I suspect that this group of walkers is one of them, were making use of the huge infrastructure that’s grown up around the pilgrimage. Transit vans, cheap (not that cheap) beds for a night and basic food every day.

Since I didn’t have any idea why I was there it would have been churlish to take a position on their efforts. One person in particular has stuck in my mind. He was German and with our Serbian translator’s help, we discovered that he was walking from Rome to Santiago and picking up a stone at every place he slept. His wife, in Berlin, was dying from cancer and this was his desperate supplication to save her life. Sometimes crazy and beautiful flow together in the same stream and I hope, against hope, that he was choosing small enough stones to get there and big enough stones to impress God.

Camino 5 with suggestions about choosing kit and some reflections on the difference between a walk and a pilgrimage.

I wrote earlier about some of the kit we assembled to take on the Camino and you’ll know – if you’ve been following this thread so far – that it was far too much and far too heavy. No complaints, though, about the little Hilleberg tent which was super light, stormproof and very comfortable; nor the Thermarest inflatable bivvy mats which were brilliant too, and the Mountain Hardware down filled sleeping bag. There’s nothing more cheering in the world than feeling safe, dry and warm when you’ve finally found somewhere to pitch up and you’re cold, tired and hungry. I love the sleeping bag so much that when I was driven back sedated from an endoscope exam I preferred to sleep it off in the sleeping bag. As I looked at the kit just now I thought to myself – why on earth didn’t we do the South West Coast Path? or the Coast to Coast?

With a little time for reflection, that turns out to be a pretty serviceable question. What, if anything, is the difference between a pilgrimage and a long walk? I’ve already said that before we left I felt I’d lost my way and that any sense of vocation that I once enjoyed was worn down by conflict and self doubt. I think that, at the time, I just hoped that I might find some kind of illumination by walking the Camino.

But there’s absolutely nothing about going for a long walk that prevents anyone, religious or not, from experiencing numinous moments that could fairly be categorised as spiritual without buying into the whole supernatural apparatus. The sense of the spiritual could derive from the emergent quality of a random conjunction of material factors – the sound of cowbells on a distant pasture, the smell of the spring air, the wild profusion of spring flowers experienced in a strange place that makes us feel how beautiful the earth is, or how small and vulnerable we are; or it could also be explained as a reassuring hug from an immaterial universal force. Does Gaia do hugs? Maybe it’s our attitude to those experiences that frames alternative answers, and perhaps on reflection a walk can turn into a pilgrimage or a pilgrimage into a walk. In the end; does it even matter?

There’s another possible answer to the question what’s the difference between a walk and a pilgrimage? when we look at it through the lens of some sort of virtue ethic. Going for a long and possibly arduous walk might call into play some or all of – let’s say – the Buddhist virtues; generosity; proper conduct; renunciation; wisdom; energy; patience; honesty; determination; goodwill and finally equanimity – but that wouldn’t be the objective of the walk. However reflecting on those virtues as the walk unfolds and deliberately putting them to use, frames the walking differently, allowing us to reflect on bigger questions such as what does it mean to be fully human? how do I distinguish between flourishing and just getting by? Maybe the objective of the walk is not so much simply to arrive at some kind of holy place – although that certainly adds a layer of meaning – and it should never be an opportunity for suffering for the sake of it because that would be a display of ego and self importance, but perhaps it’s the manner of the journey that matters. Perhaps it would be better to keep quiet about it. The one thing I am quite sure about is that pilgrimage in order to gain posthumous benefits – a get out of jail free card to be traded in against today’s willfulness, is just wrong! A pilgrimage, then, pays more attention to inner change and that’s why it’s hard to do well and easy to get wrong.

My first and finest lesson in equanimity came while we were at art school; Madame studying sculpture and I was studying ceramics. Quite in alignment with my personality I took up two ceramic disciplines that demanded spontaneity and risk – raku and salt glaze. I had made a kiln load of pots to fire in a self built salt glaze kiln, and spent 36 hours firing them in the corner of the sports field. When the kiln was opened it was dramatically overfired and everything had sintered together in a lump that could only be removed with a crowbar. I knew, as I stood in front of a month’s ruined work. that this was a critical moment. I could walk away and try something less risky or embrace the failure as a profoundly important life lesson. I chose the second option and ate it up -and it’s fed me well.

But back on the Camino, did we really need the lean-back chairs? No, of course we didn’t and they – along with most of the redundant or unusable kit – were sent later on to a friend in Bordeaux where we hoped to pick them up later. The improvised clothes pegs are free and available underneath most conifers. The giant scallop shell is the symbol of the pilgrimage for complicated reasons accompanied by pretty far-fetched yarns but it serves as a badge of sorts. Oh and the cheese comes later in the walk but it’s a reminder that if you’re actually taking part in a pilgrimage rather than a mobile supper club, you have to eat when you can, and put up with being hungry when you can’t: it’s all part of the process. Our worst ever meal was a shared tin of cold (we had no stove) cassoulet complete with the layer of fat on the top, but if you look at the top left photo you’ll see the two trees above us in which a Nightjar sang (or rather churred) gently all that night. I had never heard it before or since. When it all boils down, the biggest load you carry on a pilgrimage in any case, is the mental baggage.

Camino 4 – Monistrol d’Allier

20th May 2010 ctd:

Monster monster day.  Crossed over a big ridge to Monistrol d’Allier where we found an unlikely Englishman called Peter running a restaurant.  Couldn’t stop him chatting. Had a coffee and a triangular toasted sandwich – the machine for which he hopes to sell in Korea (!) –filling was made from last night’s leftovers gratin dauphinoise, bits of dry cured ham and cheese sealed in a kind of crêpe.

Journal

This is becoming quite a chastening exercise because every bit of the journey I read back in the contemporary notes comes to me with extras I didn’t recall at the time – like the fact that Peter the proprietor of the hotel and restaurant brought out a wooden board with a lump of local sausage, olives and a large hunting knife for us to help ourselves as he (mostly he) talked. I got the impression he was quite isolated and rather lonely since his wife and, I think, daughter were away somewhere. I couldn’t resist this photo – “Poseur,” apart from the English loanword meaning, meant something like installer, and I wonder if it referred to houses built for the workers building the SNCR railway track from Paris down to Nice. If you drive rather than walk out of Monistrol d’Allier, you follow the railway line which looks incredibly scenic. The trains were still running infrequently a few years ago and there was a ticket that allowed passengers to get on and off as frequently as they liked. It’s a journey I’d still love to make. According to the Cicerone guide there’s a campsite where we stayed next to the river but I can’t remember anything about it.

Some years later, Madame and I retraced as much of the route as we could in our little Hyundai i10 and we stopped off at Monistrol to spend a night at the same hotel. Peter the owner was still there and at supper he walked through to the kitchen with a big tray of freshly picked bright yellow girolles. They would have cost £50 at the market. Our room was spartan – like student accommodation – but on checking it just now it seems to have gone a bit more upmarket these days, although I don’t think the Korean toasties had taken off. There’s really nothing much to see in Monistrol; Madame vowed never to return, and I didn’t argue.

You get some idea of the terrain we were getting ourselves into from the photos below. The warning below them , which we hadn’t properly embraced, was in the indispensable Cicerone guide “The way of St James”. More on that tomorrow with a bit of luck.

I haven’t been spending all my time on writing up the Camino; we’ve also been incredibly busy on the allotment and tomorrow we’re back off to the Bannau (Brecon Beacons) to spend a couple of days with our friends. Hopefully we’ll have time to put out the moth trap and see some of the spectacular moths you can find there, even at 1000 feet – and the fungus season is cranking up nicely although a large box of girolles is probably not going to happen. Looking at the Camino photos the Aubrac hills, although they’re closer to 4000 feet, aren’t dissimilar.

This was only the second day of our walk but even by then we were beginning to realize the scale of the effort we’d be needing to make. Our rucksacks were back breakingly heavy and none of the training walks had been anywhere near the level of difficulty we were now attempting. Somewhere on one of my dead laptops there’s a spreadsheet with the weight of every single item we were taking – all neatly added up. On the night we actually packed them we weighed them on the bathroom scales and the rucksacks were around 5 kilos heavier – a powerful incentive to send some of the kit back to the UK. Individually the kit was as close to state of the art as we could afford; all of it – from bivvy mats, sleeping bags to quick drying clothes, overtrousers and raincoats, super lightweight – it rains a lot up there in the spring. Looking back, was it really necessary to take a spare pair of shoes? Two cameras rather than one? – the list of errors went on. But there’s a reason for it all that hid under the radar as I was planning, because I’m a bit of a hobbit – I believe I need my familiar objects around me.

I suppose most people would say – off the top of their heads – that the object of a pilgrimage is to get to the destination; the holy place at the end of the rainbow. But for me the essence of the enterprise is to embrace vulnerability. For me, not knowing where I’m going to sleep or eat each night is extremely challenging. Not knowing what the next day will involve or where I’ll finish up; not speaking the language very well; not knowing what we would do if ( as happened several times) when we arrived at the campsite, it was closed and locked, or all the shops shut. I could never come out of a period of vulnerability feeling smug or spiritual; just exhausted, wary and fearful but strangely exhilarated and open, with all my senses on steroids. There’s a clarity of thinking that comes alongside vulnerability. The dead hand of my scripted future is swept aside. One of the notes I found in the notebook today that didn’t find its way into the typed transcript was this –

My worst fear would be that my life would turn out to be a quotation from somebody else’s

Journal

Camino 3 – why then? why now? and why me?

I had a stroke of luck today when I found my original notebooks among a box of old files. I still use the boots on the allotment so they’ve lasted around 14 years of hard work. Still waterproof too!

Three questions, then – but not all questions have the same dangerous forensic quality or indeed the same capacity to disturb a night’s sleep. When I formulated them it seemed likely that – at this distance in time – they’d be easy to answer but – well, it seems not. You’d think, wouldn’t you, why then? would be simple; I was due a sabbatical, so who wouldn’t?

Why then?

The Church can be the devil, and when it thinks it can’t be it is!

Canon Francis Palmer in an ordination sermon.

On the one hand, I was an enthusiastic walker and I’d become fascinated by the idea of pilgrimages. I’d even invented and done a two day, forty mile walk from Malmesbury Abbey to Littleton on Severn, following the most likely route to be taken by monks travelling to one of my churches. An old legend told the story of one of my predecessors being murdered on the way to take a communion service, and having the chalice he was carrying stolen by robbers. It was said that a nearby spring turned red every year to commemorate his death. An alternative legend claimed it was the Saxon anchorite St Arilda who was murdered by a Roman officer called Nuncius when she refused to submit to him. I designed the walk to pass both churches dedicated to her as well as my own, and also the spring named after her – which involved a bit of mild off-route trespass. It is thought that the occasional red colouration of the water is due to a micro-organism.

Much earlier in my life I’d managed to include St Ann’s well in Syston into a cross country run which I invented to keep a sadistic PE teacher off my back. It’s difficult for much younger people to understand that we boomers – apart from all the good things like education – also had to put up with a significant percentage of our teachers suffering from PTSD after war service.

Anyway, aside from my interest in pilgrimage and the availability of the sabbatical there was something else. As Francis Palmer warned on the day I was ordained, the church is a dangerous institution. Bullying is endemic. Both congregations and senior clergy are all too willing to destroy, or encourage the destruction – physically, psychologically and spiritually – of anyone who challenges their authority or orthodoxies. I had to cope with a group inside the church who constantly belittled and challenged me; but also a local head teacher who attempted to destroy my career by making false accusations against me. The accusations were easily disproved but the church legal authorities refused to intervene on the grounds that he was clearly mad. We had church members on the doorstep shouting abuse at me or whoever answered the door. We were about to begin a major refurbishment of the church which was overwhelmingly supported by all but a handful of vocal diehards. Yet I was very close to burning out after approaching twenty years of constant headwind in spite of which we increased the congregation, built up a vibrant music group and extended our outreach into the village. Francis Palmer was right, and so was Dom Edmund Wheat who once said to me “always remember that availability is an ascetic discipline”. I no longer knew what, if anything, I believed in any more – apart from believing in the congregation who had stuck with me. I may have thought, without ever articulating it to anyone, that I might, just possibly, find God again out there in the wilderness.

So I filled in an airily optimistic proposal for some funding without mentioning any of what I’ve just written, and it was approved. I was awarded a few hundred pounds most of which I spent on an amazing Hilleberg two person lightweight tent because I thought that was how everybody else conducted long pilgrimages. Then came the maps, the guidebooks and spreadsheets and time ticked on as I bought essential boots and equipment and carried out long training walks.

Why now?

So why am I writing this after so many years? I can think of two possible answers. Firstly, and without any provocation from me, the thought that I might try and walk to St David’s Cathedral popped into my head last time we were in Pembrokeshire. To be clear, I would walk to St Non’s Well not the Cathedral which is 3/4 hour walk further on but far too noisy and full of tourists – and I would do it in short sections, over a period of time and preferably with Madame somewhere close.

The other reason is because I’ve been worrying that the wheels are increasingly wobbly and may fall off before I’ve accomplished a couple of goals. Nothing immediately life threatening is happening but I seem to be taking a lot of medication and visiting the hospital more and more. Bless them, they’ve done wonders, but it seems to me that it’s time – and this is a lovely euphemism – to get things straight; and the Camino is one of those life events that I need to straighten out while I can still put one foot reliably in front of the other. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but I’m still post-Christian and I’m still hoping, still looking for an answer.

The second goal – and this is pure hubris – is to finish writing a million words in this blog, about being human, or being virtuous I’m 80% there now.

Why me?

Well why not? However most of my life has felt as if I was being called to do or be something but I never found out what it was! Vocation is exactly that kind of thing which happens when you go for a job interview and protest that you haven’t seen a job description. At the risk of sounding psychotic, words sometimes land in my heart that are incapable of doubt. There’s a form of utterance in grammar that’s called performative. So these performative statements land without warning and because of their nature, what is spoken just happens. Mercifully they’re vanishingly rare in my experience, but it’s odd when the words “It’s alright” plop into your heart and immediately everything is alright and all melancholy and doubt fly away. There was another one – a bit cryptic but I knew instantly what “clear the decks” meant for me.

So moving on we’ll come to day one of the actual walk:

20th May 2010
Yesterday – bit of a slog (that’s an understatement).  We seemed to be climbing all day – could only get a coffee in St Christophe because the (food) service was finished.  Got to Montbonnet and decided to push on to St Privat d’Allier – which turned out to be all uphill. Arrived at the Camping Municipal (very good) at 6.30pm.  Feasted on the weirdest and thinnest cheese omelette ever + chips and lettuce leaves.  Bed at 8.30pm.  Up at 6.00 and faffed about until 8.00 so we could stock up on pain au chocolat at the boulangerie.

Journal.

A leftover shot from yesterday

The gall of Urophora cardui – a picture wing fly.

You may disagree, but for me this gall, growing on an old enemy to any farmer or gardener – Creeping thistle – is exceptionally beautiful. It suggests a tiny Baobab tree. If you were interested to Google up the fly itself – named on the caption – you’d see that flies too can be very pretty; these are called Picture Wing flies and I’ve never seen one, so there’s still plenty of wildlife for me to look out for.

I wrote a few weeks ago about the sowing of wildflowers along the edges of several paths in the grounds of Dyrham Park. I have to question my reasons for disliking out-of-place wildflowers because I’m quite sure that a kind of covert “wild-ism” can establish itself and become a brake on wildlife conservation. With global and disastrous heating of the climate; we’re certain to see many of our native species disappear and be replaced by migrating plants moving north to escape from the heat. We’re going to have to learn to welcome all sorts of human and non human strangers here and we’re going to have to learn to say sad farewells to old friends if we’re going to regain the earth as a friend. We’re also going to have to accept that when every news bulletin features the latest out of control fires across the world it’s we who are responsible. There’s no future (really!) in treating climate disaster as an abstract concept – we have seen the enemy – it is us!

I said at the time I wrote about this, that I thought many of the artificially seeded wildflowers would look lovely for a season and then fail to thrive and for once I’m sorry that I’m right, because it’s happening already and the thugs are reasserting themselves in a big way, and chief among them is the Creeping thistle. Yesterday in Dyrham Park the National Trust was deploying volunteers to cut them down. Truth to tell, the only way to control them properly is to pull the young plants out by hand, roots and all. The game volunteers were working with strimmers and sickles in a snowstorm of thistledown and undoubtedly this pernicious weed spreads viable seeds; but it gains control of large tracts of ground by spreading by rapidly growing roots which, like Bindweed, can regenerate from small fragments. Alongside the newly laid paths which, a couple of months ago were covered with wildflowers, the Creeping thistles already reign supreme in the overly rich and recently overturned soil. Re-establishing wildflower meadows is the work of decades. Meanwhile the Hogweed is showing the door to the Wild Carrot and a few poppies struggle to flower. Our son’s partner muttered that “they’re all weeds as far as I can see” and she’s right.

But aside from grumbling about missed opportunities; something else has been on my mind. A couple of days ago I mentioned Geoffrey Hill, the poet and writer of a poem sequence entitled “Mercian Hymns”. I was musing on what a strong sense of rootedness in a landscape means whilst reading “On the Black Hill” by Bruce Chatwin. I first read Geoffrey Hill maybe fifty years ago and although I loved Mercian Hymns I didn’t really understand the poem. This brought back to my mind one of those turning point memories from decades back. I was having real problems with the choir in one of my churches. There’s no getting away from it, they hated me with the kind of hatred that thrives like the creeping thistle in the virtuous people of the church when they’re not getting all their own way. So in a last ditch attempt to get them to cooperate, I enlisted a friend – a great musician and conductor who was struggling to teach me to play the piano – to come and run a rehearsal for me. The choirmaster had, by this time, walked out. Imagine this choir as a group of surly sixteen year olds in detention on a hot Friday afternoon. They were not going to cooperate even if the roof fell in. So we struggled on for a while and my friend suddenly marched across the chancel; tore the hymn book from the hands of one of the ringleaders of the rebellion; threw it violently on the floor and shouted in her face – “For goodness sake forget the notes and look for the music!” That was pretty much the end of the choir, but soon I recruited musicians and singers; learned to conduct and passed my music theory exams so I could engage with them on more like equal terms.

It was a thrilling intervention that, this week, suddenly helped me to understand what I was doing wrong with Mercian Hymns. I had been struggling to understand the words but failing to find the music. So I immediately searched and found a second hand copy of the poems for £8.00. It arrived on Wednesday and I found that it was speaking to me in a language I could inexplicably understand. When the book arrived I tore open the package and at once saw the cover. It was Paul Gauguin’s painting “The Vision after the Sermon”.

I have to pause here and take a deep breath because this Old Testament story about Jacob crossing the Jabbok brook is immensely important. You can read it in Genesis chapter 32 if you wish, but you don’t need any faith at all to learn from it. Jacob is making a life-changing journey into a new life; leaving his family and everything familiar behind. He crosses the river and spends the night wrestling with an angel, demanding a blessing from this mysterious being. The angel gives him the blessing, but injures his hip at the same time. Psychoanalytically, this is about as important a story as they get. Carl Jung spoke often of our wounds as being integral to our creativity. We work from them; we grow from them. But the story goes further because it tells us that creativity and generativity are a relentless struggle with forces we barely understand. If you’re a writer or an artist; if you’re a farmer or an allotmenteer or a parent or if you wish to live a virtuous life seeking justice or compassion, you are going to have to wrestle with the angel, sometimes all night, and even at the cost of getting hurt – demand that blessing and live with the consequences.

So where does that leave us with the Creeping thistle with its very own gall? Where does it leave us with weeds and disappointments and failed crops? Where does it leave us when we confront injustice and inhuman behaviour? Where does it leave us with loss and gain?

Well, it leaves us exactly where we are already but suggests that the only way forward will – almost always – come at a cost. We need the kind of honesty that tells us – this is going to hurt – but it’ll be worth it in the end.

A dangerous music

Taken on Cap Corse in 2010

We were watching Stanley Tucci’s cookery series on TV last night and at the very end of his visit to Sardinia and after sharing a rather grisly starter of cooked sheep’s blood and mint with a group of shepherds they barbecued the lamb- basted with the bitter honey of the Strawberry Tree – and began singing the traditional shepherd songs of the island. We’d heard that sound before on Corsica; every bit as lovely in its rather chilling way. It’s called polyphonic music; a highly textured interweaving of voices. This kind of music appears all over the world in different registers between high culture and folk song- we were in Barcelona some years ago and next door to the Museum of Contemporary Art there was a sound installation where the forty parts of Tallis’ motet Spem in alium were each given a loudspeaker, the whole arranged on stands in a circle which we were free to move inside. We were transfixed with tearful joy. At a less exalted level, there are many traditions of circle singing around the world; some, but by no means all, associated with Psalms. What these traditions all share is the complex interweaving of a single phrase being sung in something like a round by singers following different intervals.

Shepherd music, though, is less associated with loosely organised religion than it is with various forms of independence struggle. We were on Corsica on Bastille Day, for instance and not a single firework was let off. Most Corsicans don’t give a toss for the French government. Similar song forms exist in Finnish and – closer to my heart – in Wales.

But this isn’t going to be a technical discussion. The point of it, for me, is that polyphonic song is powerfully spiritual, visceral in its intensity. One of the things the lower voices do in Sardinia seems to be very similar to Tibetan throat singing; the bass sings a very rich fundamental along with its harmonics. Even the single note at the bottom would be incredibly difficult for most singers to reach; but to allow the overtones and harmonics to develop around it takes the song to a different level.

I often talk about the absolute necessity of shared community values if we are to flourish, because the whole purpose of this blog is to find ways of being fully human while living in a culture that strips us of any vestige of humanity if we aren’t careful. Singing, we are encouraged to believe from infancy onwards, is (like art) a difficult and rare skill that few of us possess – which is a pernicious lie because it cuts us off from a turbo charged source of spiritual food. Look at a shepherd choir, a folk band, a string quartet, a circle of singers and watch them as they watch each other while they make music. There’s a wild and passionate engagement with one another as we make music, which breaks down the barriers between us and allows us to experience our own wholeness in, and with others. As I often said in my old day job; “if they knew what was going on here they’d tax it or ban it altogether”. When you join music with a shared culture, a shared memory or aspiration then it takes on a scary power.

What’s the first thing a colonial power does to subdue a culture? It takes away its language, its shared memories, its art, its poetry and its songs – and so singing, remembering and celebrating become a countercultural act. I’ve never forgotten a retreat I went on at Emmaus House in Clifton. There we were, a bunch of complete strangers, and we were invited to take both hands of the person next to us and behold them. You simply wouldn’t believe what a deep experience that was because it involved a profound letting go of boundaries. Singing does that too, but on steroids!

But I wouldn’t want to forget that these humanising experiences are additive. Add singing to a shared meal, a bit of drama, (carrying in the haggis, beating saucepans around an apple tree, a bawdy mummer’s play – you get the picture) and invisible threads are woven like cat’s cradles around the participants. So in answer to the question –how can I feel more alive? more human? get down off your solitary dung heap, stop crowing like a preacher, get your head out of your arse, lose all those inhibitions, eat your dinner together and sing as if your life depended on it – because it does!

What a difference a day makes!

This view through the campervan door on consecutive days is a perfect cameo of Welsh weather. The patch of grass that’s visible on the right hand photo is just out of frame on the left. If you’re lucky you can make out the ridge of Talybont forest on the left whereas it’s clear on the right.

The campsite we stayed on is a place we’ve used several times. Right next to the canal it’s only a short distance to a place where we can easily launch the kayak, and we’re far from alone in seeing this as a perfect place for energetic walks and even more energetic bike routes over the hills on the Taff Trail. All day long the supremely fit come bowling into the campsite with their Volkswagen T5’s magnificent legs and haggard faces looking for all the world like sturdier versions of the crack smokers on the green outside the flat in Bath. I’ll get to them later.

Notwithstanding the physical challenges available, there’s also an awful lot of wildlife to be seen, although how you would get to experience any of it from the saddle of a bike is debatable. Ironically we saw more wildlife than we ever expected by just sitting still on the grass outside the van. There was a field mouse who took an hour to make his mind up and then shuttled back and forth collecting the crumbs we’d thrown down. He was sleek and almost chestnut in colour, quite beautiful. There were the two hedgehogs in the dusk and innumerable birds; sparrows, dunnocks, blackbirds, an amazing kingfisher bursting out of the hedge, buzzards, robins, wrens, blue tits, coal tits and woodpigeons – all seen without moving a step from the van. I was racking my brains to remember this line from W.H. Davies:

WHAT is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

W.H. Davies “Leisure”

It’s a bit corny, but then I remembered its uncanny echo of Milton’s Sonnet 19 on his blindness “When I consider how my light is spent”, that ends –“They also serve who only stand and wait.” – there’s a real spiritual point to standing still and waiting, that challenges our cultural obsession with success, hard work, achievement.

So we’d run out of milk when we got home and I wandered down to the supermarket to get some. Sadly, since the fire at Green Park Station, the milk vending machine has been disconnected. As I walked back in the sunshine a loud argument was being conducted across me on the street. “I’m effing desperate, I am” screamed a woman at the obviously sick man who was just in front of me. She was forging on, head down in that characteristic junkie walk. He shouted back – “It’s just here at the end of the block”. I knew in a second that they were off to meet one of the several dealers who work this area and use the corner as a rendezvous point. Sure enough as I followed them to the end of the road they were there, with a mobile standing on the corner; she was still shouting needlessly into the receiver. Then two, three and four people turned up to join the queue. They have the hunted look of those who have been shriven by their lives, bent over like the trees on the ridge of Freezing Hill, parchment skinned, incoherent bog burials.

The deal was a messy affair in several acts. She borrowed some crack from someone in the queue and stormed over to the privacy of the bushes at the edge of the green where she shared a pipe with her benefactor and walked back miraculously calmed. Arguments broke out – there was shouting and swearing until the dealer cycled up and then for ten minutes noisy negotiations broke out. People stormed off and returned chastened; shouting, more shouting, a big man was throwing haymakers at an invisible enemy. There were dangerous looking dogs barking. Eventually she got her drugs and sat calmly in full view, injecting into her neck. She wandered off again into the woods and returned with a bicycle. It was sad; so appallingly sad, to see these ruined lives.

Blaming the victim is always cheaper

Where do you even begin to find a way through this mess? There’s a strong association with mental illness, homelessness and alcohol – any or all of which could be tackled if we chose to resource it, but blaming the victim is always cheaper. In a world without the prospect of employment, drug dealing looks like a rational choice where the most successful and profitable business are centred on greed and entirely disregard the consequences. The street is a dangerous place so getting a dangerous dog is a rational response once again. I was having a conversation with a financial advisor recently and he told me that if you’re simply interested in making money and don’t give a hoot for ethical investments, then oil and weapons are the star performers. The tanks, guns and landmines are just flying off the shelves. The same old saw comes back every time – “We have seen the enemy, it is us”.

And then I remember A F Woodman who was the music teacher who introduced me and so many others to music – the “brandy of the damned” – according to George Bernard Shaw; and I remember him shouting at me “I know you can hear it, Pole – but are you listening?”

I’m listening!

A Day Lily in our container garden outside the flat

The well tempered household

The title, “Well tempered household” is a steal from a gardening classic by Christopher Lloyd called “The Well Tempered Garden” – well worth reading even though he seems to think of a small garden being anything less than three acres. “Tempered” in the sense that he’s using it has nothing to do with bad tempers or good manners because it’s drawing on a process familiar to sword makers when steel is heated and cooled in order to make it less fragile, more ductile and altogether stronger. A well tempered garden in this sense is a garden that’s capable of withstanding the kinds of climatic surprises and shocks that we’re becoming all too familiar with.

So extending the metaphor to a whole household – like the Potwell Inn – seems not to be too far a stretch, at least to me. We’re not tidy, we’re frequently bad tempered but the Potwell Inn is a well tempered household because in amongst the joyful moments we’ve seen a few shocks and many stresses; we’ve endured scary times and sad times; we’ve frequently been hard up, and to borrow another idea from Nietzsche – what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I like to think that layer after layer of experience has been forged into the steel of our being, such that our resilience has made us strong.

Of course there are some shocks that experience can’t overcome. Yesterday we went to visit an old friend with Motor Neurone Disease and against all the odds we had a really lovely afternoon together. Any difficulties in listening to his failing voice were overcome, and – not for the first time – I felt the presence of a kind of luminosity which is not unusual among those who are approaching death. We left and drove back to Bath on a warm and sunny evening and I was overwhelmed by a sense of fullness as all my summer evenings were forged into one. It was an unexpected and extraordinary moment.

Back in the kitchen there were jobs to do, and so I kneaded the new batch of dough for the morning and set it into a banneton that I’ve only used a few times before. I don’t think I could ever write a full account of baking bread. It’s so embedded in my memory and my hands that hundreds of micro decisions contribute to the final loaf. There is a recipe stuck to the fridge, but it’s overwritten with so many amendments I rarely even look at it. But when the stars align and the starter, the batter and then the dough come right there’s a feeling that it’s going to be good. But there’s another feeling too because having the starter right, having the flour and then the loaf right are tokens of stability. Well tempered baking is a fundamental part of a well tempered household and so too is the allotment which brings us healthy food. Today we harvested tomatoes, potatoes, aubergines, green beans and sweetcorn and Madame picked 2Kg of blackberries from the footpath. Today we’re winning the sweetcorn battle with the badgers six nil. Lunch was good.

The Pyrex bowl in which I’ve proved every loaf I’ve ever baked is so precious and replete with memories that it’s only ever hand-washed. I’m not sure I could cope with losing it. The sourdough starter is more than ten years old and always sulks when we go away and don’t feed it. Recently a couple of American neighbours were in the process of moving away and they entrusted a three generations old sourdough pancake batter to our care.

So yesterday evening we ate late, watched television far too late – binging on “Bear” series two – and then listened to some of the music again while we drank too much wine. The sound track is amazing. A short night, then, and up early with a thick head to bake the loaf.

As the produce floods in, I spend more and more time in the kitchen. Today there were the blackberries to be cooked and strained through a cotton twill bag to make jelly. Bramble jelly is one of the most fragrant of all the jellies, and it always feels like we’re eating summer when we have it. Then today I also made the first batch of roasted tomato passata which we use as a base for many meals throughout the year. I suppose all this is another instance of resilience; of the tempering process that keeps the household on track even during the toughest of times. Without our sack of flour, the bakers yeast and the sourdough starter and a cupboard full of preserved produce from the allotment we’d have felt very exposed, but as it was, our principal enemy was isolation.

Are we self-sufficient? Absolutely not; but are we well tempered and resilient? without doubt!

Hello – do you come here often?

Stone Parsley, Sison amomum,

OK so there’s nothing much to see here; no great rarity except for the fact that I’ve never, ever noticed it before – and I don’t mean I’ve never noticed it here in Bath, I haven’t noticed it anywhere. I was stomping alongside the pavement below Royal Crescent in a barely suppressed rage caused by a third futile visit to the pharmacy trying to get the drugs that were prescribed for me six weeks ago. Nothing unusual there, then, but what was noteworthy was the fact that the moment I noticed this tiny stranger (the flowers are barely 3mm across) my mood changed dramatically for the better.

Look! it’s almost invisible

There’s a big family of wildflowers known as the Apiaceae. They used to be known as Umbellifers but nothing stays the same for long in botany – so think Cow Parsley, Hogweed, carrot; that kind of plant with the flowers gathered in a sort of umbrella shape at the top of each stalk. They can be a bit of a baffling family because it’s so easy to get them wrong. They flower at different times in the season and you rarely get to see them side by side so you can compare them. Over the years I’ve learned to identify quite a few of the common ones – often by looking at the seeds with a hand lens; but with this particular flower I realized that somewhere deep in my memory and in an unconscious act, all the plants I knew by name had passed rapidly through my brain and in an instant I knew that I didn’t know what it was.

So I took some (terrible) photos – not really knowing what I was looking for – and then very roughly identified it at home, starting with Google Lens (feel free to hiss) and then with three or four books I’d got a ballpark idea of what I was looking for. Then armed with one or two key points – the leaves and stalks turn red as they age; the leaves, when crushed, have an unpleasant smell; the seed capsules are very prominent and green and so on. This morning I went back and checked once more. Perish the thought that I’d dare to criticise the experts but the leaves, when crushed, didn’t smell so much of petrol but was more like the smell of the Woundworts. There were traces of red on the lower leaves and some stems which matched the descriptions in colour and shape; so yes I’m satisfied that it was Stone Parsley. A quick search on the BSBI Atlas database revealed that it had been recorded previously in this part of Bath, so it wasn’t rare – it was just rare to me – and I felt the day had been vindicated.

I remember the first time I ever encountered the difficulties of being sure about members of this family of plants. When I discovered that I might have to look at seeds with a magnifying glass, my heart sank and I carried the sense that this was an impossible task for decades. But slowly I learned how to look properly and now I can approach them in the knowledge that close attention to detail is all it needs, and if that doesn’t yield a name, then I am allowed to phone a friend.

Why am I writing this? Well I have so often been put off by well meaning people who will give a Latin name but not talk about the process which leads to it. Being entirely self-taught I am never confident of pronouncing the names I do know, but years of exposure to multiple different pronunciations of the same name by equally competent experts assures me that if I go ahead and mispronounce it with confidence, most people will be filled with doubt that they’ve been saying it wrong. It’s a kind of bluff that usually gets me there.

Of course doing field botany can be difficult and occasionally intellectually challenging, but it’s also tremendous fun; especially if you’re out with a bunch of experts who are also good company and best of all, good teachers. From time to time I like to bang on a bit about the way that so many people assert – without offering any evidence – that nature is good for us. Well perhaps I could offer the idea that mindful and alert walking in nature cheers me up, stimulates the mind and is good physical and even spiritual practice. It can even stop me brooding about the state of the NHS.

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