green spirituality – Page 3

KIng Charles the Martyr – in a jar?

When you’re as old as me, you’ll probably find yourself saying “many years ago; when ….” – rather too often, since that’s the point when you realize that your children no longer care about, let alone believe your stories. But I’m not going to be caught out that way. I’ll merely say …….

I was on a silent retreat in a Franciscan convent in Dorset and since I was the only man present I was sequestered alone in a cottage on the edges of the estate. Meals were conducted in silence apart from the first five minutes of the one o’clock news on the BBC controlled rigidly by the Superior. Conversation was not allowed and so you had to learn some kind of sign language to get hold of the salt. The silence was only broken once – this was in the period of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest pomp – when it was announced that she’d shut down a couple more coal mines and a steelworks. One of the younger sisters was unable to contain a long snort of hatred and derision. We shared a conspiratorial smile among ourselves and went on with lunch – knowing that if we didn’t eat it all, it would come back meal after meal until it grew whiskers. I remember an old friend, a retired orthopaedic surgeon saying on his 90th birthday that the trouble with thriftiness was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The table rituals were both arcane and hilarious. We were each given a coloured napkin ring and told to sit at whichever place we found it on. What we weren’t told was that no one could leave the table until the final napkin was rolled and replaced in its ring. Needless to say I was the first victim of the rule, but I got my revenge by making everyone wait for each subsequent meal by sitting there beaming until I got bored. It was there that I discovered that I’m absolute rubbish at silence. I much preferred the Benedictines where they were still silent but you got a glass of wine with lunch and one of the monks read aloud from an interesting book.

Anyway the Franciscans were devotedly high church Anglicans and one of the curiosities was their attachment to martyrs, not least King Charles 1st it seems. By and large they were a radical bunch who really did walk the walk, but I was caught out by a jam jar on the table at breakfast time which was plainly labelled “King Charles the Martyr”. God knows (I thought religiously) what’s in there and I wish it would be marmalade but the thought that it might actually contain some sort of relic held me back. A single hair or fingernail would have made me feel very ill. And in any case was it entirely correct to celebrate the memory of the slaughtered king by eating him? Was this sacramental food in some arcane sense? or was it a witty joke by a rebellious sister? and if not – what?

Madame and I really like marmalade, but ever since the invention of Hartley’s “New Jam” – which was as watered down as “New Labour” turned out to be and then sold in smaller jars to add insult to injury, shop bought marmalade- in fact most shop bought jam too has lost most of its fruitiness because it’s lost most of its fruit. If you want the real thing you have to make it yourself. The Potwell Inn has one small problem in that I prefer my marmalade chunky and Madame likes it thin cut with as little peel as possible. This results in half finished jars having all their juices spooned out leaving dense faggots of orange flavoured brushwood at the bottom. I bear it bravely but it gives me terrible hiccoughs. I will get to the point ASAP.

So my family always made marmalade and home made jams, preserves and pickles have always been part of my life. My mum strayed from the path of righteousness at some point in the past and started to use the tinned, pre-shredded and cooked to be sold in giant tins. It didn’t feel right and we’ve never yielded t0 the temptation. If we’ve done the numbers right, we have marmalade all year round but sometimes we run out and then the wait for early January when the Seville oranges come in is a festival of longing. This year and true to tradition they arrived on January 2nd. It was only this week that I finally joined the dots regarding King Charles the Martyr. His execution took place on December 30th and so it’s just possible that the Sevilles arrived a bit early the year of my retreat and that Sister Angela, or whichever one was cooking that week, commemorated the religious festival on a jar of marmalade. It made me think of the Benedictine aphorism that “to work is to pray and to pray is to work”

But marmalade making is equally a thanksgiving festival for me; along with Christmas puddings and Christmas cakes. It’s impossible not to think of my mum and my gran as I’m chopping and simmering, boiling and bottling. It’s a ceremony that requires faith in the future; that we’ll be there to enjoy all fifteen jars in the course of this new year. It’s our opportunity to prepare and eat the best of food rather than the blandest and cheapest industry can manage. It’s hard work slicing the peel of 4 Kg of oranges and I have to keep sharpening the knife. My hands and wrists ache from the effort but it gives a long space of time to meditate and savour the grace of the ingredients and their journey to our kitchen where they fill the flat with their lovely fragrance. The whole act of making marmalade collapses time, prompting an escape from all the anxieties of the present moment, and it’s free; no books (the recipe is so simple) no gurus, churches or self-help groups; and if praying for King Charles 1st is your bag – that’s fine too; it wouldn’t be mine but feel free if its yours.

The Sisters and the Covent are long gone, scattered across the country and perhaps absorbed into other groups but I remember them with great fondness. The Franciscan movement has something to say to us, even now. They could be trailblazers in the search for a new and all embracing spirituality of the natural world – it’s there in the foundational writings of St Francis from the beginning. Every religious movement has to learn to live with its Jabez Bunting and its Brother Elias. The women did better with Hildegard of Bingen and Sister Clare, but there’s always a battle between the bureaucratic and the visionary when the founder dies and the battle for succession begins.

As for the Potwell Inn we opt for the quiet life and do our best to preserve it.

I had a visitation last night from Dabberlocks and Furbelow

The dream

I like to think of Dabberlocks and Furbelow as invisible friends; but in reality, as solicitors for my superego for my whole life, they’ve hinted, adjudicated and occasionally forbidden my wilder flights of fancy. Occasionally they’ll issue a non-disclosure order on one of my ideas but mainly they just sit in silence and I know what’s required. I call it censorship but they refer to it as discretion and normally they win.

The visitations come in occasional dreams and their names and faces are never visible to me but I always know they mean business even if their language is completely opaque and I struggle to understand what they’re driving at. Once I had a dream about a very large and menacing dog clutching a beautiful ruby in its teeth which I think I was supposed to remove. on Saturday night I had another dream in which the words were said – “you can’t argue with a blackthorn” in the context of winter flowering plants. It usually takes a lot of imagination to turn the key in the lock but this one immediately brought to mind a long abandoned project about a character I’d invented called Barnacle. I wrote a kind of CV down for him at the time, along with a quite detailed description of his appearance. Beard, huge greatcoat with deep pockets and that kind of thing. But as soon as I recalled the word “blackthorn” I knew that he would have carried a blackthorn stick representing both the peaceful rambler and the belligerent cudgel known in Ireland as a shillelagh. Two of his multiple temperaments in a single wintry stick that flowered like snow in the hedges in the worst and coldest season of the year.

Then I had him. I’d kept him secret for twenty years and it was time to let him out.

I learned something unforgettable from Sister Enid many years ago, and it helped me to weave some random threads into a thick cloth.The first time I met her was on a Catholic retreat. This was no pious weekend, though, because the La Retraite house in Bristol was, a beacon of radical and practical faith. I took part in a number of retreats there – they were pioneers in bringing Myers Briggs to the UK – but on that particular occasion there was something else going on. The point here is not so much what went on, but the fact that until 48 hours in, Sister Enid didn’t speak a word. She sat in the corner silently and, being young and arrogant, I assumed that she was an ancient, probably half senile sister who had been propped up in the room for a bit of company. We were a strange mix, but amongst the retreatants were a group of sisters from another house who were experiencing – let’s say – interpersonal difficulties. There was something bad eating away at them.

Anyway, the retreat went on and we talked a bit; shared a bit and did some challenging exercises in small groups and in full sessions. In the last plenary, Sister Enid finally spoke. She had watched and listened from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon – the daft old lady in the corner – and then finally and without notes, she accomplished the most forensic examination of a group’s dynamics I’ve ever witnessed. I learned two important things that weekend. Firstly, never again to stereotype and then dismiss another human being because they were old; and secondly that watching, listening and paying minute attention is infinitely more humane and useful to a writer than spouting smartass ideas and showing off.

I even invented – conceived – a character who embodied that lesson. The name, I’m afraid, was invented long before the children’s TV programme called the Octonauts so I must ask that you banish any thoughts of the character of the bear in the TV films. My Captain Barnacle – without the final ‘s’ – is a darker character and – to be honest – he’s part of an alter ego that I created for myself twenty years ago. Here’s the CV I wrote for him – or perhaps it was me all along.:

A wintry story at Christmas

At the edge of the River Severn in the month of December you might stand in the freezing cold one night, with the moon sitting low in the sky and the wind rattling down over your shoulder from the Northeast, driving the clouds across the sky like sea foam. And if you stand until your fingers turn white and brittle and wait and wait as the tide flows and foxes go about their business, you might wonder at the sheer size of the sky above your head. And you might, as you scan the sky, think to yourself – “this is the point in the film where the geese fly over, honking, and my blood freezes” – you might also begin to see the millions of stars above your head and among them you might notice the constellation of Orion with his sword and his belt. And you might also think to yourself that this dark sky reminds you a bit of your Dad’s huge black overcoat then you wouldn’t be far out.

And imagine if you could search in his deep black pockets for sweets, and breathe in the familiar sharp smell of his armpits, and the smell of the bus, and the smell of the rain and the pub and you would feel very safe indeed perhaps and you would know that asking whether such a being as Captain Barnacle exists is a silly question. When you have seen the stars that line his greatcoat stretched over your head in the dead of night, then you just know it, and the teachers, pharisees, inquisitors and pedants as usual, know nothing.

As to the facts, there’s not a lot to be said. He’s a weaver of meanings, like an angel or possibly the weaver of a unique form of cloth. Some people have argued that there may be a hierarchy of Barnacles and such a thing may be as true as any other thing. What I know for a fact is that he lives on a hill near a seaside town – hence the name and rank – and he drives a yellow Morris 1000 van with stars and a crescent moon hand painted on the side, and he has a more or less scandalous and very intermittent liaison with “Astral” who is an “International Clairvoyante” and whose visions regularly transcend the parish boundary.

It’s said he spends the day at a huge loom in a wooden shack, and where he weaves a sky cloth from fragments he has harvested during his journeys. Anything from a ship’s manifest to a small advertisement could be woven. A tiny piece of conversation blown in the wind is not too small to escape his attention. He might be arrested by the arching of an eyebrow or the faint flush of the skin in a chance meeting between two people who do not yet know that they are lovers. A dog’s bark, a small joke or even a road sign might inflame him. A particular favourite of his are lists and catalogues which can easily be unravelled and used again. Memories, sounds and smells are the warp and weft of the cloth and if he can lay his hands on the glint of the sea he can weave it in judiciously so as to bring the whole fabric to perfection. The cloth which he weaves descends only at night which is why you can’t see it in the day time.

The promiscuity of his means is a source of continual irritation to the town, and especially to the deacons of the local church who, being both strict and particular as well as Baptist, have only the one story which is completely threadbare.

This last factor may be the origin of their assertion that “Captain Barnacle is a creature of the night” – a phrase that has a peculiar resonance for parish councillors and deacons. However it may be that the simple fact that he is, in reality, out and about more obviously during the night, is enough to remove the inverted commas and turn the criticism into an observation.

Some refining of the idea might help. Captain Barnacle is especially a creature of the warm summer night. On such a night, the sea-town is held in the air by the force of dreams of faded seawashed driftwood spars; frames; orange-peel;

Delabole slate; terracotta tiles; Paynes grey skies, windworn rocks; sea worn pebbles; scrubbed sand; lichens; quoits and dracaenas as various as silks in a cabinet or an artists’ colour chart. Then, as the sun sets and the pasty shops clean down their shelves, the soft warmth of night insinuates its seductive aromas around the harbour. When the scent of hot tarmac, wallflowers, fish and chips, cigarette smoke and stale beer hang in the salt air like pheromones to the young men and women gathered like moths beneath coloured lights . When Pasties, suntan oil and peeling shutters shriven by the summer heat gift their perfumes to the sky as it turns from pale blue to indigo. When the people refuse the cadence of night and day and they try to stretch the day as if they could hold the tide at the rim of the horizon by sheer effort of will. Then Captain Barnacle will leave home and drive down the winding road through the town.

Captain Barnacle is also a creature of the winter night, of the harvest night, of the night of mourning. He is both Captain of the Feast and solitary figure at the graveside. “Amen to that!” he cries, and the deacons and the parish councillors murmur damp threats and plan horrible revenge. They will whip him with scorpions, they say, and Elder Bell keeps a whole nest of them behind the shop where he keeps the flick knives and condoms for the local lads.

Truth to tell, I think Captain Barnacle is a bit frightening. The smell of his armpits and the acrid greatcoat speak of other adventures and happenings that aren’t so good. In fact they’re everything the deacons say. Sometimes he puts his hands deep down into his greatcoat pockets and you can hear things scurrying around in there.

Some say that the Captain is exceedingly old, even as old as Adam himself and others maintain that he drifted into town in the nineteen sixties and never left. He might be some kind of extraordinary deity or he might be a beach-bum entrepreneur.

The beard is a nice thought. Nothing goes with a greatcoat like a beard, and a pipe. But this beard is different; so dense you could not hack your way through it with the sharpest billhook. A beard to occlude the sky and the clouds. A beard full of thorns and small nesting birds and fugitives hiding from justice. A beard full of things you tried to say and couldn’t. A grey beard with a golden stain that might come from poems spoken out loud or from roll-ups. It is impossible to imagine him without one and so I will give him one without fear of being accused of not really knowing him at all – and the length of his hair? Flowing, naturally, and long …. somewhat wavy and a tad greasy for some tastes.

And his stick? Why of course it’s a blackthorn shillelagh. Dark with age and cured for a year in a dung heap wrapped in oiled cloth to make it harder and more resilient and made by a man called Rex who’d scoured the hedges near the riverside for exactly the right conjunction of root (for handle) and shaft; donned his thickest gloves against the thorns and sawn it off – unique and precious; polished it to a glow and weighted it with lead so that it balanced at exactly one third of the way down where – if needs be – Captain Barnacle would hold it in order to administer stern correction if the deacons came after him on the heath, in the dark.

There must be more!

happy solstice!

I guess this is a kind of Solstice card – although it’s been a gloomy, cold and wet day; the kind you’re happiest to see the back of. I woke up at 4.00am with a dream in which the only thing I remember is someone or something saying “you can’t argue with a blackthorn”. I have no idea what that was about except that it’s impossible to force your way through a thicket of them because they’re so horribly spiny. Equally the fruits are completely unapproachable unless steeped in sugar and gin. The other notable thing about the blackthorn is the folk name “blackthorn winter” which according to Geoffrey Grigson in “The Englishman’s Flora” (other genders are available), expresses an ancient association of plants with seasons. The links are more often to do with the medicinal properties or with the supernatural which often overlap. Mistletoe is listed in the same book with countless properties including aphrodisiac and as a “heal all” from the time of the earliest herbals, but Grigson takes a very dim view of the druidic movement as it freely invented folklore, irrevocably clouding the real history.

There are others of course – outside the flat today we had winter jasmine, cyclamen and even a few hardy geraniums on the window ledge. Grigson’s pick included the Christmas Rose and of course holly and ivy, traditionally brought indoors in winter to protect the woodlands for spring. I haven’t got a picture of a Christmas rose, which is the white flowered variety but in the same family the Lenten rose was in flower on the allotments today and is a member of the buttercup family; traditionally grown next to the front door to ward off evil spirits.

The solstice manages to condense astronomy, folklore and pagan religion in a single moment of time which, today, was 15.03 so apologies for the late arrival of this greeting. Let’s hunker down now until the blackthorn appears.

The earth is not a blank canvas

We walk into the supermarket or log on to Amazon and it’s all there; the cornucopia, the works – everything the contented human being could possibly want. Except in times of scarcity, after snow or flood or during an epidemic when the shelves are empty and then we’re angry.

Yesterday we had a light frost. We walked down the steep slope to the allotment and the sun – we are almost at the winter solstice – transits behind a row of trees low in the sky – was unable to warm the soil on any of our plot. The overnight temperature according to the trailcam was 2C.

Our culture directs our instincts to want to take control. We have come to believe that each of us – apart from losers who don’t count – is some kind of tabula rasa on which we are free to inscribe whatever we want; fulfillment, creativity, success; even new and more attractive silicone lips. If you can be bothered you can easily test my hypothesis by counting how many times the word control crops up in an evening’s TV ads. Without adequate control, we are all smelly, leaky and horribly unattractive, betrayed by our unforgivable lack of the Big C which is always available – at a price – from a retailer near you.

The sad truth of course is that by the time you’ve been programmed to aspire harder and show the world who you really are it’s too late. You’ve already lost who you really are to the expensively curated simulacrum who gloats back at you in the mirror and demands more, more, and yet more.

If allotmenteering is even remotely therapeutic, as is universally claimed but rarely actually tested; it’s closer to psychoanalytic psychotherapy than that it is to happy days in the sunshine. We are not blank canvases and neither is the earth. Just as we have no retrospective agency with our appearance or with our childhood and past history, neither has the earth. The question we have to take to each session is – “why am I as I am?” “Why do I need to take control all the time?” and for any allotmenteer, and I know this may sound ridiculous, “why do I have such a complicated relationship with this patch of earth?” Why do weeds upset me so much? Why do I have this boundless fear of rats but not – let’s say – hedgehogs? Why did I feel I had to destroy anything that occupied my [?] allotment when I moved on to it. Why am I so obsessively protective of its boundaries? Why do I want so much to kill pests. What is it about badgers that I like most of the time, until they eat my sweetcorn?

If you look at the photograph at the top of this post, you may recognise one of the the tracks up the Blackdown ridge on Mendip. If by some mischance you were to inherit this lovely patch of earth you could decide to grow almost anything. You could decide but you wouldn’t succeed because this land has history; millions of years of it. Once upon a time it was at the bottom of the sea but now it’s at the top of a range of hills. The point where I stood when I took the photograph is above a deep layer of carboniferous limestone, and likely way under your feet there are still undiscovered cave systems. Rod’s pot, Read’s cavern are entered just beyond and below the horizon. Walk on half a mile and (unless you know your plants) you’d never know that you are standing on a cap of acidic sandstone. What will grow on one substrate won’t grow on the other so none of your controlling instincts will prevail. You’ll just have to go with the soil.

Our allotment is on the kind of soil called “clay loam” – we easily checked that with open source maps. This soil – when it’s in its natural state – will bind together in a ball due to its clay content. It’s naturally quite fertile but it can be hard to work when it’s dried out and you shouldn’t trample all over it when it’s wet. This immediately suggests working the allotment in beds, sufficiently narrow to reach from both sides. We also built deep paths filled with wood chip to drain away surplus water. We even tested the soil for pH – it was somewhere near the middle between acid and alkaline. Vegetables have strong preferences regarding soil types and where they prefer to grow. It sounds complicated but the point is that you can’t raze it flat and then flip through the seed catalogues hoping to grow anything you fancy. You have to negotiate if you don’t want to fail. We’re in a frost pocket at the bottom of a steep slope; that’s a problem. On the other hand we’re sheltered from the prevailing South-westerly winds by a row of trees. The plots at the top get a lot more sunshine but their sheds regularly blow down. We have to carry everything down a narrow path to our plot, but we’re pretty well out of sight from the main track which makes it so much easier for compost deliveries and thieves. Control is a fantasy when it comes to growing on an allotment. We can’t order the weather, put up notices to forbid allium leaf miner or asparagus beetle, or plan surpluses of apples which might, like this season, bless us and in others fail to appear or suffer from codling moth.

What goes on invisibly and under the surface of the soil is almost miraculous. Some thuggish plants will even resort to subterranean poisoning to get their own way while tiny nematodes and the smallest slugs can chomp away at the roots of your vegetables: …. “And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum!” 95% of plants apparently have fungal relationships; none of these are visible to us, but their invisibility can’t make them invulnerable to the onslaught of chemicals we use to assert our control over pests and diseases, and I saw in the newspaper today that climate change and global heating are dramatically increasing the spread of pests and diseases, not to mention extreme weather events; storms and heatwaves. Fungicides and pesticides with artificial fertilisers have wrought havoc with the soil structure and depth. The earth is not a blank canvas and we can’t do as we please to it without compromising our own existence.

I recall a couple of farming proverbs that we’d do well to pay attention to:

Live as if you’re going to die tomorrow, farm as if you’re going to live forever

The farmer’s boot is the best fertilizer

If allotmenteering is therapeutic at all it’s in the way that it teaches us a kind of humility – the root of the word refers to humus the condition of the earth, the soil. Don’t try to control; accept, even embrace failure and success as two sides of the same coin. The urge to subdue, to dominate and to control isn’t new, it goes back to the creation myths of the Old Testament as does the subjugation of Eve to Adam. We reject the second of those myths and we should equally turn away from the first.

Have you ever noticed that gardeners are often really nice people? Is it the therapy of crumbling the earth between your fingers, watching a robin feed on grubs you’ve just exposed and watching the clouds for rain ? or is it perhaps the botox injections? Hmm – that’s a tough one!

Losing my religion

Out, out, brief candle. Candlesnuff fungus *Xylaria hypoxylon*

Warning. This post includes a discussion of grooming and abuse

We binge-watched a whole four part thriller last night on TV. It was my fault. I fancied something like an Agatha Christie without the drawing room scene and just for fun I used Google Gemini to search for something suitable. There followed a typical AI dialogue where I refined my choice on the basis of a few questions and finally I settled on “near the sea” “cosy whodunnit” “wet weather allowed” and one series dropped into the the slot. It was “The Long Call”, based on an Ann Cleeves novel, set in Devon near the sea (I suspected Braunton Burrows but I couldn’t be sure), complete with rain – oh and one last detail that grabbed my attention – set around a religious community.

And off it went with some great actors and even accurate Devon accents. There was a body on the beach and it all looked very promising until we were introduced to the religious community which was very strict, inward looking and eerily familiar to me. It quickly became clear that everyone was lying and that there was enough passive aggression going on to freeze a small lake. My position as a viewer was so completely compromised that I even imagined myself sitting in one of the chairs in the midst of a Brethren style prayer meeting, listening to the endlessly repetitive petitions of a charismatic leader. I’d been there, worn the T shirt and carried the same alienated feelings as the investigating detective who’d been shunned (that’s a technical term with huge menace) by that same community after he came out as gay when a teenager. It was tremendously well researched in the way that vulnerable people were love bombed and befriended, groomed; then became the victims of passive aggression until they were demoralised, subdued and controlled. The next step, because this pattern isn’t confined to religious groups, is violence, abuse and in the worst case murder.

I was pre-teen, pre-puberty, but nonetheless awash with guilt at sins I didn’t think I’d ever committed – and didn’t have the vaguest idea how to commit – and that I could be certain that I was destined, or predestined for hell. Unconditional love, forgiveness and diversity were as underused in the congregation as a Bishop’s bible, although we all knew that bishops were a bad thing and the torments of hell were always good for a spittle infused, red-lipped sermon. Years later I found an antique copy of the hymn book they used which was so full of sado masochistic imagery it would probably be banned today. If I learned anything at Sunday School it was that I was a wrong un and no-one would answer the question “why?” because that was the sin of disobedience.

I left Sunday School as soon as I was able to defy my parents and took nothing away with me except that diffuse sense of guilt into the future. I caught a glimpse of a better looking god in the local anglican church, but that was more to do with fancying a girl in the choir. I got confirmed, took communion once and never went back. Around that time I was groomed by a much older teenager and introduced to a number of dodgy men but fortunately he was arrested before anything too terrible happened. After that I joined a Wesleyan methodist youth club whose saintly leaders kept me safe. We had a fancy dress party once and Mrs Round said “I suppose you’ll be coming as the devil, Dave” . Finally I discovered the meaning of fornication (Oh happy day!/ what happened there?) and after getting chucked out of school over a provocative samizdat magazine which I wrote, published and distributed I met Madame at a CND meeting and we fell unfashionably but hopelessly in love. I was 18 and she was 15. On reflection I was unbelievably lucky to get off the escalator when I did although that didn’t stop the police, and much later the church authorities from treating me as a risk, mainly to their reputation as worthy chaplains to the status quo.

I was about 12 years old when they interviewed me with the utmost hostility at the police station. My Dad was there, but sat silently throughout and when they let me go he never subsequently mentioned the way they had shamed me. Much later on I was a member of a support group for clergy which was supposed to be completely confidential; a safe space led by two skilled therapists. I finally managed to describe what had happened to me then, and also the occasion when I’d unexpectedly encountered one of the paedophiles I had been introduced to during a visit to his mother. This was very upsetting. Even decades later I recognised him instantly. One of the members of the group took it upon themselves to report what I’d said to the church authorities without even warning me. As a result I was telephoned by a church appointed social worker who quizzed me on what seemed to be the prior assumption that the abused were likely to become abusers themselves. In reality both the police and the church authorities became the abusers, forcing me to recall the events without offering a shred of support afterwards. Any trust in the group disappeared and I was on my own again. Completely innocent and yet groomed to blame myself.

As a consequence of all this inside experience of religious communities and controlling behaviour, a large part of my time has been devoted to patching people up; many of them had been horribly abused and robbed of all self-respect. Many of them drifted right back into abusive relationships, but I think I may have made a difference to a few. After the film last night I went to bed feeling thoroughly churned up.

What is it about religion that makes it so dangerous? so corrosive to young minds? I suspect that living without certainties is hard going so shortcutting from judgements of virtue to the ‘either/or’ rules of us and them is an easy way out of difficult thoughts. Madame and I were down in Southern Ireland once, during the Troubles, and we were in a remote bar way south when a group of IRA supporters came in. It was a terrifying hour whilst we sat and they sang anti British songs, us not daring to speak or get another drink for fear of being recognised by our accents. The next day I went back to apologise to the owner for causing a lot of stress and she said it was no problem. I replied “well, we are English” and she said “No but you’re tourists“. I’m still working that one out.

But there is the real reason for the danger of religion. It’s not theology, it’s the binary culture it generates – with its inside/outside, lost/saved, stranger/friend, infidel and faithful. In a world full of anger and hatred it’s all too easy to fall into camps which become gangs – each with its own flags and banners and then guns and bombs.

This morning we were having a cup of tea with our friend Charlie who managed to combine both creativity and science into his life. We were having a conversation about slime moulds – yes you read that right – and we agreed that the earth is so prodigiously beautiful whether you’re looking at an ocean, a mountain or a microscopic cell; and when we consider the almost infinite adaptations and evolutionary steps involved in getting to where we are – then there really is no need to suppose that some kind of kindly, interfering or even malevolent being, could add anything to the picture. By all means use an obvious metaphor, like Mother Nature for instance but I remember saying to someone once about a girlfriend known by everyone as “Peach” – that her name didn’t imply that she lived in a fruit bowl. The sea of faith seemed to be retreating for me. Much later I discovered that the tide comes in twice a day.

*The melancholy soft, withdrawing roar* *– not, in this instance on Dover beach.*

The Night Watch – not Rembrandt

Today we were supposed to be in the Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons in old money), but sadly the weather had other ideas. Storm Bram managed to virtually shut down the road and rail links between England and Wales. The Prince of Wales bridge was reduced to one lane each way because the lamp posts were discovered to be liable to collapse on to the carriageway, and the M48 bridge was just closed, along with some of the railway services. There were two hour traffic jams in both directions so, having packed ready to go we unpacked again, hoping we can set out early tomorrow. I hesitate to bang on about climate change, but really our long neglected infrastructure is in such a bad way that even normal weather, let alone the extremes we now expect are enough to shut us down.

So rather than a report from Wales, here are some videos from the allotment, taken on the trailcam. The opener is, of course, the rat. Rats are everywhere, they carry diseases and love to live in poorly made compost bins. Given a choice of anything to eat on an allotment they invariably seem to prefer our crops, and we’ve watched a rat clinging to a swaying sweetcorn cob and chewing away at our lunch. Badgers also like sweetcorn in the same way that bears like honey, but badgers have other virtues and it’s relatively easy to keep them away from the maize. But rats seem to have few virtues and although tidiness is an overrated virtue on allotments it’s certainly the case that we need to pick up fallen fruit and any other rubbish that would attract them. Sadly, a poorly made compost heap – especially if kitchen waste and cooked food are added to it – and if access is easy (and rats are great at digging tunnels) they’re going to move in and breed as rats like to do. Of the night time videos from the trailcam, rats outnumber all the other animals we see.

We also entertain a couple of cats who, we assume patrol at night in search of prey like small mammals. It would be a brave cat, though, that would tackle some of the clonking great rats we’ve filmed. Foxes and badgers are in a different league. Firstly they are (foxes) fast and (badgers) powerful and they both eat rats. Judging by the size of one of our badgers, they eat a lot of rats!

We like to do our bit to control the rat population and we use heavy duty spring traps baited with peanut butter. The traps are in strong boxes and although they’re not attracting many visitors the badgers just love peanuts and so they will worry the boxes to try to get at the bait, and shake them until you hear them spring. We don’t use poison because there’s always a danger of secondary poisoning to other carrion eaters. Mostly the badgers eat slugs and worms but they’re such lovely creatures we let them take friends and foes – (just not sweetcorn). As I look through dozens of videos I also notice that the rats make themselves scarce whenever there’s a fox or a badger in the vicinity so they also have a deterrent effect.

Foxes too eat rats, and if they mark their territory – which we can easily smell for ourselves – this acts as a deterrent as well. We’ve seen foxes with mange in the past but fortunately our local ones seem fine and healthy. Here’s a magnificent shot of a dog fox prowling one of the rat runs. Isn’t he beautiful? especially right at the end of the video when he pokes his head out behind the tayberry.

So there’s always a lot going on at night on the allotment – in fact it’s quite busy. Yes, of course, we get visited by two legged rats as well and like many of our neighbouring allotmenteers we get things stolen, but as long as we take home any power tools and fix double locks on the shed, greenhouse and polytunnel, then we’re mostly troubled by casual vandalism which is upsetting and annoying but – like collapsing bridges and floods – has its history and causes and won’t be ended by sloganising politicians. Don’t build prisons, build youth clubs! We’d love to teach some apprentice allotmenteers the basics!

Other than that we’re almost ready for winter. Yesterday we mixed a couple of barrow loads of topsoil and compost, filled some leftover feed buckets and planted strawberry runners to give us an early polytunnel crop. I love strawberries and they’re expensive in the shops, so it’s a joy to grow them for ourselves. Growing at least some of our own food gives us so much pleasure, but it’s good to bear in mind that good gardening involves a four way conversation between the crop, the soil, the weather and the pests. There’s no room for a control freak on the allotment. We have to accept – as an astrologer once told me of the stars – that these four dispose but can’t compel. The biggest and best lessons in gardening are as likely to come from failure as from success. I love the fact that the night watch is busy while we rest. Sometimes we turn up in the morning to find the wood chip paths turned over, sometimes obviously by badgers with their strong claws but often by thrushes and blackbirds who delight in eating pests so that we don’t have to persecute them.

Our greatest regret is that we have never – in ten years – seen a hedgehog. They really should be there and I’m afraid that badgers are a major predator, so perhaps that’s just an unwanted outcome of the eternal balancing act of nature. But now the weather will improve and the bridges will open and early tomorrow we’ll drive up to the Bannau to meet our friends for a shared birthday and maybe find some new plants or fungi to photograph. The season is nearly over now but there’s always something to capture our interest. And finally – badger versus rat trap – keep looking on the left hand side of the frame and listen out for the trap springing. The trap didn’t get the badger (as if!) and the badger didn’t get the peanut butter. Nil nil draw, then.

Small is beautiful – smaller still is ravishing.

This photograph is not of a twig but a moth; the Buff-tip moth, Phalera bucephala. I’m not showing it because I’d want anyone to think me an expert of any kind, but because its camouflage is so perfect at the same time as being very lovely. It’s eye-watering to think how many evolutionary twists and turns it’s gone through to arrive at this perfect twigness in order that it can rest up safely during the day. Our friend Kate uses a moth trap to identify record and release any number of moth species high up in the Bannau Brycheiniog; the Brecon Beacons in old money, and we took this photo, along with many others, early one morning when we were staying up there.

I’m often struck by the lack of attention we pay to the very small when we talk about the beauty of nature. We tend to look for swathes of flowers; forests; endless mountains and the most grandiose hills when we speak of beauty, but if we take a magnifying glass to, let’s say a weed like a dandelion, it’s like crossing a boundary into another world. A single seed under a low powered microscope can reveal such a complexity of pattern and structure that we’d be hard pressed to capture it in a drawing. Nature presents herself as an artist and many artists would admit to gaining inspiration from the almost reckless generosity of living forms. Moths are just one example. From the aerial view of a river basin or wetland marsh down to the double helix of DNA and the complex fibonacci sequence of seeds on a sunflower head or the seed flask of a poppy, there’s inspiration to be found. Speaking through my artist’s hat, as you might say, I’ve shared a lifetime exploring the colours and forms of living things through the medium of drawing, botanical illustration and ceramics. I’ve needed to embrace some of the science as well, but the wellspring of my explorations has been aesthetic rather than scientific. I’m far more excited by the earthy colours of rust and ochre than by shouty primaries, and a multitude of green hues relieved by occasional touches of scarlet can turn a humble lichen into an aesthetic feast.

Nature is beautiful, but not in the guide book sense. You can’t measure beauty by counting oohs and aaahs and you couldn’t propose a unit like the Milli-Helen which would be the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. It’s expressed perfectly in my mother’s distinction between perfume and scent. I should mention here that I’ve been trying out a new phone app to help identify moths – in anticipation of a Christmas present from our son. In fact it’s good with all kinds of UK insects and designed and promoted by the UK Wildlife Trusts. The app is called ID UK Insects and it’s good for bees, hoverflies, spiders, wasps – in fact for pretty well any insect you might encounter on a slow walk and is free for a basic 500 species or £18 a year for the full version. Well worth a free go! It won’t excuse you from any of the hard book work when you get home to identify your find, but like all the best AI it will save the horror of flicking through hundreds of pages in the vain hope you might run across it! For those old hands who would assert that it’s cheating I’d say – “so’s a cake mixer!”

It would be wrong to settle on the moth as a sole exemplar. As I suggested at the beginning of this post, nature should be regarded as everything on earth including us, and my friend Chris would make a strong claim for the whole universe to be included as well. In fact – and this would be a bold and almost spiritual claim – I’d argue that the default condition of a fully functioning human mind would be wonder.

I’ve never forgotten an exercise I did on a retreat years ago. We were a group of a dozen or so, all strangers to one another. We were divided into couples and asked to grasp both hands of our partners. Then we were invited not just to look at one another or chat about our journey there but silently to explore the possibilities of beholding. As you might expect, it was a deeply challenging thing to do but it was also very powerful; an intuitive exchange of our deep selves and a letting go of embarrassment and ego. I’d suggest that the default position of wonder at natural beauty is facilitated by its twin faculty, beholding.

With such a mindset even the destructive powers of nature which, for the most part are recycling the elements of existence, can lead to the sense of wonder. Nothing is ever wasted by the woodland rotters like the Sulphur-tuft fungus above. I can contemplate my own vulnerability and transience without being afraid.

Around 1970/71 I had a long period of what was diagnosed as phobic anxiety, and not being able to face going into art school, they put me on probation for a couple of terms. I took to visiting the valley behind our cottage through which By Brook flowed, and drawing there. My memory ever since is that I only made one drawing – very laborious and forensic pencil rendering of a twisted tree trunk growing at the edge of the river. The drawing went into a folder and it’s travelled around from house to house ever since. I’ve looked for it from time to time but never found it among the hoardings; until last night I dreamed that I was able to thank all the people who loved me over the years – beginning of course with Madame – even when I didn’t love myself at all. I was awake at 5.00am and got up after a couple of hours musing on what Robin, my one time psychoanalytic psychotherapist would have called a significant dream and went into my study and found the drawing almost immediately in a heap of unsorted papers.

But it wasn’t just the one drawing; I found four of them – and each of them would have taken several days. Here they are seeing the light of day for over five decades.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that these are great drawings, but rather that they articulate a theme that had been at the back of my mind for going on twenty years after I walked to primary school through a lane bordered on one side by a hawthorn hedge which, in hindsight must have been laid in previous years. I was enchanted, almost literally, by the twisted and intertwined branches and it became a treasured part of my walk to school, a memory which returns joyfully whenever I see a similar hedge today. After I’d photographed the drawings this morning I realised that there was another subconscious link in the twisting and curling water of the brook and which I’d tried unsuccessfully to capture in drawings of the sea when we lived in Cornwall. Drawing – to pack a huge proposition into a very short sentence – has been a way back into a transient moment. A mill-race; the Devonshire leat on Dartmoor; any kind of fast flowing water especially if, like a canal, it was the outcome of human intervention. No surprise then, to recall that my favourite winter job as a groundsperson was hedge laying. The spot where I drew By Brook was downstream from a paper mill where the mill race joined the brook. The mill is now disused and abandoned, and the brook itself is milky and eutrophic; quite unsuitable for papermaking.

If there is any kind of takeaway from this biographical fragment it’s that I didn’t get this ecstatic, aesthetic response to nature from a guru or a book. It was always there and all I had to do was channel it into tangible form. So the next great adventure was in ceramics. I’ve already written about this and I won’t go over it again, except to say that the making of ceramics feels like participation in creation itself. All the essential elements; earth, air, fire and water are there. The transformation of clay into fired ware is a geological process, The colours are made with elemental minerals and ores – cobalt, iron, lead, melted and rendered transparent in the kiln and transformed by the control of the available oxygen. English iron-based slipware glazes, mixed with lead rich galena and fired in an abundance of oxygen emerged the colour of honey and in China, a similar iron based glazed fluxed with wood ash and and starved of oxygen in the final stage of firing emerged as celedon, a muted and lovely green the colour of lichen.. The making of ceramics is an exhausting creative process which is affected by so many variables that if the potter doesn’t learn both intense focus and how to survive failure they will soon give up.

Nowadays I use photography to try to capture nature. I don’t edit or enhance anything and if it doesn’t work I delete it and try again. I remember once having a battle with my art school Head of Department over the characteristic form of an apple tree. I contended that trees are hard to draw well because by forensically rendering their internal structure and the form of the whole tree, its colours and its leaves it would be easier to identify its species. To prove my point I’d knocked up a black and white sketch of an apple tree on a piece of cardboard with a wide brush and some house paint. He dismissed the drawing and the idea with a lofty wave of the hand. It was rubbish and all trees looked pretty much the same. This week I’ve mentioned an apple tree called Arkansas Black several times already and today I returned to that discussion by photographing the tree on the allotment. I hope I won’t offend anyone by saying that the form of the tree is completely distinctive. Pears plums and (at the time) English elms are incontestably different.

My old music teacher A F Woodman used to to shout at me if I was particularly inattentive and say “I know you can hear it Pole, but are you listening?”

Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better – all these are the portals through which we must pass. To adopt a religious idea, we must approach nature as penitents – not least because we, collectively, have done so much damage. The technical understanding, the skills, the science need essentially to be led by the revelatory moment. Most truly great scientists and mathematicians would agree that the revelatory moment is the beginning of the process of understanding rather than the end.

Which brings me to a penultimate point. If there is ever to be a real green spirituality it will need to begin in the same place. I remember Ken Leach preaching that orthodoxy is closer to its Greek roots when translated as “right glory” and certainly not the slavish following of some ancient canonical text. I’m not sure what we could call theology without Theos, but I treasure Wittgenstein’s joke that “wherof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent” except that it’s never yet stopped a daft or cruel idea from being broadcast.

So to conclude this rather long post, I have to write briefly about education because it seems that these core skills – “Wonder; the capacity to behold and not just gawp; inexhaustible curiosity; focus; listening; some measure of humility; the capacity to fail, try again as Samuel Beckett said, and fail better” all these are being expunged from the curriculum of both school and university. If we don’t bring our children up to allow wonder and curiosity into their lives they will be stunted like wind deformed trees .

Hell is heaven designed by venture capitalists

Meet the other part of the iceberg.

*Honey fungus mycelium on a tree stump*. It’s called a rhizomorph because of its shape – like a rhizome.

Sometimes it seems – although I don’t believe a word of it really – sometimes the stars get themselves into a truly malignant alignment and the boils, frogs, flies and rain just keep coming without remission. This last year, what with the campervan constantly breaking down, the extreme weather and an onslaught of health problems has been an all-round shitter! Add to that the election of a malignant government whose big idea is to preserve everything that was wrong about the past 50 years and crush the best in order just to stay in power and ….. ? well, you decide.

I’ve written before about the challenge of accepting good news amidst a sea of effluent but this last few of weeks, having got rid of the polyps in my bowel which were causing iron deficiency anaemia; last week I finally got an appointment to fit my new hearing aids after waiting 8 months, and another appointment to sign off on the laser peripheral iridotomy so I can get some new glasses. Oh joy! and to cap it all I feel better – which is a non scientific way of saying that it’s marvellous to be able to wheelbarrow full loads of wood chip down to the allotment without having to keep stopping to catch my breath. I can see the end of the tunnel although it’s just a small disc of light at the moment. The campervan is fixed, we have a list of adventures planned for 2026, the allotment is all but ready for next season and –

– having met my targets for plant species and records, I’ve now turned to processing my fungus photos – and this is going to be an altogether harder task because until a couple of years ago I had no idea what, apart from field mushrooms and fly agarics, what most of them are called. Yes it’s true; I am a proper propellerhead. Anyway I thought I’d start with this image because the fungi – OK toadstools – we see are only a very small part of the actual fungus. Most of it comprises minute underground threads, collectively called mycelium, that can extend for many feet and occasionally miles around the part we see in the autumn. As instanced by the Honey fungus at the top of this piece, Honey fungus species actually weave their minute thread-like hyphae into ropes and so we can glimpse the underground world on a tree stump.

Getting ready for this festival of bafflement I’ve done what I always do and read a lot of books that are way beyond my understanding, in the hope that some of the research sticks . I won’t bore you with a list except to say that for the last year I’ve been gradually searching for second hand copies of the most important ones. I can never afford to buy new academic books – they’re ridiculously expensive and only for well-heeled university libraries. There’s also loads of good stuff available online; especially on the British Mycological Society Facebook page.

What I’ve learned has given me an entirely new perspective on the benefits of fungi not only to our ecosystem but to our health and wellbeing as well. These days we’re very familiar with the importance of pollinator plants at the beginning of the life process. We’re not so thoughtful about what happens at the end. At its simplest, without fungi we couldn’t survive because whatever lives also dies, at which point the fungi move in and reduce the senescent remains to their original constituents. Without fungi the earth would be covered with a layer of dead material of unfathomable depth. Sometimes, as any farmer or gardener could tell you, the fungi move in too soon and finish their lunch and our crops before we’ve been able to harvest them. The problem with drenching the field or the garden with fungicide is that without the silent work of fungi there would be no soil in which to grow the next crop because the overwhelming majority of plants and trees have what’s called mycorrhizal relationships with fungi; a constructive and complementary relationship in which the fungi supply essential nutrients to the plant in return for some of the photosynthesised sugars which its leaves produce. There is some evidence – because mycelial relationships are so important to the health and therefore the eventual crop; that fungicides can weaken the plant and make it even more vulnerable to fungal pathogens. The invisible work of fungi is immeasurably more important to us than merely filling a forager’s basket. Of course there are many more gifts from the fungi than I’m going to write about here but I want to concentrate next on the meaning of those beneficial relationships.

Let’s begin with Robin Wall Kimmerer whose books – as she describes them – focus on how “The factual, objective view of science can be enriched by the ancient knowledge of the indigenous people”. When we talk about ancient knowledge whether we’re embracing plants or religious, spiritual issues, it’s almost impossible to say anything without using metaphorical language. I’d argue that myth is the way that we try to tell some species of truth about mysteries. When Kimmerer writes about “mother trees” she’s using a metaphor to describe a positive relationship. “Mother trees” don’t breast feed their saplings or worry when they get home late from a night out. But it may be that there is a mycelial fungal connection between trees that allows the older trees with more resources to share those resources to nearby younger trees. What the metaphor achieves is to communicate in simple terms an important concept awaiting scientific verification. A wood or a forest is an unimaginably complex network of invisible connections which can sustain mortal damage if it’s damaged by thoughtless management. It’s a way of looking at trees which takes a broad, almost spiritual view of their meaning to us.

But just as I was about to write, I caught sight of a recent piece in the Guardian referencing fungi purely as a kind of industrial and scientific feedstock. It’s an interesting article about some possibilities of extending the use of fungi to produce building materials, packaging and even for biodegradable nappies (diapers). The science of using fungi to clean up industrial pollution is well advanced, so this is hardly big news. But what caught my attention was the way in which the article perfectly captures the contrast between two ways of looking at nature in general and fungi in particular. Kimmerer’s almost spiritual account, inflected by First Nation tradition and wisdom versus the highly instrumental scientific and rationalistic way of looking at nature as a free resource and a means of making money.

The question, or perhaps the takeaway from the two perspectives is that if we accept that climate catastrophe; species extinction; mass migration; global instability; pandemic and the degradation of the environment are all the result of our almost universally instrumental view of nature; wouldn’t it be better, rather than to join in the ugly scientific pile-on dismissing the ideas of Kimmerer and many others to allow that without a reset of our perspectives towards nature there can only be one result – and that’s the destruction of the earth.

Touching the fullness

**St Anne’s Well where the spring emerges**

I’ve written about this special place before after I rediscovered it on a recce with some friends in Bath Natural History Society, and you can read a fuller version of the background there. What I didn’t explore in that piece was the much broader context which involves a brief encounter with psychogeography which is part of the explanation of my curious habit of walking about a mile to Downend to catch the number 18 bus into Bristol rather than catch the number 4 which would have been much less effort. Psychogeography examines the why of our relationship with places. However there are a few bear traps once you get beyond the material explanation of springs, sinkholes, clumps of trees and notable hilltops which can take you straight to Alfred Watkins and his leylines which I’m not going to write about.

The hard bit – freel free to skip to the next paragraph

The basic premise of these thoughts is that for me – and this is a highly subjective discussion – there are certain places which seem to be associated with raised mental energy; with a sense of connection which, after all the factors of memory, intellectual and aesthetic interest have been factored in, still leaves a surplus. I guess it’s hardly pushing beyond the boundaries to describe this in terms of energy because although the brain is only 2% of our total body weight it consumes 20% of our energy. The exact relationship between the brain and what we call the mind is a bit of a hot topic, the two are obviously closely related in an energetic process. The problem as always is that the laypersons’ language we use to describe these elevated senses is always metaphorical. ‘We feel inspired’, we say, and the scientist in us says ‘that’s all very well but what does it mean? – do you mean that that we feel breathed on? ‘

Back to earth

Maybe this is a job for the poet and storyteller. There’s the Greek myth of the omphalos, the navel of the earth which in their case was in Delphi where they built a temple and where, for a fee, you could be told about the future in ambiguous terms which avoided any possibility of reprisals after a wrong answer. I was sent to a Primitive Methodist Sunday School as a child, and I somehow managed to take away from it the unexpected conviction that I needed no guide, priest, or guru to instruct or shape my imagination. There were abundant facts, certainties and structured thoughts in the municipal park of the ordinary where we were told to keep off the grass and respect the ranks of tulips and daffodils. I always wanted to walk on the grass. My imagination would not be contained by the iron gates and the cracked chime of the clock in the park. I was taught that God was an angry old man whose principal joy was smiting. There was a lot of smiting at Sunday school which was up a narrow lane that led to the back of the butcher’s shop, passing their small slaughterhouse where there were no windows but iron bars. There was never any doubt about the torments that awaited us since they were listed most weeks by preachers whose lips were flushed with the anticipation of the ruin of most of their neighbours. From the age of six I was planning my escape.

I think my first experience of the Fullness must have been on Rodway Hill when I was in my very early teens. I lay there amongst a drift of fine grass and Harebells that I now understand are only there because there’s a cap of old red sandstone whose acid soil suits them. It was there I first experienced what came to be known by Rolland and Freud as the Oceanic and I disappeared for I don’t recall how long. I became attached to a physical landscape – acid heath – which I can never visit without recalling that moment but hefted also within a different inner landscape that came and went as it pleased. The real of science and materialism had been compromised by a newcomer – the really real or perhaps the Fullness. The Fullness was not and could never be the vengeful god of smiting and retribution because he was an imposter, a fraud, a projection of thwarted dreams. It’s important that I explain this because in the next section I take this strange dimension as a “given” in writing about places.

So is this presence really tied to a particular place? Are we talking here about the old Roman idea of the “genius loci” – the spirit of a place – or is it even possible to use the term spirit in the context of place in the 21st century. Certainly some places have associated powers. St Anne’s well – the one in the photo at the top- was known for healing eye complaints. There was a St Arilda’s well in one of my parishes which was associated with a very similar legend to the one about St Winifred in Denbighshire, North Wales. Both were martyred , and in both legends the water was said to run red at times as a reminder of their death. Another well in St David’s is dedicated to his mother St Non.

Just creeping in at bottom right is a plant named Pellitory of the Wall, Parietaria judaica, which was once used as a treatment for urinary complaints. St Non’s would be, for me, the destination for any pilgrimage to St David’s. Away from all the tourists and gift shops it’s even missed by many walkers; but I’ve dangled my feet in it when they were sore from walking and it’s very refreshing indeed. It marks the place where the story says his mother gave birth to him alone on the clifftop in a thunderstorm. No pressure then Dewi!

I would call all these sites nodes. They’re all places where the membrane between the everyday and the Fullness is very thin. and they don’t move. Springs, wells, valleys, sinkholes, caves and promontaries; hills, outcrops and waterfalls; the confluences of rivers and streams – all of them can open occasionally to contemplative walkers and embrace them with the Fullness; but many other moments of transfiguration can happen in totally unexpected places at the times we feel least prepared. There’s no virtue to be claimed in it and no call for anyone to start a school; build a monument or set up a gift shop.

So yes, there are some sites,some places that are certainly filled with concentrations of whatever energy these healing, revelatory moments are fuelled with. Christian evangelicals tend to call it the holy spirit and then treat it/him? like an indentured servant, forever being prayerfully ordered around with pious hopes. But whatever the nature of the energy is; it has the capacity – provided we’re just ready to stop what we’re doing, to listen and to respond – the capacity to excite what you might metaphorically call our resonant frequency, which is the same frequency as the one that multiplies energy to the point where bridges collapse and windows shatter. Rudolph Otto called it the mysterium tremendum et fascinans; the numinous; the holy. But what it does, as it did for me, is set up a powerful, culture bending alternative to the way we do things round here.

So which is the more powerful would you say? is it the first photo of the mighty and beautiful cathedral, or the impoverished clifftop ruins? I know what I think.

When we were at art school in Wiltshire in the 1970’s I became very anxious and quite disturbed for about six months. I think it was a reaction to the first death I’d experienced of someone my own age; a friend of Madame’s. I couldn’t face college, was in danger of being thrown out, and I took to wandering in the By brook valley below Castle Combe. Sitting on the side of the brook which was really a small river, I made some drawings of a tree on the opposite bank, The roots were deeply entwined and knotted and I made (on reflection) the odd decision to draw with hard pencils. I was using a good paper which would take a great deal of punishment and although they were not masterpieces the enforced difficulty kept me there for a long time. Looking back, it was a similar kind of experience to the ones I’ve been describing except that it was slow and accumulative – so no fireworks or eureka moments but healing from the inside out. If ever I think of what the river outside the Potwell Inn might be like, I invariably think of By Brook, another place where I touched the fullness.

These experiences can’t be ordered up like a Deliveroo and so whilst our walks these days are often in search of plants and fungi, or we might be chatting about our children, I’m always on open channel just in case of a Visitation, and I don’t give a monkey’s whether it makes me sound crazy or if the magisterium could declare it heretical.

Catch a bus – it could change your whole perspective on life.

Bath bus station – there are no pretty views!

I’m working up three posts at the moment and hopefully I’ll publish them all by the end of next week One of them is about what I’ve always called “nodes” – which is about places that seem to exude a lot of energy, hopefully without going full leyline over them. Secondly I’m researching a piece on the ways I’m trying to improve my photography to make it more helpful in identifying plants. The third, this one, is about buses and what travelling on then can teach us.

It’s a kind of in-joke among plant hunters that the maps we use to find and record plants are really maps of plant hunters. Cambridge, for instance, has a very high score when it comes to plant records, but it also has a very high score in terms of botanists. Statisticians have had to find some very smart mathematical models for removing the bias. I had a friend, now sadly dead, who was a prolific recorder of wildflowers. I’d describe him as brilliant and difficult, but he was always ready to help me out and taught me a great deal. The thing about him – Rob, his name was – was that he didn’t drive a car and so he travelled mostly by bus or by hitching lifts with other botanists. I’ve been watching a particular group of plants called Fleabanes for several years now. They can be quite tricky to identify and there are three very similar species, two of which grow in Bath and another which seems to be making a slow journey up the river from Avonmouth. So two possible reasons for the slow journey are firstly that the seeds float or blow up the river. Floating is highly unlikely because the Avon flows in the opposite direction. Wind dispersal is more likely because the prevailing wind direction is south westerly and the seeds are like miniature dandelion clocks. But looking at the maps, the records could as easily be explained by their position on bus routes. I’ve seen Rob on his hands and knees searching in the central reservation of a dual carriageway, so it’s entirely possible that the records really reflect bus journeys. I now feel obligated to search for the wandering Fleabane every year to continue his work.

These days I find doing the washing up infinitely more rewarding than listening to the recycled press releases which hide under the banner of journalism in these diminished days. But yesterday I caught several mentions of “the next war” being touted by almost all of them in a brain dissolving teaser for some kind of announcement about building more weapons factories. It reminds me that we all live in a particular cultural context from which we can never really escape. One of my radio producers once told me that she thought my best writing came when I was being lyrical. Well, it’s not a big stretch from being unable to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land (Babylon) to struggling to find the lyrical voice in a context like this, where lying, thieving from the vulnerable, accepting bribes and trading in weapons that dismember children is regarded as good business.

Rob was finding his lyrical on his hands and knees surrounded by the roar and fumes of fast traffic. Several people, Chris Packham for one, have mentioned hyper focus recently as one of the features of neuro divergence. Perhaps that’s it for some of us, although my own experience is that almost no amount of focus can get me past the feeling of despondency and gloom that this government promotes. If it has a vision at all it’s to spread passivity like a virus through the population.

Anyway, to get to the point – which is about travelling by bus – one of the major causes of passivity is isolation, and that isolation is enforced by illness, poverty, going everywhere by car, wearing headphones and creating your own impoverished environment by doomscrolling on the phone and listening only to your own curated soundscape. A bus, on the other hand is a tin box with six wheels and virtually no suspension which forces you into the company of people you’d never normally meet or speak to. At Bristol bus station a couple of days ago, paramedics were treating someone who’d collapsed on the floor. There were local and international travellers, shoppers and people going home from work looking grey; homeless people, students, schoolchildren and pensioners like us, taking advantage of the free bus pass. There were people of diverse colour and nationality, several slightly deranged people all jammed in, thigh to thigh and standing well inside my usual comfort zone. It’s a challenging and immersive environment in which anything could happen – and I love it. The late night bus is even more gripping. You always get one or two people the worse for wear. One one journey back to Bath there was one man who had no idea where he was; just got off the bus and wandered away in the dark. Another fell asleep with his kebab in is hand and it went all over the floor. Yet another man waved contentedly at his own reflection in the window, half recognizing a familiar face.

The point is – the people you meet on the bus aren’t your carefully curated version of reality but the real thing. Poverty and neglect of the elderly isn’t just a number on a spreadsheet, it’s the old man with his zimmer frame sitting in front of you who hasn’t had a bath or a shower in months and smells so bad that only the smell of a Mcdonalds being eaten by an overweight young person nearby manages to cover the crime like a cheap deodorant. These, dear Mr Starmer are the people you are supposed to be thinking about and working for, but you don’t travel on buses so you’ll never know about them. It’s no use blustering on about the deprivations of your own childhood. Your dad was a toolmaker, and many people will think he made tools like shovels and chisels. But that’s not what toolmakers do. They make the tools which are used in factories to manufacture aeroplanes and cars. Their work is immensely skilled and they have all done long apprenticeships – as long as many doctors. They work in tolerances of fractions of a thousandth of an inch on machines that cost more than a mansion and they are paid accordingly. I worked as a labourer in a tool making company in the 1960’s and they were paid more than double the average wage. They were and probably still are the creme de la creme among engineers because they could work for weeks on a press tool that, if it warped when it was sent off for hardening and cost thousands of pounds. Give it a rest, then, Starmer. All that carry-on about gathering around a single smouldering coal and eating stone soup doesn’t pass the Ernest Hemingway test for bullshit. You lived in a comfortable house and had a good education. Go ride buses for a week – I’d happily buy your pass for the good of the country – and meet the electorate. Get off the bus now and again and learn the names of some flowers; learn Welsh, (I slipped that one in – I never have, but I can pronounce Welsh place names properly; who needs vowels anyway? – work a day or two on a trawler; pick orders in an Amazon warehouse.

So how do I find the lyrical; find peace of mind in a culture of lies, failure and violence. Well, there is still beauty; beauty especially in nature. There is still love; there is still compassion that trickles out from the earth like a spring. It just isn’t coming from the Westminster goon show.

“Where’s the plan?” we ask; “What’s the strategy?”. But as anyone who’s done a management course will know. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Our problems aren’t caused by lack of strategy but by a degraded culture.

Tag: green spirituality

KIng Charles the Martyr – in a jar?

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