Tag: healing

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.

The view from the clifftop at St Non’s

Having dipped my toes into the water, an unexpected turn.

The steps leading down to St Non’s Well.

You might justifiably think that this post is a fragment that escaped too soon. But I reached the last two words – “I did” – and felt strongly that I should stop before wading into a pointless attempt to explain or justify what happened. The previous post – “Suspend disbelief – dip toe in water” – gives more detail and sets the scene.

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

TS Eliot – from “Little Gidding”

So since I’ve been mentioning St Non, I owe an explanation of her place in history, which won’t take long since almost nothing reliable is known about her except that she was the mother of St David and legend has it that she gave birth to him on a clifftop in the midst of a thunderstorm near the place where the ruins of an original chapel and the well can now be found. As supernatural endorsements go I suppose that’s a ten out of ten. I always assumed that this birth took place amidst the shrubs and bracken but I have seen a suggestion that she might have been living in a cottage there. Most of the other stories about her emerged during the next 500 years and were catalogued by Rhyfarch around 1095 – five centuries later. What’s undeniably true is that this became a place of pilgrimage quite soon after her death and continues to attract pilgrims even in this secular age when, from my own experience, most walkers fail to notice the well and go straight to the chapel ruins where they take a photo and walk on. There’s a modern chapel nearby which was built in the 1930’s and includes a good deal of ecclesiastical archaeology recovered from the area and built into the unusual altar. The chapel seems to be used only for occasional weddings now. For me, neither the modern chapel nor the ancient ruins hold much attraction; but the well is different.

I’ve been fascinated by and drawn to wells ever since I was a schoolboy. I would pore over the local OS map and search them out. My first ever was St Aldhelm’s well near Syston which turned out to be a fairly miserable puddle but which was reputed to be good for healing eye complaints. Wells, springs and resurgences – perhaps because their water appears to come from nowhere – have a naturally mysterious quality. As for the links between wells and saints, my best guess is that it’s metaphorical and poetic rather than factual. What’s really important is the capacity of the water, emerging from the unknown, to evoke a change of mood, a kind of meditative openness – if only the pilgrim allows it.

The logical, scientific mind would have none of this of course. “So Dave, your supposedly healing well is dedicated to a saint who probably had nothing to do with it and probably never visited it. Furthermore we now understand exactly how the water, falling as rain, percolates through the ground and emerges at the well, and the supposedly healing properties of the water cannot be identified by the most detailed analysis.” and I would reply “Every word you say is true; but in such a limited way you miss the point altogether. The well, the stories of saints and the water are nothing more than the setting in which the real work is a kind of silent dialogue between the pilgrim and what one 15th century Christian mystic called “The cloud of unknowing”.

No-one knows or ever could know what the emerging water says, because – in exactly the approach of Taoism, Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism and almost any other religious tradition – the Word – is only heard in the silence when every preconception, theological assumption or personal pleading is put aside. All of which was a rather long winded answer to the question – “Did your ankle get better?” – Well, thanks for asking – but no, not really. On the other hand I did.”

“Where’s the evidence – David?”

IMG_20191129_105716I should dedicate this posting to Sid Harris, my sociology tutor at tech college, a thousand years ago, who would challenge my sociological flights of fancy with the words – “- that’s all very exciting David, but where’s the evidence?” If there is any way of sending a profound thank-you to the past it would be to Sid for providing me with the alethiometer (great TV adaptation isn’t it?) that all thoroughgoing sceptics need to get through the mire of speculation, quackery and sheer roguery that infests our culture.

But the question has its price – particularly that going after the evidence demands a lot of commitment, blind alleys and reading which, added up, mean you have to live until you’re at least 110 to understand a simple question like ‘why does peeling onions make your eyes water?’ My latest read – yes I get through 3 or 4 books a week – is “Garlic and other Alliums” by Eric Block, and which is a magnificent book that makes me want to cheer and applaud every other paragraph. But understanding the central chapters depends on a familiarity with organic chemistry which I don’t have.  Every opening door leads to another whole corridor.

But today I’ll start with a Guardian article that perfectly demonstrates the thought I’m working on. If you haven’t clicked on the link, the article concerns biochar – a form of charcoal made by burning wood in an atmosphere starved of oxygen – so far so ordinary charcoal – but by doing it in a retort that captures all, or most of the nasties that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. The hypothesis is that by making huge quantities of this compound and digging it into the earth we would be sequestering carbon in a way similar to, let’s suppose peat bogs or coal reserves. The article goes on to suggest that the biochar might also improve soil fertility and even the health of grazing animals at the same time. It’s a no-brainer, we should all go out and buy it right now save the world in a day. Except for a paragraph towards the end-

While academics and researchers are optimistic about the benefits of biochar, they are not blind to the risks either. “If we’re wrong, and we spread hundreds of thousands of tonnes of charcoal over the UK, we can’t get it back out of the ground. We’ve got to be right. The stakes are really high,” says Udall.

The evidence isn’t there yet.  It might be there in a year or two, if we do the research, but like most breathlessly announced breakthroughs, we need to slow down a bit. I imagine that the article itself will be mentioned many times, used as a sales pitch and generally enter the consciousness of allotmenteers and gardeners all over the world without the small-print warning following it.

When I started to read about the deep ecology movement I was puzzled by the phrase ‘aquarian conspiracy’ which often cropped up.  For me the ‘age of aquarius’ was a song in a musical where some people got their kit off on stage, I couldn’t associate it with the idea of a conspiracy. But what the phrase seems to allude to is the concept of a ‘new age’ in which all of the great challenges facing us are ‘solved’ by the application of new technology.  Apparently this became something of a Silicon Valley mantra. While you might think that making charcoal in a fancy retort is hardly ‘technology” it’s clear that the ideological use that it might be put to  could be a dangerous diversion from the pressing issue of our anthropocentric environmental greed. Soaking up excess carbon is a must, but you need to stop producing it at the same time.  The pressing danger of the ‘aquarian conspiracy’ is that it allows us to carry on polluting in the false belief that there’s always a technology around the corner.  And there’s no evidence for that either!

Evidence based science often clashes with the sales pitch – it’s hardly surprising – and the danger is that we rely so much on the carefully crafted ‘evidence’ produced for us like pre-digested seagull food, because we lack the skills to find out for ourselves. Here’s an interesting quotation from David Hoffmann’s book “Medical Herbalism”

I was asked to present a paper on the topic of “Herbal Alternatives to Prozac”.  This quest to identify a herbal alternative to Prozac is a perfect example of how the real gifts of herbalism can be deflected by underlying assumptions. It would, in fact, be more appropriate to consider the holistic alternatives to the current vogue for psychopharmaceutical solutions.

When judging outcomes in phytotherapy, the quality of an outcome depends on your values. If an RHS judge with a passion for formal gardens was asked to comment on our allotment they might say it’s a mess because it doesn’t meet their criteria (tidiness, straight lines, complete absence of pests and diseases), for “a good allotment”. A good outcome in holistic therapy (or gardening) might be an enhanced sense of wellbeing whereas a medical assessment might depend on a series of abstract measurements. Neither method is more correct than the other, they both try to be rigorous and they each have strengths that we depend upon – and in any case I have to say that being loved cared for and listened to is the best healer and that defies almost all science.

I remember well a ward sister at the General Hospital in Bristol where I was a part time chaplain. When she died in a riding accident, they put a plaque on the wall to commemorate her.  It’s gone now and they’ve turned the hospital into expensive flats – and I’ll  make no further comment on that subject! However Sister Valerie Helps – this is my little personal commemoration – had a gift beyond any scientific exploration.  Post operative patients in severe pain would feel better when she came on to the ward.  She would say -“could you hold on for just another half hour?” when they were calling for morphine, and they discovered that they could. She would challenge the doctors when they were attempting to do something stupid and inspire complete confidence in patients and relatives alike.

Lets do the science – masses of it – and be prepared to learn from it, even if it means changing some of our assumptions.  But for science and healing to work together they each need to broaden their underlying assumptions.  For science there’s the need to try to describe and quantify a broader range of outcomes which will have to include wellbeing and other ‘subjective’ states.  For herbalism, gardening and the whackier reaches of human culture we need to accept that not every hand-me-down remedy is necessarily, a priori, better.  I remember my mother talking about the lives saved when sulfonamides were first used during the 2nd world war.  They’ve been superseded now, for the most part, but in their day they were lifesavers. To go back to biochar, it may be a part of the answer to the climate catastrophe but in ethics they always say “you can’t make an ought into an is” and that’s not just a lesson for ethicists but for all of us.