Author: harrietsams

I walk in summer fields

Through shadowy patches still clinging to the dawn’s dew

Gently it bathes my naked toes as I brush through the tall, soft grass

Sharp, cool water, quickly warms on my skin and I lose sensation of it

A grass seed sticks under my foot

Warm sun now fully alive in the North and I am bathed in summer

Yet still the dew clings and the denuded path is soft underfoot

Morning light is hours old by now, I’m really late to this meeting

Curlews call in the breezy, blue sky

An unseen nettle stings my ankle

How strange, I’m usually so careful to move like a dancer around them

A rabbit comes towards us

Not seen by him, we watch his effortless jumps

Ears erect, body so comfortable

How rare to see a wild animal at peace in its own world

Accidental, unavoidable fear follows me usually

I’ve not thought of this before

I leave no trace of my passing

Hard times indeed, when the Earth is threatened with drills and big machinery, spewing her blood from veins deep within her body. Blood that will fuel industries and homes in a last-gasp attempt to eek out the last dregs of profit for those who laid claim to those blood riches.  That is not your blood to spill, I hear, yet this cry has reverberated around the arenas of human-made slaughter for aeons and nobody has ever listened until the reckoning of peacetime. 

Except that this anthropocene has bore witness to the spilling of all the blood in the world. Every single drop that wasn’t white, rich or comfortable to spill. This time it’s Earth Herself who is to keep sacrificing Her innards of shale gas to be offered upon the alter of money, of energy, of fuel, because dear girl, all this makes us happy in the long run. You like your life, don’t you? Surely you gave your silent consent long ago, when you were born into this world and you didn’t complain of the riches, the privilege, of the comfort? 

Hard times indeed. I squirm in my skin of the lost chances to respond. Because I have blood on my hands too. 

Yet, the rallying call went up and I’m listening now. I am rallied now. The comfort given to me for my silence can no longer numb me from the means used to stupify me.  

As individuals it is easy at first to be overwhelmed by the enormity of what is needed to be done. But this is a LIE!  have learned that this thought is directly caused by the habit of thinking that we are alone and separate from one another and from the Earth. Find others who agree and who will not collude with the all-too-easy return to sleep! Find those who too have heard the rallying call and who are turning towards the lines. 

I found such a place at Kirby Misperton Protection Camp last week. I took the baby and we went for an hour to meet the residents and to learn a little about their days. Amid the practicalities of putting a kitchen together, rat-proofing their food stores by using filing cabinets, fixing clattering cabins and moving useful humans across the country, I heard of a deep and real connection to the Earth, I felt the power of place, the genius loci embracing all who come tumbling lost and grief-stricken through the gate. I watched as tears of protectiveness welled in the eyes of one, my own eyes welled up as I felt it too. Fixing me, I heard. This place is fixing us all. Bowled over, surely it is us who are fixing the Earth? Yet even in her cry for help, Mother still heals. Goddess eyes, woven with wool into birch twigs dot about the camp, homemade signs and placards read welcome home. 

A week later and I return to offer a Global Earth Exchange: an offering of meditation, connection to place, of finding the wound of a place and then making beauty that was created by the inspiring Trebbe Johnson at Radical Joy for Hard Times charity in the USA. The sun beat down on us as we sat next to young willows in the camp. Nine participants plus me, my singing bowls and my drum, making a circle of stillness in the heart of the camp as others around us buzzed about, busy with the tasks of the day: kids making a tarp hide, kitchen goodies being prepared, cups of tea made and imbibed as actions were discussed. Our circle turned inward, to each other, to the group, to the Earth beneath our hearts. 

We began with a quick introduction of each of us, why are we here? What brought us here? And this is the depth of the wound: grief, rage, how dare they? How dare they? Love, self-healing on a long journey, love, love, love, and a calling responded to. Time and again, the call. 

Then a meditation, to feel the Earth, to open up to her as if she were a lover, to stand as equals with her and to find what she says to us as silent, still individuals. RadJoy has the term the Ground beneath our hearts and this was utterly perfect for this work. We envisaged the shale gas and we felt our own connection to that. We felt the Earth as our lover. 

We then went off to spend some time alone to connect more deeply to what we’d experienced. The drum and a bowl were taken, occasionally I could hear the drum as its player walked around the camp. The bowl turned up on Facebook: chill mofos.

To the couple of people who remained I played the other bowl, swaying into the bowl’s rhythm and vibrations, it took us deep into its sound and feel. To give vibrations of music back to the Earth. 

When we returned we made the RadJoy bird; wings outstretched, made from twigs and straw, long grass, cast-off cricket bat ash, half a tennis ball for a beady eye, goose feathers given only the day before for some as-yet-unknown reason (until now) splayed along the tail. The bird took shape under our foraging eyes and the will to create grew and grew in us all as the joy of the making took over. Satisfied at last we stepped back to admire our creation. Beauty made with joy, she lies now in the meadow as a symbol of the kestrel who has frequently visited the camp. 

Holding hands around the head, we close with a final grounding meditation and a reminder to give thanks to the Earth and to ourselves. 

Suddenly, Kestrel swoops overhead. Absent for a couple of days this is a portentous moment, just as we finish the GEx. Has she come to check out the new bird? Or because she has been attracted by the love of the group? She glides above us and beyond. Transfixed, we are blessed. 

Global Earth Exchange or GEx is a powerful thing. It’s a moment of reflection on every emotion that rises up when we notice that we are in the presence of a wounded place. Grief hangs over us like a weighted cloth that smothers our every move and the breath we so desperately need to live. The GEx offers us up to the grief, opens us up and makes us aware of it so that we can look beyond it and notice the radical joy that bubbles and sparkles with creative energy. Right at the edge of despair we find the strength to create joy. But we have to get to that edge, through the pain and the fear, through the grief and rage that hangs so ominously. It doesn’t engulf us because the joy is always felt, somewhere near, somewhere close, and GEx offers a gateway and an invitation to step into it. 

We make the bird that was lying waiting within us all, waiting to be made by willing hands and open hearts. 

The other day, our middlest daughter received Star of the week from her new gymnastics class. She was so completely delighted. She strapped the heavy, gaudily over-polished star under her seatbelt and cradled it all the way as we drove home, looking at it and stroking it, then looking at me with such a look of happy wonder in her face. Disbelief and joy could be clearly seen in her eyes as she took it all in. In my mind I held a breath’s space in silent thanks to the teachers who saw her shyness as she first walked in and the way she clung to me, tears in her eyes as she felt the alien room and the half-strange faces all around her. Thanks to them for encouraging her into the room and helping her forget her fears as she chose a hula hoop to whirl about her tiny body. I remember that feeling from dance classes when I was a child. Clinging to the rock of security that was my mother, I’d have done anything, anything at all to not feel that feeling of homesickness. No matter how much I ended up enjoying swinging myself about, dancing to the music, getting mind and body and will and rhythm to all merge as my body moved into the dance, the first fears were ever present.

———–

I have an occasional habit of turning on the morning news. Mainly for the weather report.

I get the news I need from the weather report

The gymnast walked in with her star. She had slept with it on her pillow and had been carrying it around since she awoke. She looked at the TV and said “perhaps I’ll be on the news today.”

“It’s big news, isn’t it?” I replied.

Indeed, this is big news. News so enormous in her life that it may well determine the course of her Wednesdays for a good while. My little agent of chaos, my firecracker has made the news.

Out of curiosity, I tune my attention to the news report coming from the TV: Macron, Le Pen, Brexit, Frexit, polls and elections, Syria, fake news, bombs, Trump and North Korea. All in the space of a two minute round-up of the headlines. No mention of a scared little girl getting a star, no mention even that their five month old brother can now roll over. How about the eldest and her encyclopaedic knowledge of Animal Jam, a game on the computer? What about my sleep report, how did last night go? That’s news to us. Or that yet again, my husband will be working this weekend and there is no let-up in sight for how much, how deeply I miss him.

“Four eggs today, mummy”, says the eldest. Our ever-giving chickens create their daily offerings. 

———

It’s enough to make anyone sad, or mad, or angry, desperate, despairing. Two minutes of my life I gave them and I got given a list of enormous problems, caused by enormous egos, for enormous egos to fix or worsen, depending on what mood they’re in.

Stepping outside, I take Dog and Baby back into the world. The wind whips my hair in jubilation the moment I step outside the back door, playing with my skin as it cools and strokes me. The sun plays too, peeking behind cantering clouds as they race overhead. It isn’t warm enough yet to make those first moments comfortable, but I know that I’ll heat up and I’ll be glad I didn’t wrap up too warmly. Cherry blossom shakes in the tree above me, the apple blossom is just starting to erupt! Soon the trees will be a rich, sexual pink. I step on ground elder and daisies, brush past a patch of forget-me-not at the gate. The lawn is dotted with colour now: verdant greens, whites and yellow of dainty little flowers. Cuckoo pints unfurl beneath one of the apples and tiny red currants bob about in the hedge. Everything is growing its offerings! Clothes snag on reaching brambles at the end of the garden and the willow bends her graceful boughs to my face, her leaves caress my upturned smile. Every day is different, the world tells me, yet every day is a return of the Great Circle of the year. The same and so achingly familiar, yet so new and so unique. Like greeting a very old friend, to find that you have both grown, but not beyond recognition.

This is the news I want to fill my world with. This. It’s real. It’s real news. It’s eternal and it’s right here. It’s what my body, senses and spirit have, right here. The path winds through the world and all I have to do is step forward, step by step and the news is there to be known.

Wild garlic is now in full flower in the old quarry; the heron takes off and lazily sweeps away across the river. It must have heard the crashing of Dog in his joyous meandering. A toad has laid strings of spawn in a receding pool of the river. I pick it up in my hand, and feel the ooze of the jelly around each delicate little egg. I gently move it all further into the pool, under a protruding rock, away from the increasing heat of the sun. Give it a chance, I think. I’ll come back and have a look to see if it’s safe. Roving reporter. The river level has dropped, almost all the way down to its high-summer level. But still a little way to go. I’ll report back on that too.

Someone has laid my altar down and used it as a makeshift path. I re-erect it and place a marigold and a wild garlic flower on the top. Also some grass, because this ubiquitous, understated plant colours our world like nothing else, yet it’s entirely overlooked, in favour of herbs, flowers, anything but grass. I met an ecologist who’d been studying grasses for fifteen years and still didn’t know every kind.

News. It’s what I make it.

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

——–

Excerpts from Simon And Garfunkel The only living boy in New York

and J.R.R. Tolkein The Lord of the Rings

Bright sunlight comes from a sun that has crept up the sky these last weeks, from its lowly sweep of the horizon in the darkest days to crowning the rooftops and the tallest of trees. Light dances off the glossy evergreen leaves of ivy, holly and privet as we canter to school this morning. Light illuminates the birds as they glide in the sky, their underbellies glossy with reflection and warmth. Everything is in motion: a brisk breeze whips my hair about my face and sends a crisp, brown leaf tumbling across the road, so much like a mouse that I thought at first it was. The breeze blows birdsong first into our faces then snatches it away and fills our ears with the roar of air instead. These first days of Spring are busy busy busy and we are not even privy to the event. We are not even expected to notice. Yet we do. The girls chatter and laugh at the banishment of Winter. They coo in delight at the crocuses in abundance in a neighbour’s garden, at the tiny daffodils and narcissi in bloom. Every year they are expected and every year they delight.Wild garlic just showing tiny green rolls in a garden are sagely discussed. They love to forage and intend to snack on them soon.

Then to school they go, to indoor classes, maths, music, art and writing. They too will have their moments in the sunshine. As I turn towards the day ahead my mind turns to the familiar contemplation of what I shall do. More specifically: which route shall I take in my daily walk of the dog and of Baby, fast asleep in the sling? The wind plays with the dog poo bag, sticking its corner out of my pocket. The rustle alerts me to its imminent take-off and I quickly stuff it back inside. Baby snores gently at my chest. I tuck his blanket around him a little better. This wind has fingers.

Dog goes bananas as I change into wellies and head off with him into the garden. Such joy! His delight creates in me a frustration because he’s just so daft (he’s knocked into the recycling box, now the gate, skidding on the muddy path down the lawn, stood on a chicken) but also a half-noticed envy of just how amazing life is for a well loved, well walked dog. At the bottom of the garden there is a little path and I ask him “Well then, left or right?”He looks at me from eight meters down the path to the left, so I suppose that’s the way we are going today.

Past the willow. How lucky we are to have one at the bottom of our garden. Not since I was a little girl did we have a willow. It stood at the corner of our house, by the veranda. No doubt it was planted, maybe a hundred years ago, to make the house look a little like a settler’s house on the banks of the Murray river in the searing heat of nineteenth century Australia. That beautiful willow eventually got too big for its home and had to be felled. I remember that day so well, such a sadness to say goodbye to a tree, even one that was slowly but crushingly lifting our house up and making it warp. So this one here is special. Catkins formed weeks ago high up above our heads in the canopy. This wind has brought a few down to the ground and the girls have been stroking them agains their faces, wondering how many they’d need to harvest to weave them into a soft jumper. I pick a catkin up. It is soft like the fur that sheaths the ripping sharpness of my cat’s paws. They poke out of dark brown husks, curved, cracked shells that have kept the delicate fibres protected from Winter’s worst ravages all these weeks. Now to be split and discarded to fall, pecked at by inquisitive chickens.

As I walk the wind accompanies me. I know that in a few minutes I’ll be warm with the exertion of the land: up hill and down dale. Carrying a steadily growing baby in the sling is keeping me fit. Yet shadows between the bushes keep the air cold and the ground is still packed down hard and barely above freezing. Air circles around my neck and my skin feels the sting of the wind. I keep my hair down and think (again) of how fortunate we are to have hair that keeps growing on our head. In a post-glacial world of northern Europe I’d have been glad of the extra insulation, as I am now.

The path emerges into sunlight and suddenly the air warms. I raise my face to the sun, feel the last shivering fingers of Winter release me from their grip and I sense my soul fully accept that this, here, now is Spring. I smile. I feel the smile cascading down into my body and my limbs, lifting me up from the heaviness of mine and Baby’s weight, into a lighter, brighter season, where adventures beckon. My pace quickens as I come as close to running as I can without bobbing the baby about too much. Birds are chattering incessantly about my ears: long tailed tits chirping, blackbirds scolding and wooing in turn, a lone thrush in the tree outside my bathroom has been entertaining me of late as it tries mimicking the birds it hears. My favourite call in its repertoire that it is perfecting is that of a curlew. I was quite convinced at first. I watch two robins love-fighting in a hedgerow. I am absolutely here now. I am watching you, I want to say. I am here. I feel it too.

I walk and walk. Each footpath I come across I take. Further and further I go because I don’t want to go back. I take the risk that Baby will wake up and I give thanks (again) for my on-board feeding machine. In fact, I wish he did wake up just so that I can find a rock and feed him. To feel this day shape my motherhood, to be bathed by the warm light as the coldness of the rock beneath me fights to keep me from getting too comfortable. Winter still holds the rocky realm. But it doesn’t hold the trees, nor the birds; the becks bubble and trickle, bouncing light about so carelessly while the creatures within them feel that the waters are perceptibly warmer today than yesterday. It doesn’t hold me either. Winter tries to get to Baby and for a moment I’m horrified that one of his bare legs has escaped from its wrapping and is cold to the touch. Small beings need great care. He fusses in his sleep as I tuck it back in.

Sooner or later I have to return home. That is part of the deal.

Walking home I turn my mind inwards to my thoughts. Ecotherpy is an off-shoot of ecopsychology which is the study of the world, the Earth, our humanity and the lack of connection that has sprung up between people and their environment. It says that the Earth is a being and that it influences us just as much, if not more, than any other person in our lives. I have a relationship with this world, just as intricately woven about me as my relationship with my mother. In fact, my relationship with the Earth is deeper, more eternal, more critical than that with my mother. Because I simply cannot live if the Earth falls sick and dies. I die too. Much as I love my mother, her destiny is not my own. Yet I am the Earth and She is me. 

It’s very easy to enjoy the delights of the Earth in this unspoilt, beautiful, empty place in the high Pennines. It takes a jump of understanding on a rational level to willingly open myself up to the realities in the rest of the world; open sewers leading into the Ganges, from which people fish then sell these in market places, deforested lands choked with acidic soils which will never sustain crops again, salinated swathes of Australia which were left after disastrous land management, so salty that it contaminates water supplies, and of course the imminent threat of fracking on our doorstep. How will we eat? How will we drink? How will we breathe? These are vastly terrifying questions that I must admit I can only glimpse at out of the corner of my eye most days, because on the days that I have seen them, stood facing them and brought them fully into my awareness I have broken down and sobbed in grief.

So this is ecotherapeutic motherhood, I suppose: to know that this Earth is both my delight and my greatest fear, delight that reaches way beyond myself into the wide reaches of the future, when I am no longer here and the breeze that plays about my face today has recycled itself into a terrifying cyclone, knocking down trees in Indonesia. So if anything, ecotherapeutic motherhood is giving me a sense of perspective.

Coming home, Baby is stirring. As I extricate him from the sling and he is crumpled up into a little warm ball of himself, slowly stretching out his arms and his head, I tell him of all that there is out there. How I ventured three miles, maybe not even that, from our door and I found the world to be filled with life. How I found that Spring comes again and again to our world and demands sleep to be banished before it. How that the Earth Herself gives cues, perfectly in time with the Sun, for collaboration. We mustn’t just walk through this world unknowingly, un-noticingly, as if we do not matter. True, things will go on around us in our blindness, yet it’s amazing out there and all we have to do is go out and surrender to it.

Since this magical bundle of life arrived I have been recovering slowly from the c-section, reacquainting myself with my body and my surroundings. These photos are all taken in the last few months since his birth. Through our winter, when the land sleeps. Yet it is still filled with abundance. Take a look. Please follow me on instagram as nwyfremeandering Dusk at the shortest day

The base of a pot that my eldest found, now on the Windowsill of Wonders

Birch trees in the sun no1

No2

No3

No4

The mighty Tees no1

No2

No3

No4

Looking east over the Stainmore Gap no1

No2

Fallen nest made of spindly birch twigs.  

Pathways

Frozen fairy

Smattering of snow 

Sunset

Tracks in the snow

Reflections

This mighty oak calls me to look closer

Namaste. Enjoy your own meandering. 

I read Phillip Pullman’s Northern Lights many years ago and I was struck by the pain a human endures when severed from their daemon. The guillotine falls and the energy released rips holes between dimensions. I felt that pain when being separated from this baby. I’ve been here before, twice. Yet I have never ever felt anything like this. The birth of my first was a messy, rushed emergency delivery, where I was gone into oblivion by anaesthetic so I had no idea of what was happening. My second delivery was all natural, swellings of pain that crashed in waves over my body. Taking days and days, sleeplessness and lack of food, I finally opened like a shattered and torn flower and out she came. Yet even that pain did not feel like a severance. This did. This felt like our bodies, our spirits had been severed from one another. I had to be cut open, a ‘natural’ section where we could watch him emerging, a full eight minutes of indignant crying of his rapidly pinkening face as the rest of his body stayed firmly in utero. Then, once he emerged fully, he was put onto my breasts to blindly hunt for nothing he’d ever known before. Then finding it and sucking my newly ready breasts.

As my body has aged I have become finally and surely aware of my fallibility, my fragility. I have felt now how healing takes place, of deeply created scars. I have learned to understand pain too. Debilitating pain, where I reach willingly for heavy medication, just to manage this feeling. I cannot be with this. I need to numb this, exacerbated by having a cold. Every cough and sneeze terrorises me into thinking I’m going to burst open my gut for all to see. Ripping, searing heat. Husband pushes a pillow into my cut as I get ready. Yet I never burst and I never tear. I heal. Miraculous.

Then I get better. Baby grows so beautifully. An ounce a day! How happy this makes me. I catch myself looking at my naked body in the full length bathroom mirror: blackened tummy, turning incredible colours of yellow and green, crimson scar and deep, deep blue bruises. Swollen tummy and engorged breasts. Nipples blistered, shoulders hunched. I have the face of a stranger and the eyes of a doe. Yet within I have reached somewhere that I have spent many years practicing meditation to reach: single-minded and complete surrender of being. I am now here to keep Baby alive with milk. I function on low battery, yet I have something I have always struggled to have: a still mind.

My mind is now on low battery. Light seems dimmed, functions take less energy, fewer critical functions function at all in fact. Respond to the cry of the Baby. Sit. Read a book. Have a drink of water. Allow my empty mind to just be that. Empty. What a wonderful feeling! No more racing mind, the chattering monkeys have quietened down, and possibly have left the building. Silence and peace prevails within my mind. It has taken severance of me from my spirit to have this happen. A simplicity prevails, so much so that I have wondered if I would find the words to write this. Thoughts have floated gently by like clouds in a blue sky. Now I have written them and captured them. Not all of them though. I want to write about how my chickens gave me so much therapy when pregnant, how they’re possibly the only other things I think about, them and my family. Better feed them (the girls), better clean them out (the chickens), better say thank you a lot more often (to my husband). Be grateful for them all. Spread the peace within my spirit that this has given me.

I look again at my body in the mirror. I see the strength it took to conceive, grow and birth a new, bright soul into this world. A soul that has lit up our lives in his own, joyous ways. Brown-eyed boy, our Joyous One. I am grateful and I am home.

I sobbed, turned to my husband and whispered gently in his ear that the unthinkable had happened. Unthinkable, yet ever-so doable, it turns out. So there it was: my first slap around the face that perhaps I hadn’t been told anything like the truth by pundits, journalists, social commentators, opinionators, and everyone else thought. Brexit allover again. I’ve heard this from others too, and my word, I felt it that morning.

Yet another blog about the US election? Well, yes and no. I am writing about what I’ve observed in humans since what came to be as of Wednesday this week, including myself. But life carried on. I get up, get the kids up, kiss my husband goodbye as he goes to work. Nothing has changed. Yet a sea of change is broiling somewhere in the world and I’m standing on a distant shore where my toes are getting the tiniest of laps.

But why was it so unthinkable? Of course we live in a time where two things are happening simultaneously: minds are being polarised, activised, emotions are being encouraged and fed upon, change is in the air and not only that, change has been voted for and is now expected, demanded. Instability is rife, swinging between anti-establishment fervour and fear. Of defining ourselves by what we’re not. Yet at the same time we are being encouraged to be at peace with current events, to protect our own minds from the truth of the horrors all around us. To be apathetic and at worst to be complicit in not standing up for what we believe (anyone have any idea of that anymore?). Buddhist teachings tell us to welcome in change as it is inevitable and that transformation is a process that begins with an open heart.

I see friends really struggling with what is happening. People who have armed themselves with knowledge and such erudite arguments. Both sides are compelling me to listen and to agree. To know all ends. But the truth is, I don’t. I do not know all ends. I do not know if welcoming in this change is going to protect people from unemployment, or racism. I don’t know if by standing against the dismantling of our establishments and the ushering in of chaos is even a task that I’m up for. I don’t know if I can stop fracking, rapacious greed committing ecocide for profit, stop a fool who cannot be trusted with a Twitter account, who now has his finger on nuclear warheads. I don’t even know if he’s a fool. I don’t know if I have any idea of what the world is really like. I don’t even know if any of this matters, seeing as we will all be dust particles blowing in a cosmic wind once the sun goes out anyway.

But yet, if I let myself delve deeper into what I don’t know, I look even further into this and I see a hope kindled that has never gone out. I see the hope that I cannot put my finger on to name: it isn’t hope that we won’t suffer at the hands of those we mindlessly allow to govern us, it isn’t a hope for humans, nor species, nor even for the air that I’m breathing right now. It is a hope of a purer form, that I think was put there when I was very small. It is the hope that this is a beautiful world and staggering universe that my understanding of will never, ever comprehend. And that really, we are just playing.

That smacks of fatalism, nihilism even. Well, here’s the truth: it actually won’t matter in the end. And in the meantime, I draw my eyes away from their western-orientated view and look around me. I look at street kids in Kathmandu who don’t give two hoots about what’s going on, because we’ve just put an emperor back onto a broken throne. They don’t care who it is who wears the ermine. I see the Amazon basin gasping for breath, when of course it’s us who will breathe the last lungful of putrid carbonised air. I see China through a haze of successful pollution and I see lives belittled and destroyed, so we can have a really smashing Christmas. I turn my eyes to the orangutangs in Borneo who are our cousins and we still can’t stop them from burning, so we can have palm oil whenever we wish for it. And I know that we’ve failed our biggest test and we all know it.

I need to write something positive here, a word of encouragement. Perhaps it’s best to use the words of Max Erhmann in his beautiful poem, Desiderata:

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

It really is.

I saw two dippers in the river the other day, walking upstream in the sharpness of the November waters. They looked like tiny otters at first, until one hopped onto a rock and did his characteristic bobbing up and down. I was delighted. Dry seeds rattle on the dying undergrowth as I brush against them, the promise of Spring right there. The rescue chickens thoughtlessly give us eggs now that they’ve settled in and grown their feathers back. Life is being, just as it should and this makes me very content. And yes, Baby still grows in my tummy, waiting to be born very soon. I have to have hope, don’t I? Because this world, this universe, this unfathomable expanse of unknown will never ever change, no matter what we do to it in our tiny sphere of which we think we have taken control.

I feel that there are other worlds, far out of reach of this one, where we exist without our bodies and that all we’ve ever done to believe the hype that our bodies and all the tricks they ever play on us are all that matter, well, there it simply doesn’t even happen. Ego, wealth at any cost, destruction of what we’re too foolish to value, hate in all its vicious forms, the cages we put around ourselves and each other, desires, fears, hopes, shames, they’ve all gone. Every single thing. And all we are is the spirit and soul we had before we started to believe that this world matters. It’s that flame of hope that must have been put there when I was a very tiny child. That’s what I’m talking about. And it’s there for us all to see, to feel. Every single one of us can see that and feel it and take great courage from it so that the task of making this world, this material, tangible world, a little easier to deal with. For after all, it is still a beautiful world and it really is good to feel happy and to see it in others with whom I share this path.

Going into confinement, 

Body bourgeons with the life within, 

my body takes on pregnant proportions and it’s time now

To go within.

Where though?

Where did I go in the years

That have fallen between learning and acting,

When the last time I went into confinement I was not who I am now,

What became of that person and what

If anything

Is left?

Silence does not come easy in this house.

Ear worms from half-learned songs or

Grazed shins and squabbles leave no space for

Silence

And drumming or bowls or chants

That carry me waking to this knowing

And then there’s the shedding to be done,

Of profession and job or income and ego,

To lay me naked once again before you all,

To say

This is me, pregnant, rounded, softened and tired,

And I’ve nowhere to go and nothing to do except 

Be

Pregnant and waiting,

Confined and free

“If you’re waiting to be led by someone who isn’t at least a little bit hypocritical then you’ll be waiting till you’re dead”.

Recently I went on a workshop that talked about how our world leaders (and by these I do not mean politicians, by the way, but peacemakers, climate change scientists, spiritual teachers, yoga instructors and the people who give meaning to our lives) and we all agreed that most, if not all of them are hypocrites in some way or another. Environmental activists who fly thousands of miles to give talks, buddhist teachers who get pissed off with random people who do silly things, the Quaker lady who kicked the wheel of a car because it was in her way, vegans who buy soya made from deforested virgin Amazonian forest…. I could go on.

But does that mean that we cannot learn the deep, ground shaking message that they have? Does it mean somehow that my own hypocrisies counter all my good intentions? Does it mean then that I might as well not try, because I like a good takeaway and use the car quite a bit? Are we looking for justification for not listening? For not even trying? 

I realised a few years ago that to be of this world meant to contribute quite significantly to its problems. Every year I use 2.2 worlds to sustain my life. I worked it out. If I took away car use it went down to just 2.0 worlds.  Staggering. Seeing as I recycle almost everything, barely throw any organic matter away (and by this I mean anything carbon-based. Why should natural things be called ‘organic’ when things laced with chemicals are not even labelled, let alone named?! Daft is it not, that we allow these chemical-laden half-foods into our eons-old bodies. But this is the world upon which we have to build our lives.) If you want to work out your Earth usage you can do it here: http://calculator.bioregional.com The average Brit uses 3 worlds each year. And that’s just because we need a vast network of infrastructure like a safety net in our lives: the NHS; roads; Tesco; schools; wifi; heating; water…… ad nauseum .

Short of living in a cave (and this is often very tempting) and living off spring water and offerings to the gods given by local people, I’m in this world. I am contributing to its problems just by breathing, let alone by reproducing, eating, travelling, shopping and watching DVDs on occasion. This feeling fills me with justifiable shame. Yet it also shoves me to the front of the whole bunch of us who are in this together: to bloody well do something about it and stop bemoaning this inherited shambles as if I cannot do a thing about it.

So how? How can I, or we, do anything about not being untouchably perfect in our lives on this planet? How can we face this hypocrite that lives within us every day? Firstly, by staring it right in the face and naming it within ourselves. I am a hypocrite. There. Said it.

Then, to work to off-set our own lives where we can. If I travel today, then I won’t tomorrow. If I eat ready meals today then tomorrow I’ll eat locally produced food. If I use a lot of electricity today then I’ll make sure it’s from 100% renewable sources. And if there are things I cannot do, then I’ll support those who are doing it on my behalf: such as Amnesty International or Friends of the Earth. And I will spread the word. That things can be different and that this life, this Earth, this over-stretch of resources does not have to continue.

Small steps, but vital ones, if we are to accept who we are and live lives that we can be at least partly happy with.

‘Riddled with anxieties’, ‘led by fear’, ‘carrying a load of baggage’ are phrases I had not thought related to me. I like to think of myself as someone who does things. I have felt fears, of course, but I’ve learned to say ‘yes’ in their faces and gone and done stuff anyway. I remember being a teenager and school had organised a potholing trip in Yorkshire. There I was, fully kitted out, standing with a few other quivering teenage girls, looking down into the hole and declaring in a squeal that I’m not going down there. Then I watched in half horror and half jealousy my class mates all going down into the depths of the earth. One teacher stood, just the right amount of pissed-off emanating from him, with us to make sure we were ok. OK?! Weren’t we taking the easy option? The safe way? Half a minute elapsed until the ‘just bloody go down it’ in my head erupted into the world and I declared I was going down. Just that. A decision to say yes and to release myself from the fears of doing so. I had an incredible time, of course.

Roll on twenty-odd years and that day’s lesson has failed me. All I had to do was drive down the M6 to Wales and go on a retreat in a forest. Just me and a few people, my tent and some quiet time to reflect, learn, recharge, and be at peace. Sounds idyllic. Necessary, even, in the madness of parenting young children with another on the way. My rational mind has been looking forward to this. My person needs this time of growth. So why is the feeling of dread growing with every mile eaten up by the car? Is it that my hip is starting to give me jip? Or the third traffic jam since Tebay? What about the fact I’ve not seen my girls for a week and if I go it’ll be even longer? Is it simply because I’m pregnant and tired? Is it the fact I’ll be so remote I won’t have phone signal to talk to them? How about that I’ve asked too much of everyone to look after them in my stead? That’s my role, isn’t it? To be the Mother. To care for our offspring so that others can go about their lives uninterrupted. But by going I’m interrupting. Being selfish.

I stop. And cry. I stop longer. I talk to my husband. And the facilitator. Both urging me to go. I cry a bit more. I buy something to eat from a little farm shop and I get £1.11 change. I wonder if it means anything. Because by now I need signs because I am lost at sea with absolutely no bearings nor compass points to guide me. I sit a little longer then I decide to continue. Then I stop again. As I pull over there is a jay sitting right at the place where my car comes to rest. He flies off. Another, deeply meaningful sign this time. The Jay represent the screech and yell of the family unit. He is the hardest to see of the crow family, yet he’s sitting right there, on the kerbside where my car comes to be parked, just as I’m finding my resolve to go home. And my eldest has a poster of one on her bedroom wall. This is the sign I have needed. My emotional being knows that when nothing works anymore, and the advice of other people as well as the inner voice is so confusing, Nature Herself will tell you.

I turn for home. I turn off the satnav who insists that the M6 and all those traffic jams is the best way home. But the satnav doesn’t have a soul that needs soothing. So I drive up through the Pennines, over Settle and Ingleton, the Ribblehead Viaduct and past Annie’s house. I briefly wonder about her blisters and think to call in, but I know that being on the edge of emotions is never a good place to be when being social. She’d hug me and give me pie, I’m sure. And for the thought I am grateful.

Home.

It’s the next day now and I am thinking of the wall I couldn’t break through. Of the fears that I simply couldn’t come to terms with and conquer. Make no bones about this; this is as momentous a failure as I’ve not achieved in a very long time. I try to take comfort in the knowledge that I take myself with me, and sitting, guilt-ridden in a forest for five days wouldn’t have served anyone. It’s best to stay away and to make beautiful what I have here. Perhaps it boils down to that in the end: guilt. The carefree feeling of going and doing stuff for myself could so easily have swept me though, joyfully into this experience, in the knowledge that all would have been well, everyone would have been fine and happy. I’ve felt that before and I have done many, soul enriching things on the back of that. Yet, I didn’t feel that yesterday, and now the crying has abated and the emotions are come to rest, I still feel it now. That wasn’t my place to be. How odd that I had to pack and arrange babysitters, set off and drive for two hours before I could find the point of failure. How odd that I never once felt it in the months since I booked the retreat in the first place. How strange that it was change from a fiver and that jay that cleared my head of the swamp that was threatening to suck me down into immobility.

When one door closes, I’ve long thought that when saying no, the best way to make good this decision is to make whatever you’ve said yes to really something special and beautiful. Because of course, every no has a yes buried deep inside it. Sometimes it takes a little while to see it, sometimes it doesn’t even feel as though there’s a yes in there at all, when we can be buried deep inside the thought of a failure. But it’s there, waiting to be grasped and acted upon. For my part, today I’m going to smile and be thankful for everything that I have today, for everything that I don’t need to retreat from. It’s my job today to be very aware of just how special life is and how very, very lucky I am to have the small worries that I have that turned me aside from what could have been.