Practice

Working with the fabric

May you have the courage to jump the fire. May you disobey your forefathers and open the box. May all your helpers come in time. May we all sing before the storm as it advances, as Eros approaches us with his great wings. May we have loved this Earth and each other enough for this not to be the end.

from ‘The Time of Stones’, After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time

Seed collection from ‘Daydreams for Masanobu Fukuoka; by Monique Besten (Dark Mountain: Issue 17)

Quito, Ecuador 1992

Stand with me on this balcony: we are in a city at the far side of the world, shrouded in mist. Lights blink on the glass towers below to warn the hidden aeroplanes flying in. Everything is upside down. North is now South, the constellations have changed places, the salt comes out of the pepper pot. Born a sea level creature, I find myself thrust thousand of metres into the sky on the brink of the great Andean night. We are about to travel into an unknown land, without a guide.

‘Charlie!’ Mark is calling out of the mist, camera in hand. ‘come down and stand by this tree!’

It will be in Quito where we will first hear about having a practice, when Joui, who once lived here, tells us about the Daoist way of walking the Earth. ‘Anything can be your practice,’ she says. ‘If you are a fisherman, mending your nets can be a practice. It is the way you mend the nets and the attention you pay to it that matters. This is how it and you become part of the Tao.’

I could say that this journey through the Americas is a kind of practice. We wouldn’t have framed it like that at the time: we just knew we had to step out of hotel rooms and encounter the world with whatever challenges it presented: weather, geographies, people, tin-can buses that skittered down vertiginous slopes, our equally perilous personal and cultural karmas. We did however have a book to write, a testimony that, unlike traditional travelogues, full of landscapes and cultural history, would be about two people who gave up everything to live in a vaster space, to arrive as strangers in a strange land. We were in a mist, but the book would provide a structure, so we could make sense of our experiences. Whatever happened to us would be material. We didn’t have a plan. We didn’t know we would never return to our old lives. Or our homeland for many years. We looked into that mist and felt the world open.

‘I’m coming!’ I shouted and ran down the stairs.

By the time our travelling days came to an end in Western Australia seven years later, we had a practice for real. The first of several that would lead us not only back (reluctantly) to England, but to change our attentions entirely. These were the ten years of the dreaming practice, the ten years of the plant practice, the six years of the community practice. Of course, these practices overlapped, and included others both in terms of inquiry, or teaching, or writing.

What they all had in common was the creating of a container, a space and a time, so you could see the connections between dimensions, an ‘interface’ that could reveal the metaphysical held within the physical. To activate what is sometimes known as a ‘right hemisphere’ attention, a way through to the imagination of the world. We made this bridge with a speaking practice, shaped by the dynamic dialogues we had once enjoyed with the power plants of the Andes and the Sierra Madre.

But the practices depended, for their creative fire, on undergoing the unfamiliarity of things, a not-knowing. You couldn’t stay at home, playing safe. You had to step out. Even when you didn’t want to, deep into the freezing fog of this turning year.

Planet

Minsmere, Suffolk

Here I am alone in the twilight cycling towards Minsmere Bird Reserve, a bumpy track I know well at dawn but not at dusk. The reserve is almost deserted when I arrive. I walk out into the marshes towards the restless sea which I can hear, with the eerie sound of a crane, and barnacle geese flying in. I’ve been searching for the great winter bird murmurations but the weather has been gloomy and windy, and I’ve not seen any. This evening though is beautiful, cold and clear. A knot of lapwings curl and loop over the waters of the Scrape, and in the distance a small swirl of starlings. I stand and wait in case they come closer, but they fast disappear among the stalks and tassels of the reeds. The light drains away. I scan the sky a final time, and that’s when I suddenly see Venus, brilliant before me, then Jupiter to the south and Mercury, just above the horizon, and finally Mars, glowing red over the sea. It’s a full line up, a convergence of planets!

You think you come for one thing, but when you go out to encounter the Earth, you realise you are there for something else. The people you love are not always here, the birds you long for don’t always appear, but the planets are always there in space whether you see them or not. They are steady, revolving around us, orbiting the sun. That’s what you remember in the dark, the invisible influence of those spheres, what having a practice allows in. Something you do not expect that makes sense of everything.

I cycle home, without lights to guide me but with Venus shining before me, flashing between the giant lime trees, glancing off the river, until I see her perched above the chimneys of the house.

So long, and thanks for all the flowers

(Left) Mark in his famous black overcoat in the snowdrop wood, Dunwich (centre) with one of Cathy's giant apples, Ditchingham, Norfolk; (right) with Sustainable Bungay digging an orchard for Greengrow Cooperative, Ilketshall St Andrew, February 2010

Bath Hills, Ditchingham

I am walking across Bungay Common, across the Waveney river, and up into Bath Hills. I am going to a farewell gathering at Cathy’s house and walking this narrow path, fringed with winter aconite, for the last time. At the top, at the junction of two lanes I see a man in a black overcoat walking towards me, then turn to go towards the house. The figure is so like Mark (the beanie hat, the bike bag slung over his body) I do a double take. I know it isn’t by his stride but something is kin for sure.

After lunch, the assembled group will gather round the fire outside, and each of us will take up to sticks for either side of the approaching Imbolc: one to say goodbye, the other to wish good luck for the future. We will say why we loved this garden, coming here for all these years, how this place had been both a refuge and meeting place, why we so valued Cathy’s generosity, the welcoming way she was with the wild flowers, and us. We will speak and add our sticks to the fire. When Mark and I lost our old home three years ago, Cathy offered her cottage to us, to all our plants and our cat, in case we didn’t find anywhere to go. You don’t forget kindnesses like that. They stay in your heart.

When we were community activists together, Cathy ran an Abundance project from this orchard, where people pooled their surplus garden fruit and shared it via the Community Library Garden, along with seeds and seedlings in the spring. We made apple juice together in the rain, gathered damsons and pears for the community kitchen, run workshops on making blackberry wine and hawthorn leathers. The group, like a lot of grassroots activist groups, may not have lasted in the way we imagined it might but its kind and fiery spirit was still here, in these exchanges between strangers who don’t feel like strangers, in this deliberate marking of time, of leaving and saying thank you.

These social communications were our practice for six years and like all our practices, endured beyond the time of intensity, excitement, exploration, difficulty and falling apart. Maybe that’s what I recognised in the black-coated figure, walking with purpose that was not just ‘going for a walk’. You can tell people who have had a community practice: they don’t mind speaking out loud in go-rounds, or bringing a dish to share, or taking up Cathy’s saucepans and banging them to wassail the trees. Because we want the world to be like this when it so often is not. Most people wouldn’t see it as a practice but it is. It takes time to get on and get over yourself in a individualist world almost entirely constructed of untempered ego, wanting its way, to make its points, to be right, to be noticed, to be superior.

To be loved without loving back.

Carrying the fire

Hope Cottage, Eastbridge

Here I am once more lighting a fire for Imbolc in the garden, with the practice we worked with over decades: the marking of the eight ancestral fires of the year. Thrushes are singing in the dusk; a crescent moon and Venus shine above the goat willow trees. But the fire is absolutely not happening. I am quite proud of my creative array of twigs (crow’s nest, Mark would say) with its assiduously collected fennel stalks and sunflower heads and birch twigs. Usually it springs to life, even in a light wind. But after a great whoosh of flame that almost burns my eyelashes, there is just a lot of smoke, and then snap, crackle and pouf, gone. Just a smoulder, coughing among the twigs that refuse to be re-ignited. Oh no, it’s going out, and the matches are spilling everywhere, and oh hurry, it’s getting dark, and god everything is way too damp. How come you didn’t notice? It so mustn’t go out, not this fire, the one at the beginning of things. But here you are, it just did. Fuck it. So I knock that untidy citadel of twigs over and begin again, fetching dry kindling from the house and (sacrilege!) a firelighter…

The second fire roars into life, and I crouch alongside blowing its embers, feeding it fallen ivy and greengage branches, toasting the evening and laughing at my desperate antics. Don’t you know by now, Charlotte, this is the Fire. This is the Practice. Each time you forget, each time it catches you unawares. You think your dream, your plant, your visit, your meeting, is going to be clear and luminous like the stars above, but it’s a mess. You are a ninny, you blew it – but hey, you can try again.

Got it, I told myself and went inside to a celebratory supper of roast vegetables with chickpea and polenta chips.

Left: violets from The Plant Pamphlets by Anne-Marie Culhane; centre, hazel catkins, Reydon, Suffolk; right poster for Barleybird Seed and Plant Swap, Brampton.

Dunwich cliffs

The next morning I get up at dawn in candle light in in time to catch the sunrise. But I had forgotten the frost, a deep hoar, that now has encrusted and glittered the land … and the car. Oh, no I am going to be late! I throw warm water over its frozen windows, and roar down the lanes towards the coast, executing perhaps the worst parallel park of my short unbrilliant driving career. I charge through the copse to the cliff edge. And lo, the sun is already rising: a beautiful red disc emerging above a dark ruffled sea. I have totally missed The Moment. A ninny twice over. How is that possible? I go to the snowdrop wood and sit on a yew log and take out my thermos. The coffee is lukewarm, the snowdrops are not out yet, and everything still looks out of kilter from the felling of sycamores last year. I want to get up but I don’t. I stay. I stay until I can feel the emergence of the white flowers extend around me like a skirt. Hello again fellows, I say, and lean against the tree. The sea breathes in and out. The sun sends a golden pathway to the shore. Something settles within the chaos.

I go down to greet the day. There is space and air everywhere. Without thinking I start to sing; to the sun, to the sea, to the flowers, to Mark, who only last year was standing beside me on the cliff by the wind-carved blackthorn. I stretch my attention in all directions, and breathe the beautiful morning in. Then I take my shoes off and walk into the icy water. And begin to laugh… OMG, I am doing my own task!

The irony was not lost on me. For years I’ve written and taught the female myths of the Underworld, about the rigour of Venus and her four initiatory tasks, and now I was undergoing them myself. All year I have stood on these cliffs, distraught, my heart riven, like Psyche with the loss of Cupid, and here I am on Imbolc morning, down by the shore, and in spite of everything, singing to the sea, and putting my winter feet in the waves, feeling suddenly complete, energetic.

In our last teaching session based on Dark Mountain’s book about the sea, Dark Ocean, I had asked everyone to go to their local water body, to make a small ceremony, and put their feet in the water, and then pour some of the water into a small bottle to share their experiences the following week (see full exercise below). This is what I mean, about a practice, about working with the fabric, with what Joui might have called ‘the fisherman’s net’: you open a space and a web of inner and outer corresponding threads come together without your thinking – the land, the fire, the season, the myth, your own body. A harmonic convergence occurs that is almost impossible to describe, existing in a realm uninhabited by reason or will, to which only a relationship with the living Earth can take you.

This convergence happens because a practice enables you to withstand discord and allow things to realign and come back in tune. And, as far as we know, this Earth is the only place where those interdimensional shifts can happen, a planet that holds the dynamic of change in its cycles of living and dying, enacted each day by its creatures. Imbolc reminds us of what that brings. The return of light. The return of the flowers and singing birds. The possibility of starting again.

Venus is an alchemical planet which means her teaching is about undergoing change in order to keep the balance of life going. If you fall under her tutelage, you realise, ninny as you are, you can make a small move among a host of flowers, around a fire in an orchard with your fellows, for the future. You can’t do this from the outside, without suffering that discordance. I sometimes lost patience with the girl in the story, weeping among the reedbeds, alone by the river, why could she just not confront those sun-enraged rams of Colchis on her own?

The following day I find myself with another of Psyche’s tasks: sorting seeds for a seed swap at Hodmedods Bean Store, where I will tend a stall with a pile of Mark’s Plant Pamphlets. His seed library is housed in various shoe boxes in his room, and sorting them feels like a Sisyphean, let alone Venusian, task.

‘I can’t tell you how to do something,’ Mark used to say, ‘I just need to put my hands on it and then I’ll know what to do.’

That’s when the memory of many hands flying across a table comes to me. When I taught this myth, I would tip a small sack of Hodmedods’ pulses and grains onto the the table and ask the assembled company to put these ancient edible seeds into separate piles: barley, wheat, lentils, chickpeas, poppy seeds… Their joint attention was formidable.

I gather a pile of flame-coloured cempoaxochitl seeds he grew and collected for over 20 years from an original wild ‘flor de muerto’ marigold in Oaxaca, and effortlessly my hands put them in 20 glassine envelopes, one pinch at a time.

Attention, allowance, waiting until the fury abates, waiting to be given a hand – the mainstays of any practice – are qualities that get little traction in an impatient, controlling world, predicated as it is on a senseless addiction to power. But you never get to experience the Earth as it truly is, or your own place, a moving strand within its vast fabric, unless you deliberately make time for them.

Alchemical planets are not concerned with power, They are interested in life, in beauty, in relationship, and if you work within their spheres of influence, you will endure many trials to find these in yourself and the world. When you stumble across a point of convergence, you can feel its many-strands-coming-together, whirling like a wheel of Maypole ribbons. You can feel the dance of life inside. You can feel the harmonic. And you don’t want it ever to end.

Helped by the eagle of Jupiter, Psyche takes the jug of bitter waters from the wellspring of the Styx and presents it to Venus. Helped by all the planets, I bring this crow’s nest of words gathered by the North Sea, about bearing loss, about moving through the dark, about those small invisible acts of alignment we make in our collapsing, converging times, to keep life going.

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Getting Your Feet Wet

Here’s the exercise from the Dark Mountain Journeys into Earth and Sea course and the Imbolc title page by Candace Jensen for our Eight Fires book

Kinship with Beasts: Imbolc title page for Dark Mountain: Issue 24 - Eight Fires by Candace Jensen

Walk to the shore of your local water body (sea, river, estuary, stream, lake), taking with you a small jar or glass bottle.

Greet the water as a being and collect some water (ice if frozen) in your jar/bottle. Leave it open.

Find your holdfast place (rock, tree, or wherever feels right). Set the bottle on the ground. Tune into the place to shift your attention: feeling your feet, connecting with your heart, breathing with the rhythm of the water, stretching your arms/awareness out in time and space (before you, behind you, to both sides of you). Remaining anchored, move and feel the fluidity of your own water body and let any rigidity of mind or body go.

Sit (or remain standing) and wait in attentive stillness, and when you are ready, put your feet into the water (where possible - a quick dip is fine in winter!). Remembering everything water has given you in your life, for life, ask yourself what might you give in return?

Create a small ceremony with what comes to you, what you find at your feet: dance, song, gesture, spoken words, found artwork.

When complete, thank the water, close the bottle/jar and take home (to share experience later).

Thanks for reading everyone. If you would like to know more about the practices and working with the four tasks of Psyche, you can read an introduction to my book, After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time here.