The year has turned, the feast days are over, and I’m hunkered down on a wooden platform beside a path that leads to the sea. The white sandy criss-crossing tracks of the heath are dotted with visitors on post-holiday walks. This lower path runs alongside a creek which pools at certain places where you can stop and swing up a birch or pause on a mossy log. Unlike the restless sea beyond the wild fringe of sallow and bulrush and the hurry of walkers, these ponds are still and deep. Nothing is stirring. In winter, there is no life on show: no floating lilies or darting dragonflies. Everything is happening beneath the surface, or adjacent to its reedy edges in suspended animation. Seeds are waiting to unfurl, beetles to emerge; invisible nymphs are dreaming of sky, slumbering amphibians of the fragrance of water.
Something beckons you to peer into this dark mirror, sketched by branches and cloud. As you do, you find not your reflection but your attention shifted into another state. You fall, tumble in, go under. You stop as the stillness of the water finds the still point inside you. In this equilibrium, you realise there is part of you under wraps, an emergent spring, a future self, that only a certain kind of waiting will reveal.
It’s just a small flicker, like the stealthy increase of light in January, a blackbird quietly rehearsing his song in the ivy. Like the surprise of a butterbur flower you stumble across on the cliff, the fragrance of vanilla in the cold salt air. But it’s there. Attention quickens its presence; contacting this stillness is the practice.
Contemplation by ponds
I first began sitting by ponds in the lockdown years. My own small Walden was in the ancient coppice woods down the lane where we once lived. There were two ponds in the central woodland clearing: one in the open sunlight, skirted by meadowsweet and common orchids in summer, frequented by common and crested newts. The other lay hidden behind it, shadowed by a thick canopy of hornbeam, beside the back ride. It was a very kiva pond.
That year I had unwittingly become a guardian of this (now busy) nature reserve, and wore a small blue cap which granted me access to places where ordinary mortals were not allowed. My task was to guard the ponds’ inhabitants from wayward dogs jumping into the water. No one, I soon found out, even with official headgear, resists the rules of the house quite as forcefully as a woman with an unleashed hound.
So sometimes I kept invisible watch by the back pond, where a great nest of birch twigs had been erected to deter human visitors. Here it was darker and quieter, the flowers were shade-loving, chthonic: the tiny blue skullcap and very poisonous hemlock water dropwort. It was here, in a twin state of rest and alertness, I experienced how a body of contained water could bring an entirely different attention into play.
One day I waited longer than usual, partly because I was keeping vigil but also because I had just joined a contemplative activism group. We were a band of cultural and climate activists exploring the communal act of paying attention in an insecure moment. Most of this online ‘sangha’ were Zen (or other) Buddhists, had Catholic and Jain upbringings, and some kind of meditation practice, except Mark and me. The word ‘contemplation’ sounded rather medieval and religious to my heathen ears. But I knew about hanging out with plants, with a blank page before me, waiting for a word or image to emerge from the mysterious depths of the imagination. So I had sat down, listening to the rain on the leaves around me and gazed into the deep stillness of the pond. Time passed. The woods were quiet. Everything felt held in a state of suspension.
When I finally looked up, the trees around the pond had moved nearer. It was as if the whole assembly were leaning in, watching me, expecting some kind of response. The presence of the wood was palpable. ‘Oh,’ I said out loud. ‘I see. We’re working together!’ That was when I realised it wasn’t just me, just us, working on our own as humans to keep life going. It was an ensemble act. The territories we lived in and us.
That lockdown an entirely new attention was paid to the wild world outside our doors because none of us could go very far. No one could fly away, go out for entertainment and parties, or even in most cases out to work. We all became neighbourhood alchemists, working out of tiny hermetic vessels in our front rooms, watching the spring unfold outside. The plants pushed through the cracks. The animals came nearer. We came nearer to them, to one another, started new alliances.
Keen to return to our ‘normal’ schedules however, we quickly forgot afterwards how this pause had held the key to everything about the future in its hand. Only now looking back by this pool do I see that it was after that first lockdown when I began to lead sessions with people to connect with their local territories and create work they then could share with their fellows. Two years later those gatherings became Dark Mountain’s Eight Fires book of practices. And then this column.
Here’s a fact about ponds: you prepare a hole in the ground and fill it with water, and life will appear seemingly out of nowhere: frog spawn and newts, insects and plants.
Here’s a fact about alchemical spaces: you carve out the time and pay attention, and the future you are holding out for will reveal itself out of the blue. One glimmer, one gathering at a time.
Contemplation by ruins
The pond was not the only place I went to in those contemplative times. I also went to the ruins of abbeys and friaries, moored like broken ships on the eroding edges of this east coast. I watched the sun rise from the refectory of Greyfriars Monastery at Dunwich, where the medieval town now lies under the sea. Once a lively port with eight churches, two storm surges in 1286 redirected the river Blyth, and it collapsed slowly into the waves. The monastery had to be rebuilt on higher ground.
I walked across the flowering potato field at the end of the lane to Leiston Abbey (founded in 1182). Originally built down by the sluice at Minsmere, it too was forced out by floods in the 14th century, its massive blocks hauled across the marshes, to be reassembled outside the town.
I wanted to get a sense in these places of how small bands of people had held the light of a belief system in times of darkness and turmoil by their joint attention. Was this what we were attempting in our meetings, as we bore witness to the pandemic in our different countries? It was not a religious faith we were tending but a different culture we sensed could only emerge at a certain depth working as a group.
Ruins are romantic things, and it is easy to be poetic. But feudal Suffolk is a prosaic country. You know these religious centres were seats of power, the corporations of their day, and held most ‘serfs’ in a spiritual lockdown. Even though these ecclesiastical buildings were ransacked in the Reformation, became farms, then retreats, now monuments, some configuration of control is held still in the physical fabric of the place. And you shudder.
So try as I might, I could not find an anchor among these abandoned stones. It’s easy to see how the great houses and castles of England still command the empire, but you rarely get to see the underlying power of the religious orders, or their satellite churches, how they still hold our imaginations in a vice. The flinty aesthetic of turret and steeple with their discordant bells feels familiar, as if they fit the land, so we don’t question their presence. As a result, no matter how modern and secular we might consider ourselves to be, we are still governed by feudal forces, both without and within us, trapping us in history, blocking our access to deep time. Even the words, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, are held captive by their unkind masonry.
Churchyards are one of the few unfenced places in the country where you can go, unbothered by private property or commercial concerns. You can sit with your back against a big carved oak door, out of the wind, and watch the flower year turn: from winter aconites to cowslips to harebells to red-berried yews. You can sit among the dead and feel the ancestral gathering places over which these churches were often built. But inside these buildings, the cold and gloom envelops you. Even in Westleton Church at high summer, where the women of the village bring armfuls of wild greenery from the surrounding meadows and heaths, and cover the windowsills, pulpit and altar with flowers and leaves, twigs and moss, you cannot wait to go back outside into the sun.
Something needs dispelling.
The scent of violets
Years ago when Mark and I first headed full tilt into a dreaming practice, I was often assailed by nightmares set in large aristocratic houses. These places were filled with shrieking party goers, their grand staircases running with blood. I was an unwelcome guest, an intruder on the run, frequently trapped by their menacing architecture. In one of these dreams, I was caught in an empty drawing room and had no way of escape. And then I sensed the presence of a small light in the corner of the room: it was a sweet violet. The flower’s colour extended into the darkness. As I moved towards it, I found myself outside in the garden, and free.
Afterwards, plants would often appear in my dreams, spots of colour or portals of light in these frantic monochrome worlds. They always signalled the way out. We imagine it will be a grand theory or a warrior strategy that will liberate us from our incarcerating history, but sometimes it is a tiny flower that surprises you in the dead of winter.
So on my way home across the muddy fields this January morning, I do not stop by the medieval archway as I pass by but the great lime tree that stands sentinel outside the cloisters. Here at its feet, changing places with the winter cyclamen, are the year’s first sweet violets with their heart-shaped leaves. Without thinking I drop to my knees to inhale their dusky compelling scent.
Here’s a fact about violets, when you kneel down to catch their fragrance you need to hold the memory. Because often when you return to the same flower, it will have evaporated. Now is the time. This what the flowers teach, what the territory teaches, as you move together through the year. You catch eternity, one flower at a time.
If you are a writer or a cook this is when you take out your alchemical jar to distil and lengthen the moment. When you steep a handful of sweet violets in vinegar, the colour and aroma will fill the whole jar. Leave in a cool dark place, and on a windowsill in moonlight (optional). Strain after one to two weeks. Use in a light dressing on salads mixed with the small wild leaves as they appear, one by one from February onwards: purslane, dandelion, jack in the hedge, cleavers, alexanders, mint, hawthorn. Eat, remember, feel welcome.
Shelf
Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighbourhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is we have been startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.
SHELF1 Later this month, I will be starting an occasional series on writing as a metaphysical practice, and Annie Dillard’s slim superlative treatise on the hermetic small room and wrestling with sentences The Writing Life will be our first guidepost. In respect to our alchemical jar, I also know no other writer with such a capacity for pushing the membrane of the quotidian to reveal the deep and existential life beneath. She is a master of the metaphysical shift into the natural world. Each morning is a god, she says.
If you don’t know Dillard’s work, the collection of extracts and essays in The Abundance is a good introduction. Here you find her walking along a creek with an unremitting eye, coming face to face with a weasel, a burning moth, a frog being devoured by a beetle; you go with her into unfamiliar regions: merging with twilight, witnessing a total eclipse, following the footsteps across the ice of a doomed Arctic expedition, the mule tracks of palaeontologist and mystic Teilhard de Chardin in the desert sands of Inner Mongolia; then find yourself running down the snowy street in Pittsburgh with her remembering acutely how it feels to be alive as a child. She grips your attention, like a raptor with its talons, hoisting you into sky, across the bays of Puget Sound, towards the last light flaming on Tinker Mountain, until you and the world are held in ‘a swaddling band of darkness’.
Who is my neighbour? she repeats unremittingly, until all conventional descriptions disappear. What is our neighbourhood? We do not know. It is a mystery. Our petty minds hate these unanswerable questions but our deep still self rejoices to be immersed in them, to be astonished. We wait by the pond. The trees reveal themselves. We are not alone.
COMING UP! At the end of this month I am going to London to give a talk about wild kinship, how creative work with a local territory can act as an anchor and gathering place in times of collapse. There will be a workshop the following morning organised by the Leytonstone Library for Change. We’re heading out into the Wanstead Flats and returning to share encounters, following the track set in Eight Fires. So if any city-dwelling readers would like to come here are the details. It is a donation based event and there will be books for sale afterwards. It would be lovely to see you. Happy new year everyone!
For new subscribers: The Shelf forms a regular part of these posts where I introduce a book that has inspired this aspect of the Red Tent practice (see earlier posts for references).
Ah. The paying attention to the small things in lockdown. I did exactly that. During that April of that first lockdown I began a daily meditational walk along the shore in Hove. Inspired by the Siberian story of Old Kitna and the Wolf as told to us by Martin Shaw, and his own 101 step practice of sitting in the woods at dusk, I began a 101 day morning walk. It was transformational, as I recorded all the small things I observed, both externally and internally, on the walk. I found myself creating a Salty Temple (an old groyne people used as a small fishing pier) exposed at low tide, where I began to offer libations. This practice culminated on an overnight sit, and Utiseta, on a bronze age barrow on Newtimber Hill, above Saddlescombe Farm, where I had attended your workshop on sitting with nature and observing, a few years before.
I kept a daily diary of everything that arose on that walk. At some point it will become a small book. It was a transformational and creative journey as the world grapples with the chaos and restrictions that the pandemic wrought. At the end of the overnight sit, I saw the Isle of Wight gleaming on the horizon, with the Eye of the Dragon lit up in the chalk cliffs by the morning sun. This led me into dowsing parts of the Spine of Albion ley lines, which runs through several ruined houses and monasteries in the South. One of these was Titchfield Abbey, which also possesses a dark foreboding energy. It was there just a week after my sit, I was locked in the grounds on a hot late afternoon and not fancying spending the night there, had to call the fire brigade to rescue me!
Oh, if you don't know Dillard's two slim books: Holy the Firm and Teaching a Stone to Talk, you might try to find them. A strange and marvelous the both of them ...