Zenith

Gathering the materia for an alchemical practice

Midsummer greetings all! The sun has been blazing here and with the fires stoked what better moment to begin compiling the ingredients of this stovetop venture. On the night of summer solstice, the zenith of the year, our San Pedro cactus, recovered from its crash to the ground last summer, brought out an array of huge fragrant flowers, and, as I sat in the dawn beside them, I realised I had to start again somewhere …

Self-portrait with cactus: Mark and San Pedro flower, Reydon, Suffolk

GOTTA MOVE, GOTTA GET UP, gotta keep going, going faster : open the windows, unlock the door, water the garden, check for slugs, feed the birds, pack the books; it’s five am and work is piling up; hurry, get dressed, do the washing up, shake the rug, eat breakfast, open the computer, read the emails, edit the docs, fill the spreadsheets, check the bank accounts … it’s six am and the drive will keep on relentlessly through the day, until I stop. Because there is always more to do, always late, always behind schedule, the house, the garden, the car, the job, always demanding attention, fixing, cleaning, trimming, strimming, filling up, checking, answering …

I’m sitting in the door of the red tent that almost three years ago opened this column. It’s faded now with a hole in the roof but it’s still here at the bottom of the ragamuffin garden under the white buddleia, and I am still here, similarly having seen better days, deliberately breaking the drive that holds me and everyone in the maw of a machine, deliberating resisting the furies and grief that threaten to tip the day into disorder, the unseen forces that are not always mine …

Breathe, Open. Listen. Feel your feet. Feel your heart.

Sky, long grass, woodpecker, sun rising, breeze…

It’s is not a feel-good moment, a well-being moment, a meditation, it’s an open-eyed practice. The drive wants me to go back inside, get to work, go faster, but I am tapping into something else, deeper, slower, more sustained than the urges of the will, or the nagging of thought, or any ravishing sorrow. The shift does make me ‘feel better’, feel more connected, at home, but that is not why I do it.

Thirty years ago a man spoke to to me in a bar in Quito and told me: ‘There are two kinds of person on the Earth, ‘One is here for the beer, and the other is here for something else.’

Are you here for the beer, or here for something else?

Something else is what this alchemical practice is all about. I’ve called this book project, back-burner. Because most of our lives, our real selves are lived on hold: the front burner demands all our attention and keeps the heart and soul at bay, the ‘kitchen’ work that would change the world. The practice makes time and space in a world engineered for there to be neither time nor space for anything beside the drive and the sorrows it causes. You make the shift for the something else to come through, and not just for yourself.

I went to the Americas at summer solstice 1991, because I had reached the zenith of my beer-loving city life, thereafter everything would be about transformation. Instead of writing about glamour, I would be writing about the beauty of the Earth, and what it was like to go through the wringer to get there. I didn’t know that at the time. I was heady with the joy and freedom of leaving deadlines and a dreary crowded London behind, travelling to unknown places, exploring vast and beautiful inner and outer territories alongside Mark. When I met the man in the bar, we were about to go to a place called Madre Tierra in the south of Ecuador, and meet a plant called San Pedro, an encounter that would alter the course of both our lives.

The shift, the move from back-burner to front, can only come with a decision to ‘get up and do something different’. Sometimes this begins with a decision to leave your old life and go ‘walkabout’, sometimes, with a change of partners, house or desk. But however you have altered your outer circumstances, at some point you have to go home to your own heart and soul, the purpose of your being on Earth – even when you don’t want to. This inner return journey starts with another decision. Which as we found with this luminous cactus means, decades later, you have to loop back to the beginning where it all started.

This Red Tent column began with the plant that sparked our own real kitchen work. Here is the original story for those who haven’t read it yet or perhaps for others, as a reminder…

A taste of heaven on Earth: a cup of lime flower tea, July, Suffolk.

Materia

The process of alchemy famously has three stages (or sometimes four), the nigredo, the albedo and the rubedo. The Red Tent has been principally shaped by the solarising, completing forces of rubedo. But cooking can only happen if you have materials to cook with, and unearthing that materia is the first step of the nigredo: a store cupboard, not only of the untempered, difficult things you have experienced but the sweet ones that keep you going, that remind you and everyone else what the point of life is, the point of your life. You make the move to access the store, because your life in this present moment has become flat and meaningless, a chore, and you know you need that something else, buried in a time you have almost forgotten.

The original journey with San Pedro began with a vision. And it has taken me over thirty years to realise that the instruction revealed within it is a decision you make every day: as I looked out into the sacred valley, I saw everything…

… illuminated in the most beautiful colours. Everything is moving and converging in a vibrant pristine state, and you are beholding the harmony and beauty of all things under the morning sun – the breeze moving the green papaya trees, the sound of the women washing clothes down by the river, the donkey laughing on the hill, the turkeys talking as they pass by, the clouds passing by the mountains, reflecting everything below them. It is like a song that ripples in endless waves through the valley. Underneath this song you can hear the Earth as a great heart beating and everything is in rhythm with this beat. You see this heart like a giant queen bee, see how all living beings bring the fruits of their collective labours, the sweet nectar of their gathered lives, home to this rainbow-coloured core that is also the core of yourself – your heart. Everything is made of the slanting hexagonal cells of a honeycomb – leaf, wind, feather, stone, your skin. You see the mountains take the forms of ancestral beings. One is shaped like a man’s head, turned upwards to face the sky, which radiates an extraordinary light that dances with the movement and sound and forms of the green valley.

– from Bush School, 52 Flowers That Shook My World

At the zenith of the solar year the flowers everywhere exude their sweet fragrance into the air, and this midsummer week in the intense heat, I went out to visit them – lime flowers in the woods, bell heather on the heath, the vipers bugloss on the roadside, white clover on the path to the sea. Thousands of bees were humming around them, gathering nectar and pollen – and that’s when I knew it was time: everything begins again when you remember the original instruction.

The journey with San Pedro shifted that day to seeing where that harmony was disrupted and out of alignment with the human visitors to the valley, but it began by seeing its true state. So that is the core of this practice, going ‘back’ to seeing yourself and the Earth in its true state. The decision to make the shift of perception, the something else, is where it begins.

This book is about alchemy, going through the wringer to get to that state, because the sweetness only comes with work, as every cook, every bee knows: the point of cooking is the feast, the point of gathering is the store. You do this because life has to be shared, to be beautiful, remembered, to make sense. That’s what the ancestors told us when we went to the Americas. As I sat this solstice before the San Pedro, a solitary bumble bee making its chaotic way into an unfamiliar flower, I remembered that in spite of the drive, in spite of the griefs that rock me each day, in spite of the dereliction of Sizewell, the flowers are still beautiful and I am still here, keeping vigil beside them, storing up these sweet moments, for life.

That’s the move from the back-burner to the front. I can’t promise you poetry, or enlightenment, but I can provide some tools for a kitchen mesa, a batterie de cuisine to help find the language of your own soul and heart, to share some of the plants, places and people, who have shaped this practice to see and love this Earth and ourselves within it not least my old companero Mark who reminds me every day of the heart’s ineffable ability to keep self-amused, light and celebratory, come what may.

(left) Mark trying it on, Give and Take Day, Communty Centre, Bungay; (centre) Spring Wellbeing Walk,St Mary's Churchyard, Bungay; (right) with 'carnival brolly', umbrella upcycling workshop, Norwich