I must admit to feeling disheartened in the run up to another COP, where the oil and gas companies seem to be seeing the talks as an opportunity to do business, rather than prioritise moving to cheaper and cleaner and more local alternatives. The powers that be sometimes seem especially powerful.
So here’s a tiny, smaller-than-David-vs-Goliath idea which is currently happening in my drive. Just in case any of you good readers feel similarly, and are looking for small but meaningful actions. There’s a lot of us who care, who want to leave the world in as good a state as we can. So, rather than despairing over what isn’t happening, here’s something that is. Mighty oaks from little acorns and all that…..
It all started a couple of weeks ago, when my husband came across one of our old neighbours digging tiny tree seedlings out of a council flowerbed. Unsuprisingly, he asked her what she was doing. She replied that a friend of hers had two acres she was trying to replant as woodland, and was looking for trees. Now, I express unease on a regular basis about the number of tree seed- and saplings I pull out of our garden. The squirrels are very keen on planting nuts, which germinate remarkably well for instance….. So, he mentioned it to me, and I got in touch with the lady with the two acres. I dug out all the readily available saplings, and began to collect them from other people. The first load of about 100 trees went to her, and to someone else who has twelve acres they’re rewilding.
I wondered if other people might have spare trees in their garden, so emailed my friends at Transition Woodbridge, who passed the message on. Trees are arriving most days, and another person has expressed a need for small native trees, especially ones suitable for growing in a hedge. Another friend also has a number of oaks springing up in her allotment. So we have more sources of trees, and more places where they can go. It’s always good when actions become collective, when people gather together and all do the little bit they can.
Now, who knows where this will go, but for now, I reckon we’ve easily been able to provide a new home for getting on for 200 infant trees. That’s not nothing. That is something. It’s food for insects and birds, it’s shelter, it’s improved soil fertility and water management, it’s less carbon and more oxygen. It’s one in the eye for despair, too.
So, here’s to taking the small actions we can. You never know where they might lead. In 100 years from now, those nine tiny oaks might be home to many creatures, having a profoundly positive impact on soil, air and water …. And carbon. Nearly all life on the planet is carbon based, after all.
The practice of wandering – often around the garden – contines to be a a helpful one for me, quieting and contemplative. The practice of standing still and looking, too. Quite a lot of apparent “nothing” seems to be fertile ground, after all. Something catches my attention, as if it is saying: ‘look, here is something, a marvel, a meaning, a glimpse of beauty’. I am coming to think they are happening all the time, and what makes the difference is my openness to seeing, hearing and knowing them.
And so, when the sun broke through after the rain, I went outside, and sat on my coat, and looked. Some distance across the lawn, I saw a bright red light, flashing, and, curious, saw a drop of rain acting as a prism. I watched it for as long as the angle of light made it shine with colour. It called to mind two ancient stories – the burning bush, and the flood – from the Hebrew Scriptures. How the world is full of epiphanies. And again, I was in awe of the way the natural world – of earth and fire, water and air – invites us to listen, to pay attention, to wonder.
A solitary shining drop
Just now, I saw the sun catching a raindrop as it rolled so slowly down a sedum stem, fleshy and green.
It shone through red, rich, neon and ruby, flashing as the stem swayed in the breeze, taking the drop through that one ray of light, back and forth.
Then it suddenly changed to the dazzling blue of cobalt and lapis lazuli – oh, heavenly blue. Heavenly blue.
Just now, for a moment, this treasure made of light and rain, this solitary shining drop becomes a tiny shard of promise, a slim fragment of the arc that holds the sun and the rain.
It all speaks. All speaks. In the mind’s quiet, and in a flash of brilliance that turns your head. A gentle whisper and a burning bush, both. A drop and a rainbow. The world shines with meaning, murmuring, as the green earth is drenched by sun and rain.
I shared a poem with you last week – What the space holds. Writing that poem reminded me of the extraordinary Matisse cut-outs, imagining the negative spaces left when his scissors had finished thier task. I realised that I’d never shared with you a poem I wrote about those works…..
Tate Modern in London had a very beautiful exhibition some years ago, in 2014, of these late and astonishing cut-outs. I was deeply moved by what we saw and experienced. You can still buy the catalogue from The Tate – and other places too – if you’re interested. As ever, as a book that accompanies a major exhibition, it is a revealing and insightful exploration of the work.
A thing that struck me was the contrast between the photos of the frail but engrossed artist, towards the end of his life, and the vibrant, joyful celebration of life itself that the cut-outs embodied. The vitatlity of the art he created sang from the walls. Finding it hard to make art in the ways he had before, he developed this extraordinary technique to transform his relatively confined spaces into a paradise of form and colour.
I felt the deep wisdom of this response, this openness to beauty, to nature, to life as a whole. It seemed to offer a brightness that could illuminate our days.
Henri Matisse working on paper cut out. Undated photo. Getty images
Matisse Cut-Outs
The rooms are thick and warm with people looking, in reverence. There is a hush as we move like pilgrims through doorways and spaces full of quiet light.
There are photographs of you, in bed, or tucked in a chair, old and crumpled. Yet, in your outstretched hand is that long stick, tipped with charcoal, drawing, drawing, or a curling pile of paper at your feet, unravelling from those black scissors.
When the outside became unreachable you turned your rooms into a garden, with swallows dancing on the walls, and fig leaves, and pomegranates, mermaids and stars. You are covering your walls with bright cut-outs that sway in the warm breeze, lavender and myrtle, while you breathe deep.
This is what you did while pain nagged close, while death grew closer. You made the beauty you could make. You made joy visible. You did not stop – in the shadow of so much destruction, so much war-grief – you kept the charcoal and the scissors moving, an Eden at your ending.
I thought again about this exhibition a few weeks ago when I went to the Lighroom at King’s Cross with my daughter to see David Hockney’s Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away). I loved the way the projections immersed you in the work, especially the Spring pieces he’s been developing using an i-Pad. You felt the power and beauty of the trees bursing into life, the brightness of the green, the froth of the cow-parsley. I bought a book as a souvenir, Spring Cannot be Cancelled, which I’m currently reading. It’s particularly good at capturing the mood of lockdown in his Normandy studio, and the intensity of the observations of the arrival of spring that time of isolation and deep uncertainty generated.
I was wondering whether to couple these two art events together, I do hope Hockney has many more prolific years ahead to enrich us all. I do not mean to suggest that he is an artist at the end of his life. But it seems to me there is something in common between these two artists in the intensity, freedom and joy of their later work. There is a real clear-sightedness and poignancy in the appreciation of beauty, and an urgency too. There is a deep embodied wisdom and wonder which pours through to the viewer.
Welcome back to the blog! Thank you for joining me here in the garden again.
One of the great joys of summer evenings is going outside to look at what’s happening in the warm, long twilights. In particular, I love to look for bats as they tumble and swoop over the long grass, and above the shrubs. Last year, we had a bat recorder in the garden, part of Transition Woodbridge’s wildlife corridors project. It’s fascinating to find out what treasures we have, and to work together to try and encourage more. There was an evening event with feedback, and you can find out a bit more about it here, following the links. I was sad to have missed it, as we were away. But I know there are bats here.
The garden at night is a very different place from in the day, quite mysterious. I’ve been thinking about the many creatures who come to or live in the garden who I don’t know and can’t name. I’m learning all the time, but the more you find out, the more you realise how much you don’t know. I’m learning too not to mind the mystery, to find out what I can but to just enjoy the beauty and variety of creatures we get to see, and hear. To notice the detail and the behaviour of creatures that may in time help me to find out what they are, but now the noticing is enough, and a real source of delight. We know the muntjak and the fox, and a hedgehog from time to time, are there at night, we hear an owl and know there are mice, and probably voles, but the unknown creatures bring something special to the experience of being in the garden too, Not rushing to id everything, but instead being open to observe with awe, is something I’m coming to love. You don’t need to know what things are called to appreciate them. You can also do your own naming!
So this theme, of unknown and unnamed things, begins to unfold in this poem. I think there might be a few more pieces exploring this way of seeing too.
I don’t have the tech for night-time photography, so the words will have to do.
Unknown June twilight 10 o’clock
We went outside to look for bats, up against the navy and turquoise sky, up among the slick sycamore leaves, up above the long grass where pale moths flutter.
We waited in the thickening dark, quieting, and then saw a black shape twisting and swooping amongst the other night-flyers – a heavy beetle lumbering, ghost-moths, silver gnats.
In the day, all can seem sweetness and light. The smell of roses and lilies hanging in the soft air. Our own familiar world, we can think.
But now, darkness reaches closer than our outstretched fingertips. The bat flies overhead, joined by another, and another, and we hear sounds too down in the long grass down in the deep cover of the borders. A rustling and a moving that grows louder as the space is transfigured by darkness, strange creatures blooming in the imagination, unknown and unnamed.
As looking up again, I see the gathering stars sometimes obscured by stretched and fluttering wings. There is so much unknown to me, so many names have never been on my lips. The quietness of unknowing is upon me, even as
I seek to learn. And I find I am discovering, mainly, what it is to live in wonder, to walk slowly, and in awe.
Last month we took a few days to visit Norfolk, staying by the Wash. UK viewers of Winter Watch and others may have seen some awe-inspiring film of one of the UK’s greatest wildlife events – sometimes called the Snettisham Spectacular. Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to see it for yourself. We decided we’d go and try and catch this sight, when a very high tide drives the birds off the mix of saltmarsh and water, into the air in huge flocks, and down into lagoons cared for by the RSPB. Their website (linked above) will help you get a taste of what its like, as well as some information about when these high tides happen.
Of course, there are never any guarantees with nature, but we got up very early and went to Snettisham in the dark, on a cold February morning, full of anticipation. I’d decided on flasks of coffee – which turned out to be an excellent idea! It was the most moving experience, deeply awe-inspiring, to see a landscape so full of life, and the wildness behaving freely as it should. I am sure that there have been times when there were more birds, and more wild, here, but it was nonetheless a glimpse of a more beautiful world, the world closer to how it should and can be.
You may also be aware that this precious landscape is vulnerable, and a new development could have a huge impact. If you want to find out more about that, you could begin here.
I wanted to try and capture the beauty of what we saw, and also the depth of experience that aroused in us and the others perhaps who were gathered there, and so this poem recounts the journey through the dark, and into the dawn-light of this beautiful sight.
Out in the Wash-marsh, the dark-before-dawn, we walked uncertainly, deeper in, listening warily for water sounds, mud sounds, as we heard, out on our right, the loudness of bird and tide. Restless, growing, imminent.
The path seemed so long in the dark, unknowing and unseeing as we were. On and on until at last we came out of hedge-shadows and reed rustles, out on the open bank of shingle, with a chill wind blowing, with the dark softening into the grey of mist and ice-fret, as out of the greyness emerged a gathering crowd, moving, looking, watching that density of black birds emerging too, out there on the mudbanks and sandbanks, crowding as the water was rising, All prickling with anticipation, all readying for flight.
Through a lens you could see the black backs of oystercatchers, tens of thousands, all facing one way, bright beaks aligned like many compasses.
And further out, paler knots, rippling over the shrinking land, their voices sounding together as water lapped and lapped ever deeper, full of fish washed in on this rapid tide, followed by the hungry seals, heads up, and hunting.
The bird noise grows, and the waders begin their great lift, A few at first, tip toed, up and down like dancers performing the perfect jete. Then, as waves pour over their islands and there is no room for all these birds,
They lift and stay lifted, from the edges, like a great cloth, swirling now above fast running water rilled with small waves.
And then the oystercatchers begin to pour like dark smoke, like sentient smoke, as one, all to the right, pour down into the lagoons behind us.
While the knots, catching the rising light, rise too, turning pale now, loud with cries and loud too with wings, like a great crowd running joyously, like a shining cloud swirling in the wind but with mind, with being, with will, a great pale creature rustling and winding through the air over us, close and low, and then down in a whispering snake’s head behind.
And again, and again, rise up more swirls of birds, faster and wider by the tens of thousands, of wings all together, birds turning together, a miracle of unity,
As wings beat like hurried feet as more people rush to look up, and the waves take more and more ground from under us all.
And I cannot tell you what joy, what exultation – And I write from longing to tell you what joy, what exultation, we humans, standing, feel in this wide and wild abundance, this wild and wide abandon. This deep unity, this wide-wild-eyed seeing into the communion of things.
As a sudden sound is added even to all this loud crescendo, like thunder, like jets,
The rise and beating of great wings – pink footed geese beyond number, beyond measure,
filling the sky with clouds of moving birds, spinning fast now into great skeins that wind over the deep distance, loud and louder bright on the dawn,
Bright with the wonder of wings lifting, Bright in this new, steady, giddying light. A light that washes through us all A light that holds us all As dawn breaks us wide open.
I hope this gives you a glimpse of how beautiful a sight it was, and how transformative.
Yesterday evening I had the great privilege of reading this poem to open a series of talks organised by the Woodbridge Climate Action Centre. Local friends, tickets are free, and are going fast. The series is called Regenerating Living Landscapes, Working with Nature.
It is possible that a recording of last night’s event may become available. If it does, I’ll make sure there’s a link to it here.
19th May Note: As you can see from the list above, tonight is the last talk in the series. Once again I’m delighted to have been asked to read something, and the poem I’m going to read is A Good Place, which is also on this blog. As usual, click through to read it.
Hello again! Thank you so much for joining me here. I’ve been taking a break from blogging, if not from writing, for a few winter months. But as the days are lengthening and the sap is rising I’m emerging from winter hibernation by the fire.
Yesterday, for #International Women’s Day, I joined some of the wonderful women and men who make our small town such a special place. We’d been invited by Counsellor Caroline Page, who organised the very special gathering despite seriously failing health. There was cake and poetry, an old wind-up gramaphone, and Suffragette colours – a celebration of women who had lived in the town in years gone by as well as those we know and love today. It was full of life and joy and friendship. Many people shared, and I hope to be able to put a link up in time to more details about the poems and stories that we read and heard together.
That morning, I’d been watching the pigeons in the trees in front of our house – a remnant of an ancient hedgerow we’re gradually restoring – and took inspiration from their eagerness and their clatter. So although this is not a poem about women, it’s a poem about life, for all of us I hope, and the awaking of spring. It was my contribution to the feast.
I’m sharing it as part of my inclination to awaken and to clatter, to be hungry for spring and for life. I hope you enjoy it.
Pigeons in the blossom – Early March
Now that the cherry plum is blossoming – hedgerows white and frothy, flowers pale, bark dark –
pigeons come through the grey sky, clattering as they land opposite my window, their collars brighter than the blossom where they perch and peck.
Sometimes one, often more – armfuls – they balance across the scrubby tree like vintage decorations, nodding their blushed heads hungrily, pecking so many buds.
The top of the tree is almost stripped bare – no fruit high up then, no precarious balancing on shaky ladders in the summer to come.
Lower, thinner, branches are tested again and again by fat feasting pigeons, hungry for rich bitterness.
I feel inclined to join them, to taste that blossom too. I know the hunger for spring, bone-cold and weary as I am. And I am coming to see their wisdom as I too feel the urge to awaken and to clatter, to feast on life with its bright blossom, its green buds, again and again.
Pigeons seem to be a bit of a theme. Not the most popular bird, I know, but I do enjoy watching them. I do hope to be an equal opportunities appreciator of nature, and to celebrate all the creatures who share this patch of garden wild.
Here’s a few more poems, if you’d like to read on.
This is a poem, in two parts, drawing on my morning practice of yoga in the garden. It’s patchy at this time of year, depending on rain, and sometimes cold, but there are some mornings where you catch a break in the changing weather, and know why this is a good way to begin.
I took no photos at the time, being lost – or found – in the moment, and so I include for you here some other pictures filled with light, and dark, hoping they will fill your eyes with something good. This morning, as I breathed in the light and the air, I was aware of gratitude rising within me, gifted to me. I know that American friends are turning their attention to Thanksgiving at this time of year, and so, even as winter begins its approach, I am reminded to hold on to the practice of gratitude in darkening days.
I wasn’t sure quite where to go with this poem. There were two things – the experience of suddenly becoming aware of the beauty of the sky – and that beauty itself. So I’ve noodled around with it until it sits in two parts. So, this is where it is at the moment.
On looking up
So this is how it was, this morning: Early, feet bare on cold grass, I raised my head, stretched my arms, and as I did so, I remembered to look up – to open my eyes wide. I remembered to took up and breathe in deep and full, breathe in that cool morning air, early, before the smell of road runs through it.
Or maybe, it was more like this: Raising my head, stretching my arms, breathing deep of the cold clear air, my mind beginning to steady and settle, my eyes opened – all at once – to the strange dazzling luminosity of the sky. And that sight filled me as surely as the cold air. For a moment, hands high, my smile broke open as wide as my gaze, open as it was to this sky.
Sky as dizzying, vertiginous depth, and falling. Sky, too, as ever-present wonder, and catching. I do not know which it was, but I know that the beauty of it fills me, nourishes me, changes me. And I am thankful.
******
For in looking up, I saw the sky’s unknowable dizzying depths, its many layers, its films of light moving across each other, and for a moment I held a cool breath in wonder, and in looking, and what felt like falling.
Highest, or deepest, the moon, partial and pale, and floating beyond the crumpled white-blue linen of high clouds and new sky. And below, moving fast across them, hurried and bright, the rapid soft pink and orange of clouds blowing in from the north.
And holding up my gaze with each deepening breath I see, below the clouds, how the dark lines of birds begin their overflight. Gulls, risen from their night-roost on the river, coming inland to forage in harrowed field, overflowing bins, wherever they find what they need. And below them, the crowd of starlings, chattering, still holding a loose shape of past murmurations, trailing after from their hushing reedbeds.
Each layer of sky lower, closer, faster, sliding against each other in wild reckless beauty as my body fills with north wind, lungs as cool as fresh water on a summers day. The morning beginning at one with these things, with joy in these things, with yes to these things, with thankfulness for all these daily wondrous things.
The river is quieter in the summer – at least, it’s quieter for birds. It is busy with us humans loving and enjoying sailing and swimming and rowing and all the other things which bring us onto and into the river. There’s been much going on too about protecting the river, and I was part of an event a little while ago where we celebrated and spoke up for our river, which is the lifeblood of the town and its people, as well as all the other communities of creatures within and around it. You can read a little more about all this here if you would wish.
Photo by Lorraine Ruth Leach, Save the Deben
But, this is a poem about those birds, mainly the waders, who are far away to the north all summer. It’s so good when begin to return, as they do now and all through the shortening days. The lowlands of the east are a haven for so many migrating birds, and many are working to protect and enhance the wild places that shelter them. Just this week, the Suffolk Wildlife Trust have announced very exciting plans for rewilding part of the Deben’s watershed – Martlesham Wilds. You can read about that here.
Over the long and beautiful days of summer, I miss the winter birds – the godwits and the lapwings and the curlews and the redshanks, and so many others. I feel so honoured to live in a place blessed by their presence, by their return year after year. It’s so precious, and precarious. So here is a poem that rose up as I leaned on the flood defences, and watched the sky and the mud, and greeted the homecoming birds.
Homecoming
Oh, the waders are returning – swooping now over the water, their wings and tails flashed with white against the slow dark shimmer of river and mud.
How good to see them again, to hear them again, their plaintive calls rising like long echoes of winter, of the far north where they have been all summer long.
The godwits have their heads down now, probing river-mud for worms – again and again, hungry, windblown, wings aching with effort of flight across open, chilling seas, exhausted and home at last, jabbing and jabbing with their strong beaks for worms that have been quiet all summer, deep down, low with heat and drought.
How I have missed them, with their cries and angled flight, and as the days darken, it feels now as it does when old friends return, and we share a table together, feasting and talking long into the gathering night, together, and content.
Sitting in the garden in the late afternoon today – the Summer Solstice – I watched the daisies in the sun and the breeze. Here they are.
Midsummer daisies
Midsummer – and the tall daisies are full of light, nodding and glowing, glowing and nodding, saying yes, it seems, to all that is.
Simplicity – to receive the light and shine out in turn. To have roots in the dark earth, in the damp earth and to shine like this – with a purity of brightness, and such depth of yellow, while swaying, like this, in the breeze.
Perhaps it is so – simply to be is holy, to receive and to give is enough, this longest of days.
Alchemy – for surely it is a glory, and a wonder, to turn earth and damp and light into this brightness, this daily beauty, shining like the distant sun here, in this shady place, beneath my apple tree.
I’m with Mary Oliver – each morning I get up and hurry over the damp grass to see what has begun to open in the morning light. I love her poem Peonies, and this poem of mine pays tribute to it.
My peony did not open with the morning. This beauty waited, waited until the sun was high and warm before unwrapping itself.
And I had waited for two years since planting. And waited while the bud was closed. And then, in the space of a few hours, everything changed.
Peony
Today, I watched as a new peony opened – I had planted a row of them, and now, after two years, this – the wondrous first flower unwraps itself. Slowly.
And oh, how dark, how perfect. Red velvet cake, chocolate, a rich eggy heart of soft anthers waiting for the already waiting bees.
Three hours ago it was bud, and now, this heart is open, warming in the golden sun. And still, others wait to put out their own flowers for there is more, still more, to come.
And each day, then, the question – What astonishing thing will unfold for you today, and unfold in you today?
What gift can be given, and received? For all the world, and you within the world, is full of such wonders – sweetness for ants, clover in the unmown grass thick with the darkness of bees.
And this flower, now, with its beauty both before you and within you – for they are the same, know they are the same – glowing deep in the ripening light.
Experimental mowing/unmowing pattern, beloved of bees.
Andrea Skevington 