EARTHLINES: holding a door open for the ancestors

"We stand for a land ethic: for real and deep connections to the land and to places, their inhabitants (human and nonhuman) and their stories. And so we stand for a culture which respects and values place and a sense of belonging to place— for digging in, and digging deep." This is one of the tenets of Earthlines a magazine that explores the complex relationships with nature. Now in its fifth Spring edition, this is the Life in Transition column I wrote for their winter issue as the year turned:

I am in a car, a European estate from the 1960’s in a grass-covered car park. The car won’t start - it  doesn’t “click”. “Oh, it’s still in gear.” I say out loud. When I shift out of gear it starts. Then I realise there are no brakes and I am skedaddling around the car park, out of control..

It’s at that point I notice there is a full moon in the sky about ten times the size of an ordinary moon. I manage to stop the car to look at it. As I stare at the sky a huge black woman comes out from the bushes. She stands before me: “What about your obligations?” she demands “The dog and the cockroach."

This was a dream I once had many years ago, when I was working on a project called The Earth Dreaming Bank. We asked questions in the dialogue practice that followed the dream, as we always did each morning: why was she not red? Why was the moon so large? What did it mean that I had to get into neutral to start the car? And why on awakening, did I feel so light, after months of feeling drained and disturbed?

The ancestor dream was a reminder: it was personal but it was also collective. A vocative dream that told us: you are in charge of the gears but you are not driving the car. Fossil fuel is driving the car, millions and millions of ancestral trees; millions and millions of lives lived on earth. The energy that is coming through time, that runs through your body, through your intelligence, is from the millions and millions of beings who have lived through time: the ones who went before. Your obligations are to them. You need to remember what you are doing here. 

Second Spring - Arizona 2002

In the late summer the fierce heat of the desert brings huge towering clouds from the south. Animals and plants endure the heat and wait for the rain to replenish them. The clouds advance like great beasts, throwing down curtains of water. At night rainbow lightning dances across the skies and dry washes roar suddenly in the darkness. This second spring is where the regenerative power of this desert land lies. These are the months when the Pima and Tohono O’Odham and Hopi people plant their seeds and sing to them and to the clouds. These rains bring forth the pumpkins, the beans and squash that feed their people. Sometimes the seeds of a new time lie deep buried within us, in the secret places, in the sacred places, where the ancestors planted them, and we are just waiting for a certain kind of song and right condition for them to break open. 

The dreaming practice gave us keys about living in time - big time, deep time - a present in which all past and all future is contained. The desert house was our crucible, in the rainy season, in a big land, in the year 2001. What is our obligation? I found working with this dream that my obligation was to the ancestral earth. It was not to hold the unbearable heaviness of human history, but to remember how it had been originally, to live in these mud and straw places, in these round houses, with the storms all around, with this intensity, with these growing plants. To live in the rhythm of time, to love the place though I never owned it. 

It’s a common assumption that only indigenous people have access to the ancestors. That somehow, our link to them has gone - indeed if civilised people had them at all. We scrabble self-importantly looking up our family trees, trying to find a link to the powerful of the land through our violent history, a castle, battlefields, our properties. But none of this helps us belong to the earth, or find meaning in a world held to ransom by a ticking clock. 

What brings meaning are “the ones who have gone before” the primordial beings that form the bones and breath of the earth, its rocks and rivers and sky. 

Our bones, your bones, our sky, your mind, our trees, your fingers, our water, your blood. 

What the dream reminded us was there is a primal place inside us that remembers a time where feeling was instructive to our beings. It’s a sense you sometimes get by rivers, with the desert rains advancing, or walking down the lane in moonlight. That big moon was a doorway. When you go through the ancestor moon you remember everything. It is the doorway of memory. You are no longer fixed in clock time. You get to a sense of belonging that doesn’t square with civilisation, or calendars. 

Nobody likes to go through this memory moon, because it demands your feeling and losing control, all of which terrifies the rational mind. You have to face the personal and collective forgetting that is kept in the moon’s gravity. Because you realise we have put the best of ourselves out with the trash, and what we have now is the life of a dog and a cockroach. A subservient and a scavenger existence in a technological cityworld. 

Playing for Time - London 2012 

 In a dark room a voice is telling me about the caves at Lascaux and about the menhirs, markers of prehistoric time, that stand on a windy cliff in Corsica. This is an exhibition based on the work of John Berger and these recordings are from a performance conducted underground in Strand Station in 1999. It’s called The Vertical Line.  

Outside in the corridor I sit down at a typewriter he used to use, which was also my first typewriter. I type: “it is a long time since I used a Lettera 22” and a young man walks past with a bunch of dried stalks in his backpack.  

“Isn’t that wormwood?” I ask him. “Yes,” he laughs. “It’s from the Imperial War Musuem. They don’t used pesticides in their grounds and you can find all kinds of plants there." 

Afterwards I stand at dusk outside Somerset House, a building which once housed all our records, our births and our deaths, and heard the dark river flowing past under Waterloo Bridge. For a moment it was all I was aware of.  A sense of vast and complex time opened: wormwood time, tree time, river time, flint time, in which all the rushing traffic and scurrying 24/7 city world , seemed to disappear. 

The Earth Dreaming Bank was a practice that began in Australia, with a story about a goanna, and it ended in England in 2003. For five years now, I have lived horizontally in time, in this narrow land, and placed my attention on the Transition movement. I’ve focussed on forging a community practice, working in groups, finding ways to be resilient in the face of an uncertain future, in which resources are scarce and an unstable climate challenges us to change our ways dramatically, or face some kind of apocalypse.  

Last autumn I began working with fellow Transitioner, Lucy Neal, on her book about collaborative and transitional arts practice. As we sat in her kitchen, discussing the people who would help shape it, Lucy handed me a ceremonial bowl an Aboriginal woman had given her and something clicked. Remember your obligations. This is where the book begins, I said. The bowl contained chunks of chalk from the downs, some empty honeycomb, and stones from the river bed of the Thames.  

To seek the origin, the ancestor, is to know how to proceed. To go forwards is first to go backwards, which is to know why the ancestors have to be in charge of the car. We want always to go forwards and leave everything behind. But to make changes you have to negotiate with them first. All native people know this, just as they know that all life begins in the dark. But we came into our brave new world, without any such knowledge, or obligation. We devoured millions of ancient trees, buffalo, lakeland birds, arctic creatures, seas of cod, we hounded scores of native peoples, skedaddled over the prairie grasslands and still we have not stopped.  

In the desert you can know how people once lived for thousands of years, with their vast intelligence, their vibrant imaginations, respecting the primal forces that break open the seeds. They waited for the rain, they looked to the moon, because without water they could not live. They knew how to listen for water underneath the ground in a place that was once the sea. They learned the songs of the water and sung them to their seeds, to the clouds that each year banked up around the sky islands. Around their fires they told the stories of the watery ones who came before, who lay down and made the mountains, the rivers, the bones of ourselves, who knew where the water was hidden and who had been here when the moon was ten times the size it is now.  

They knew the black ancestor drives the car.  

 Driving the car 

 I am not a driver, but I am always dreaming of cars. Sometimes I am waiting in a car park, or going very fast down a highway. Often I am blind and have no real control. I have to trust I can see without my eyes. In the dream, nothing is working except the gears. Things only get on track when I listen to the ancestors, then I know what I am doing here and now.   

The ancestors make it all right. They begin everything again, The ancestors don’t live in modern geography, with passports. They are not in this time. They have always been here and will always be. Once they were here when the moon was near and the world was a watery place. We were close once, but then we broke away and became restless, sun-worshippers, in a logos ruled world. We liked to have our adolescent hands on the steering wheel and go where we wanted, come what may. We could get it right, if we just stopped, for a moment and waited. If we held a door open they would come, as they have for thousands of years, in our dreams, in the flickering firelight, in the sound of the rain arriving from the south. We’ll know what to do when we get out of gear. It’s a large debt but it can be repaid.   

This year, as I began working for Playing for Time and the Dark Mountain Project, I remembered the time of waiting a decade ago. I recognised that no matter how smart we were about climate change and peak oil and management systems, only the arts of ourselves, the music and the poetry, connects with the part of our being that knows how to speak with the planet. Only the mythos can break us from our servitude to industrialised time, get into the tempo of our beating heart and find a future that is worth living in. 

Inside each artist is the dancing and storytelling ancestor, the one who sits by the fire and tells us how it once was and must always be. The ancestors are everywhere singing for everyone, in every land, so long as we have the courage to face the moon and remember. They are reminding us of the seed we carry for the future, waiting for the right conditions to break open and flower. A seed for all our relations. They are singing a song that comes through the timelines, through our bones, they are singing the land anew. In the flinty pathways we walk along the coastline, in the gorse-covered sandbanks that were once rivers. In the wind in the leaves, in the starlings gathering above the marshland. The lines on our faces. The hands that type these words. 

For life one is obliged, as I know now, to give back. I am obliged to remember, to write the dream down that I once had in the desert of Arizona. Once there were dances and songs that showed us our obligations to the ancestors, to the animals, to the trees, to the mountains, to the sea. We saw them in the elders’ faces, in their painted limbs, the connection that came down to us though time.  

We haven’t paid for a long time and the debt is long, stretching back through history. Our dreams tell us this. What we have forgotten, what we have thrown away, what we have become. A pack of English hounds thirsting for the wild red fox, a thousand cockroaches ravening in a New York larder.  

No one has said thank you for a very long time. 

Rewilding the Self - Earth Dreaming Bank - a discussion and workshop about the relationship between ancestral dreaming and art will take place at this year's Uncivilisation Festival 

Cars in Arizona (CDC); image from The Vertical Line by John Berger and Simon Burley; 

ROOTS, SHOOTS AND SEEDS: The Spear Carriers

Roots, Shoots and Seeds is a book about the local community food movement, set around the wide arable fields of East Anglia, following the tracks of the crops that grow in these clay and sandy soils, from barley to flax, from rapeseed to potatoes. I began to write this book with my friend and fellow Transitioner, Josiah Meldrum in 2009, and although we were unable to complete and publish the work, our attention set the scene for other food projects, such as the Low Carbon Cookbook and Happy Mondays at the Community Kitchen. Now May has arrived in full force, so has one of Suffolk's most cherished vegetables. In celebration here is a section in praise of the great green spears . . .
 
"There she is," said my father, "Boudicca! Look at her! Formidable!" Craning our necks we looked upwards toward the statue in the darkening sky. A woman on a chariot flew into the night sky above the arch. Boudicca was sacking London, trampling invaders under her spiky wheels. We were travelling back along the red road that runs between the Palace and the Park.

For years the statue at Hyde Park Corner signalled the return to the city, after days and sometimes weeks spent in the countryside. We had, alas, come back, but Boudicca was holding the fort and pointing us in the right direction. Just in case we forgot our way.

In spite of his admiration for barbarians my father was not one of Boudicca’s men. He worked for another woman entirely, a Roman matron who stood blindfold on top of the dome of the Old Bailey. She was a hard taskmistress: the folds of her gown unyielding, her sword exacting, and for all the advocacy he performed in her service there was none of the jubilation he expressed for the warrior Queen of East Anglia. But then my father’s heart was not in the work he did for Justice, it belonged to the country we had just left behind. To a large ragged garden that lay by a marsh, a plot of earth with a wheelbarrow and a spade beside it, apple trees all around and a bare mound that signalled the presence of the greatest of British vegetables, white crowns that lay hidden in the earth: asparagus.

Asparagus is a lily and like all lilies, otherworldly, and keeps its strength in reserves underground. From these rich stores, it bolts through the earth in straight green shoots with purplish heads known as spears in Spring, when it is harvested until midsummer before it branches into its stiff and feathery form and flowers. Like all lilies it is ruled by the moon, the planet of memory, and, in spite of its overtly masculine form, unequivocally the queen of the field. The crowns take years to mature and the spears are time-consuming to pick both in the wild and domesticated state and consequently, though eaten with barbarian fingers, they are always treated with a certain reverence.

When the asparagus arrived my father would appear triumphant in the door and stride towards the kitchen, carrying the spears. The Moment had arrived. At supper we would watch for the signal that meant everyone was allowed to begin eating. He took up position at the end of the table. The napkin flicked. The glass was filled. The asparagus lay steaming on our plates. A spear was lifted dripping with creamy butter, held aloft for dramatic effect, and then, in it went.

Dear God, dear God! exclaimed our father, rolling his eyes upward. Dear god, dear god! we chorused, laughing between our own slippery green mouthfuls.

We did not question why our father always called upon the Almighty when he ate something he loved since he was a devout atheist, however it was how all great foods were addressed. Ordinary foods were quietly and effortlessly dispensed at the other end of the table by my mother, all manner of stews and pies and puddings, but the roast meats of Sunday, game fish, smoked fish, French cheese and most assuredly his own garden vegetables belonged to my father’s end. The ritual and mythology of food belonged to him, all foods that required ceremony, a careful handling of carving knife and fork, a judicious serving, came under his dispensation.

I spent a life-time excusing myself from this dining table, liberating myself from the constraints of its form and hierarchy, forgoing manners, dramatic gesture, napkins and claret, and yet when it comes to asparagus, I still exult.

To gain a true relationship with food, we have to regain a relationship with place, remember the part of ourselves that knows about seeds and earth and rain. Sometimes this memory is secreted in a place we don’t want to go, in the deep earth, down an ancestral path that leads back through time towards a battalion of asparagus marching over the East Anglia fields in the month of May. Our buried treasure.

Ru Litherland, Hackney-born, might have run along Boudicca’s chariot. He is a radical man who grows all manner of vegetables in renovated land in Walthamstow. He says that many who come to enlist in his volunteer army of seed sowers and leaf pickers, fall in with its movements and requirements easily because their old man once had an allotment and grew his own veg. When they come to the land they just know what to do. They have listened to a rhythm and it has somehow got into their bones. I have listened to that rhythm: the chink of spade as it scraped the eastern flint, the shake of grass, the rattle of bean poles in the wind. I once climbed an apple tree and watched the East wind as it ran through the blond marsh grasses of Kent, my eyes scanning the horizon for the distant sea. And below me I listened to the sounds of the garden: tack tack tack.

You could get nostalgic remembering those sounds, but I have learned not to trust nostalgia especially when it comes to fathers and gardens and going back in time. I want to go forwards, taking this sound in my ears, this feeling in my bones, this pungent taste in my mouth, a taste of blood and iron.

* * * *

I stand at the chopping board in the kitchen in the spring evening. Outside the window the apple tree is heavy with blossom. My hands hold a knife, my attention focussed on cutting the woody ends from the asparagus. My left index finger feels for the place to cut and then the right hand slices the spears sharply: tack tack tack. The hands know things the mind does not. You pick up an axe and know without knowing how to chop wood, bake bread, wrap the dead, hoist a sail. When I was 29 a gardener put an egg in my hand. It was warm and smooth. Listen! he said. Tap tap tap: a chick was pecking its way out of its shell into the unimagined vastness of the world. I had been wrapped up in myself, far away from earth and suddenly I was looking into his eyes. “I wanted to get through to you,” he said.

Something stifled in us needs to come alive, break out, remember. We need an encounter with life to do this. My old friend Carol went into the desert when she was 40 years old. Everyone had left her and she had to start again. She sat down in the middle of nowhere and cried for a long time. Then she put her hands into the earth and her hands formed bricks out of the red mud. She built a house with those adobe bricks and then she lived there. Some people put their hands back into the earth and they find themselves weeping or laughing, flooded with feelings they have no names for. Then their hands start searching out roots, pushing seeds, pulling weeds, throwing out flints. Something happens in this moment when your hands take charge of your life: something quiet, unsusceptible to the eye, that thunders inside you and breaks. You think it is your heart. But it’s not. It’s your isolation.

The root to the real world is cut quickly. The forgetting of how to be in nature happens quickly.The diseases that come with the Western diet come quickly. They come to indigenous people and to girls who live too long in cities. Everyone blows up like a balloon, gets diabetes, their hearts fail and their stomach knots. The world of factory food goes too fast for the natural systems of human beings. To survive on this food you have to eat too much and not think about what you are eating. You have to forgo your common sense and the knowledge of your ancestors and fit the requirements of industry in the same unnatural ways that food is processed and homogenised. Somewhere deep inside you shut down. You find yourself gazing up at the actors, the kings and queens at their high tables, and forgetting you are among spear carriers without whom the play is not the play.

I stand at the chopping board, green spears in my hand. Outside the blackbird begin his evening carol. I do not make Victoria sponge or marmalade like my mother. I don’t give dinner parties and sit bejewelled amongst guests, or lay down claret, or cross the Channel to eat raie au beurre noire and Camembert. I don’t dine like a king, like my father, on smoked eel and partridge, I eat like a spear carrier. I know things about food and history my parents’ generation never knew. I know that Boudicca is not Boudicca, but a boy in a war chariot overwhelmed by the angel crowned with olive leaves. A statue to peace erected in 1912 just before the bloodiest battle ever fought began. I know that what we need is not peace but life in our hands, a year filled with great moments. Dear god, dear god! holy food for unbelievers, who don’t worship or go down on their knees but declare their happiness out loud for the fruit of the season: for greengage and rhubarb, for samphire and blackberry, for purple sprouting broccoli and leek.

I don’t take out a cookery book to cook this bundle of asparagus, picked this day in Jack’s fields in Middleton. I will not cover them in hollandaise or adorn them with shavings of truffle or Parmesan. I will not hide my spears inside risottos or a quirky nest of noodles, nor in any manner of grandiloquent dish I once learned to make in my working city kitchen, surrounded by pans and knives and cookery books, my apron hanging on a hook behind the door. Tonight the spears shall take their place on the plate as they emerged from the earth. Naked and green, beside a cut lemon, a small pool of olive oil, sea salt, black pepper. I will serve them in the glasshouse on the blue table. It’s the Moment of the first summer vegetables: new potatoes, broad beans, spinach. A humble dish of vegetables on a great day in May.

Can you sing praises to broad beans and spinach? To a blue kitchen table?

The Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai sings praises to cucumber and scallions:

Times are bad. I take an oath of loyalty to the table

coated with white Formica.

His fellow countryman, the Palestinian poet, Mourid Bougati, instructs us in these times to speak of real things, to hold everything dear. In a world dominated by abstract theorems, by the high-flown rhetoric of empire, by eternal war, to cherish the concrete and the real with words is the radical act of writers and chroniclers. To acknowledge time and place, to engage in the physicial breathing and growing world is radical. Cooking is radical. Tasting the fruit of the earth, knowing where it comes from and whose hands grew it, the name of the grocer and the flower. Holding the spear and walking away from the play, in the opposite direction to Rome.

* * * *

Eventually the stern taskmistress demanded my father work harder and harder, the piles of paper in the study grew higher and higher, and the vegetables in the garden slipped away; my mother got tired and started to buy readymade food. The pies and the stews slipped away. And then they both slipped away. I was alone in a world without the ritual of carving knife and fork. The garden was paved over, earmarked for development. The kitchen fell silent. The wooden spoons lay unused in the drawer. Reluctantly I came down from my apple tree hideout, where I had been observing the wild world for twenty years, keeping a log.

Now what do we do? I said.

Frankenstein has loosed his monster on the world, an industrial chain of hubs and tankers, factories and refineries that devours every living thing in its path, spews out poisons and bad air. He stands in the laboratory mixing cocktails of enzymes and chemicals, cheating time, killing the soil, outside his juggernauts ceaselessly thunder up and down the roads of everywhere, perpetually, silently, the shelves and freezers are filled with food so cheap, so convenient, that the people forget that it is the stuff of life and comes from the earth, emerges in Spring, like the asparagus with the bluebells and the nightingale.

How can anything we do make a difference? How can knowing these facts about food serve us, knowing that Frankenstein has every base covered, is busily stripping the living systems bare, stalking the countryside, spraying the barley field beyond the hedge even now so I have to close the kitchen window not to inhale its noxious drift?

Because when the tractor with its long arms has left the field there is the blackbird singing as dusk falls, because you are still standing by the chopping board and the asparagus is still in your hands. Because you remember the feel of the land in May. The greening of everything. Something went in deep those years ago in the garden and though you are living in a different time you haven’t forgotten the lily crowns that lie for years underneath the soil. Frankenstein tries to make the world forget the deep and slow things, the plants that move according to sun and moon and alchemise life in their root and stem and leaf. He runs on clock time, 24/7 time, on high-drive, in the fast lane, where one day is the same as another and everyone is interchangeable, replaceable, only worthwhile for their ability to feed his monster’s maw.

Under his tutelage whole legions of us fall asleep, lose our minds, forget our names, who we are, what we are doing. But some of us are remembering, singing hymns in praise of radishes and olive trees, not moving from where we live, on deliberate go-slow. Growing lettuces in windowboxes and barrels, on rooftops, reclaiming land, regenerating soil, in the hinterlands and back country, in the cracks of the streets of cities, behind railway stations. Meeting up in halls and backrooms, baking our own bread, stirring the pot. Speaking to each other across tables.

Some of us are returning, carrying our spears. Coming home.

Images: Organic Lea community veg bed; asparagus from local farmer's market (Creative Commons); Jack's Suffolk asparagus with Maple Farm radishes, 2013 (CDC)

52 FLOWERS; Japanese Cherry

south kensington, london 02 

The cherry trees are in bloom all over Kensington. It is a London spring moment, when the city’s ornamental trees burst into flower before anywhere else: golden forsythia, waxy magnolia,  sugary pink almonds. In the parks and private gardens, the bushes and trees hold a grand ball, throwing their gorgeous colours against the white painted houses in the sharp spring air, as the lowly daffodils and narcissi dance beneath their grand Oriental display.

On one of these glorious days I go walking across the parks of London and find myself in South Kensington at a dress shop. I am standing in a changing room wearing an outfit I once beheld in a dream: an elegant jump-suit made of crinkly dark grey material. It is the kind of dress a fashionable extraterrestrial might wear, or a modern Joan of Arc. It fits like a glove. I am amazed by the coincidence. I have always wanted to wear a dress like this. But as I stare into the mirror I am shocked I cannot find myself. “I” have disappeared.  It feels as though the dress is wearing me, and not the other way round. I suddenly feel very uncomfortable.

This warrior outfit has been designed by the visionary Japanese fashion designer, Issey Miyake. Years ago I was invited by Issey Miyake to visit Japan as a honoured guest, with several other  fashion editors from around the world. We were entertained like royalty. I had never been treated so well in the whole of my life. Everything was paid for: our hotel bills, our expenses. When we walked into clothes shops we were told to help ourselves. Beautiful meals were constructed in our honour, elaborate courses based on the theme of autumn, adorned with small maple leaves and twigs. We were chauffeured everywhere, put on luxury trains that took us to all the major cities. We  slept in mountain lodges with paper windows, sat in cedarwood baths, visited red and gold temples.

Meanwhile, as the purpose of the visit, we attended the conference on the future of fashion where Miyake talked eloquently about the earth and the fabrics that demanded such a high price from the natural world - things which at that time I had never considered. The fabrics of Japan are unique, as are their designs. The Japanese attitude towards the material of life is quite different from that of Europe. It has a rigorous abstract aesthetic that Miyake felt was being undermined by the coarser narrative and glamour of the West. This aesthetic is expressed in a myriad ways - from the simplicity of their Zen gardens, to the innovative and elegant way parcels are wrapped, the reverence with which everyone sits underneath the cherry blossom at Springtime. The Japanese are also phenomenal consumers of rainforest wood. Rayon is their principle fashion fabric, so it was apposite that these things were being discussed.

One night in Kyoto we went to a traditional restaurant with various business men.  We sat on the floor and behind each of us kneeled a geisha girl in rigorous attire. Occasionally they would serve us food and pour out sake in perfect silence. Their stiff clothes and their painted faces and submissiveness made me feel quite uncomfortable. All the visitors exchanged glances at each other, not knowing quite how to respond to this part of our show. I am remembering this moment as I stand here in South Kensington in my fashion suit.

No one except a Japanese craftsmen could have created this kind of suit. It is made from the fabric that made Miyake famous in the West. Only Mario Fortuny in the 1920’s had worked with this crinklecut before. Evening dresses that could be squeezed into a small shape in your hand, that never need ironing, that always make you look like a million dollars. The material hugs the body instantly and lends your whole physical being a certain elegance and shape, making you shimmer in the metallic hues of gold, silver, copper, bronze, like a classical statue.

My dress was pewter-coloured, just like my dream. It fitted perfectly. It was not even very expensive. But as I looked at myself, I suddenly felt overcome with something I could not name. When would I wear such a garment? I thought.

It was then that I saw myself in a vision. I was paused on a stair, held in a certain moment. It was the stairway of a grand hotel, and there was a dark man on the dining floor below. There was a place set for me, and he was waiting. It was the moment when he saw me, would then rise, greet me and allow me to sit down.

But I am not that woman. I was never that woman and moreover, I had never wanted to be that woman. This dress was designed for someone who would serve a man, and whom a man would formally make a place for, as she descended the stair, shimmering in all her metallic colours, in all her jewels. There was an ancient agreement between them, except that I have never made it.

“It’s beautiful,” I said to the shop assistant. “But I am going to leave it.”

“It looked good on you,” she said simply.

“Yes,” I said, “I know. But I don’t have any occasion to wear it.”

That was the last time I considered fashion. For years I had worked in this world and known it in so many ways. And now it had suddenly lost all its meaning, all its alllure.

Later I walked home through Holland Park.  There was a peacock amongst the cherries and camellias and as I walked by, he opened his glorious tail. There is such beauty in the world! I thought and was filled with all the excitement of Spring. The cherry tree is an ecstatic tree. Like all the rose trees – apple, hawthorn, almond, plum and all the soft fruit trees - it has a profound effect on the way you feel. Its masses of pink blossom and its autumn-red leaves, give you, as you stand beneath its branches, a great soaring hope and inspiration for life. I have made a tincture of wild cherries, and found that one sip can give you this feeling as well. Its scented bark is a traditional remedy for the lungs, helping you to breathe more freely. Everything about this tree lifts you up, opens things up. When the peacock unfurls his tail of rainbow colour, the blossom of a tree appears at the end of a street, and as you put on a new dress, you feel for a moment transcended. And it is at that moment you find yourself on that imaginal stair.

There is a lot of power in that moment. It is a moment that millons of women fantasise about. That one moment of blossom, where the man is waiting, beholding you, finding you beautiful.

Millions of dresses pour out of the factories all over the East to fulfil that one moment. The geisha moment. It is repeated again and again. Never quite reached, never lived out. Then the tail descends, the bloom fades, the dress doesn’t fit, and you search for another, and then another. 

I am not going to be in that moment.

If we could be beautiful like the peacock, with simplicity. If we could unfold ourselves, each with our own natural beauty. Not just for this one Spring but always. Because our beauty in a cage is not real beauty. It is a glamour, a moment wherein we are stuck and doomed eternally to repeat; beheld by another, but possessing no qualities of our own, except that we adorn and serve some business that is not ours to question. Real beauty is something inner, something deeper, something more lasting. It is in the whole tree, its roots, its branches. And that whole tree has its own mystery. It is intact.

Somewhere miles from here there stands a wild cherry tree in a wood and the tincture I will make from its fruit one year later is delicious, rather like sloe or damson gin. Except I put no sugar in it, so it has an aftertaste of bitter almonds that all roses posses, a taste that lingers on your tongue, long after the fragrance has gone, that is not covered over with artificial sweetness. That taste is prussic acid. It is the poison of the rose.

This poison says that no matter how beautiful you are on the outside, no matter how many dresses you wear, or how many times the man does, or does not wait for you at the bottom of the stair, there is a price to pay, and some day you will have to pay it. That if you are smart you will pay this now. While you can. You will put your dress aside and think about the inside of your being, what treasures lie in your bones, what kind of wild beautiful hope you carry in your cells, what kind of rosy fire that will exalt us all - not just to illuminate a private fantasy, but for real.

doing the spring shift

There it goes again. Booooooooom! 4am, April 20. Bang on time. The bittern is back in the marshes. Gotta be spring out there, right? And yes, finally it is: bursting out of its cherry-plum celandine and alexander seams. I've been tracking it since we went to the woods down at Dunwich in March. First the honeysuckle, then the foxglove, then the odd blue veronica winking along the curb. We checked out wild daffodils on the tumulus and goat willow at East Hill and they were finally in their splendour. I saw my first bumblebee and first butterfly (tortoiseshell) and sat barefoot on the doorstep, prepping veg, face in the sun.

You think it means nothing a shift of season, but after this long, dark and bitter winter Spring feels like a reprieve. We're warm for the first time in months and a feeling of lightness and happiness is flooding the house. At our first Sustainable Bungay wellbeing walk a crew of us walked around Bungay on the first really great sunny day of the year, mapping the streets and green spaces. We met at the community garden and everyone shared their favourite places, the edges of carparks and rivers, the commons, certain streets, trees and  houses.

We set off to visit the now community-owned, Falcon Meadow and  the wonky colourful Bridge Street, once the main thoroughfare and site of the Halloween pumpkin festival. We exchanged our experiences and memories, knowledge about birds, trees, history, delighted at the texture of place - brick, flint, faded wood - the river, alleyways, benches, footpaths, the pattern language of our town and finally ended up at Bungay Tea Rooms, everyone's favourite cafe, where we sat in the garden with tea and chips.

The sun shone gloriously. We felt good. Not just in ourselves, but with each other. Life was harder for all of us, but treasuring the day and this town we share made it seem all right. We mapped out the walks we are going to do this summer too, including swimming down the river Waveney and holding our annual picnic by the shore. And then Mark and I did a manita de gata (cat's paw) tidy of the community garden and delighted in all the green shoots of the herbs and plants that made it through the dark and cold.

Right now in the garden under the budding greengage tree, the coldwater champion of England and fearless Transitioner, Lucy Neal, has established her caravan. We have begun work on the book, Playing for Time and each week over the summer she is coming to stay for three days and we are hammering out the Work in the tiny crucible. Here I am sorting out the hexagonal sections that make up the centre of the book: contributions from the artists, writers and practitioners who gathered at Lumb Bank. Lucy recently wrote about our experiences on the Arts Council blog here:

http://blog.artscouncil.org.uk/blog/arts-council-england-blog/playing-time 

This week we are looking at each of those sections, starting with one that matters more than anything . .

Images: honeysuckle and foxglove in Dunwich Wood, March; arts, culture and wellbeing walk en route to Falcon Meadow, April; in Lucy's caravan; message to Mark at the wild daffodil tumulus!

From the Mourning of the World to Happy Mondays

This year I'm co-curating one of the stages at the Uncivilisation Festival. All manner of poetry, prose and performance will take place on the Woodland Stage, as well as workshops in the woods (programme to appear soon!) When night falls and the fires are lit, the musicians will take over. Amongst them will be singer Marmaduke Dando, who this year has compiled an album of some of wild and uncivilised music associated with the Dark Mountain Project.

From the Mourning of the World features an alternate version of Caesar, recorded specially for the album by Chris Wood, as well as celebrated artists such as Jon Boden, Chris T-T and Bethia Beadman (whose track is a duet with REM’s Mike Mills). 

Like many creative grassroot projects, Dark Mountain funds its annual anthology by crowdsourcing - a kind of community-supported publishing. You order a book (or in this case an LP) by pre-ording a copy, and this in turn pays for the production. Following the trend and in the spirit of celebrating the beautiful and the physicial, From the Mourning of the World will be a 12” double-gatefold vinyl album, with a cover by the wonderful Rima Staines. Check out the crowdfunding page here:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/from-the-mourning-of-the-world.

I'm planning to give a workshop on Earth Dreaming at Unciv this year, and there will be more about this and other creative Transition projects during 2013, from Playing for Time to the new Arts, Culture and Wellbeing group. But right now I've got to proof the upcoming second issue of Transition Free Press and go make nettle pesto and beetroot risotto for our April Happy Mondays at the Community Kitchen. Stay tuned!

Considering Transition community events as cultural and creative acts

Last month as part of the Playing for Time project, a convergence of artists, theatre makers, writers and tutors met at Lumb Bank, the Arvon Foundation's centre in South Yorkshire. We were collecting material that will form the core of the book - the practices and projects of community-led creative action. To help shape the week and to introduce Transition, I mapped out the following events in the light of the work.

The invitation

Dear contributors to Playing for Time,

I am writing a few notes on three Transition events, so you might consider your own projects and practices in the light of one very ordinary Transition initiative.

If you don’t know much about the Transition movement, this is one way of looking at it in action. Every initiative differs according to its town or bio-region, but all of us work from the same premise: to help create resilient communities that can adapt to the shocks of climate change, peak oil and economic downturn. In many ways we are working in preparation for hard times ahead - creating a low-energy future that people might want to live in, rather than fear. And one, for sure, where none of us feels on our own.

I have included links to blog posts about these three events if you would like to check them out later (no pressure!)

Looking forward to working with you all this week.

Best wishes,

Charlotte

Editor

Who we are

Sustainable Bungay is based in a small market town in Suffolk, in the Waveney Valley. We are unfunded and without any formal links to any organisation, or public arts body. None of the people taking part in this initiative would consider themselves artists, or these events we put on as art forms; yet thinking about creative collaboration within the context of Playing for Time, everything we do has strong creative base. We are deliberately forging a new culture for a new time, a culture not made up of operas or fine wine or complex poetry.

Our work comes from necessity, rather than theory: it’s grassroots, vernacular, based on gatherings, rooted in time and place. It doesn’t have a hero writer or diva centre stage, with an audience gazing passively upward, but takes place in a room full of participants, with an organising, often invisible, core. Everyone belongs in this space and time. Everyone has a voice.

In Bungay we all bring something to share and we all take turns. Our events are organised by one to five people and everything else self-organises. We don’t do visionings or have strategies. Most of us learn on the job. None of us are rich or influential. 

We have a core group of 15-20 people with several sub-groups, who have been working together for five years, producing a regular monthly programme of talks, walks, workshops, film showings etc. that are open to all the community to attend. These include a twice-yearly Give and Take Day, monthly Green Drinks, and seasonal celebrations, such as summer picnics and seed, plant and produce swaps. Our activities are based around the local library where we built and maintain a community permaculture garden, and hold many of our meetings.

All these events were photographed and written up afterwards in a series of blogposts. Keeping a record is part of our communications work.

The events

HAPPY MONDAYS at the COMMUNITY KITCHEN: Mexican Fiesta, September 2012

Monthly meal for 50 people, cooked from scratch using local, seasonal and mostly organic produce. £5

Crew: 16 (5 cooks, 2 front of house, 3 servers, 3 set-up/flowers, 3 washers up)

Venue: local community centre

All of our meals have a theme and sometimes this is a country. Last September I directed a meal, based on Mexico (where I once lived) that took place just after Mexican Independence Day. Most of the food was locally sourced, including several kinds of chilli. Our maize, onions and runner beans were from a  local allotment, blackberries from the common, Mexican sunflowers and cosmos from local gardens. 

Our Abundance table was truly abundant, filled with Indian summer sweet corn and chilli plants, tomatoes, peppers, raspberries, apples, garlic etc. Mexico is a great place for convivial gatherings, and this was the theme of my short talk between courses, as well as Beans and their place in a low-carbon diet. We also had a Spanish-singing Transition a capella crew, singing the mariachi standard, Cielito Lindo.

All simple stuff. Yet it’s this attention to detail and celebration of ordinary and beautiful things at your feet and working alongside your fellows that makes such events joyful and satisfying in a way a Hollywood movie never can be.

BUNGAY BEEHIVE DAY July 2012

A daylong “celebration of the honeybee and the flowers they love”, as part of the town’s annual festival, held at Castle Meadow (one of the town commons). Free.

Crew: 16  (one event manager, one stalls manager, 3 cafe organisers, 10 set up and breakdown/stall keepers, one grower of bee-friendly plants)

Activities: stalls, workshops, plant walk, film, talks, cafe, children’s corner

Venue: festival marquee, under the trees and around town

The Bungay Beehive Day is organised by members of Bungay Community Bees - the first community-supported apiculture in the UK. The group keep community hives in different gardens and orchards around the town, teach children about bees, give talks about pollinators to local groups, work with a local nursery to promote bee-friendly plants, build their own top-bar hives, train beekeepers and have bee-related events.

Beehive Day invites several speakers, ranging from the professional (Heidi from the Natural Beekeeping Trust) and amateur (Philip, ex-surgeon and local bumblebee “expert”) to local beekeeping groups and the day includes discussions, a film and readings. The stalls sell honey and organic plants, have demonstration hives, info about pesticides etc. and there is a honey cake competition and a bee-flower walk around the town.

Beehive Day is visited by between 600-800 people, and like other SB events, is self-funded.

BCB also grow their own stock of bee-loving plants and have planted a wild flower meadow, with a local landowner, as part of a “River of Flowers” project around the town.

PLANTS FOR LIFE 2012

A series of knowledge. skill-share and reconnection with nature events, based around a Herbs for Resilience plant medicine bed at the local library. Donations.

Crew: 2 (organiser and event manager)

Venue: community library and courtyard garden

Each year the Library community garden central bed has a different theme and is curated by a different member of the group. In 2010 this was Plants for Bees and Butterflies, this year The Edible Garden. In 2012 the bed was abundant with wild and garden medicine plants, from a huge burdock to stands of tiny thyme flowers.

Each month between eight and forty people came for a talk, walk or workshop on the theme of plants as medicine. Each Plants for Life session featured a guest ‘plant person’ speaker and included medical and lay herbalists, authors, organic and biodynamic growers, and home winemakers.

“We looked at the medicine under the ground as we connected with our roots in January, learned growing tips in February, adopted a herb to focus on for the year in March, walked with weeds in April, heard about hedgerow medicine in May, made midsummer wildflower oils in June, went on a bee and flower walk in July, had our world shaken by 52 flowers in August, made autumn tonic tinctures in September, medicinal wines in October and French tisanes in November.” (Mark Watson)

We tasted, talked, foraged, shared tips and teas and exchanged seeds. Transition medicine is as much about plant knowledge and maintaining well-being, as it is about getting in synch with the living systems - not as a solitary practice but as a communal one.  

Images: creatures made from clay behind our backs - workshop led by Julia Roundtree (Clayground) at Lumb Bank ; Sustainable Bungay crew with van, Give and Take Day, 2012;  Abundance table at Mexican Fiesta, Happy Mondays, Sept 2012; bees in one of Bungay Community Bees top bar hives; poster for Plants for Life, Oct 2012

52 fLOWERS: alder

canal, oxford 02

“Oh, spleen, spleen!” sang a small vivacious woman in the basement kitchen of the Oxford house. We had just returned from Arizona. Miche was from Africa, and our paths were about to cross in a very unusual way.

“I am constructing an altar to the spleen at a food conference,” she explained.” I’m an artist.”

“Do you know about red root?” I asked her,  “The ceanothus bush? It’s the best medicine for the spleen I know. Especially if you have a difficulty with your mother.”

“Oh, you’re witchdoctors!” she laughed. “Where can I find some?”

“Round the corner,” I said. “It’s in flower right now.”

“In October?”

“Come on, I’ll show you,” I said. So we set off into the dusk at a fearsome pace with a pair of kitchen scissors.

Miche was a high-performance cook as well as an artist and she lived round the corner in a studio piled high with books and bowls and cooking pots. She ran an outfit called Kitchen Ritual, and created all manner of culinary and environmental art events, from ecological rite-of-passage feasts to workshops in community kitchens. As we went off in search of the blue ceanothus flowers, she began telling me about the events she had started based on the five elements of Chinese medicine. She had already held a picnic in the summer based on the fire element of the heart in Port Meadow. But she wasn’t sure how to proceed with the spleen dinner and the season for it, harvest or Indian summer, was drawing to a close.

“Oh!” I said, “What a lovely idea! Let’s do them together.” 

So we did.

They were called the Organ Dinners. Miche brought her kitchen ritual, we brought the plants. She brought her artist’s flair, we brought our spiritual perspective. We were a good team. We  invited people we knew in Oxford. There were usually about seven of us and everyone would bring food based on the season and the flavour associated with the organ. Sweet, sour, bitter, pungent. We dressed in the colours of the elements and took turns to host the events as the year turned. I brought Eliot Cowan’s book, Plant Spirit Medicine, based on his Five Element acupuncture practice. After the dinner we would sit in a circle and ask the questions about the element that ended each chapter. Earth, water, metal. In this way we put our attention on the organs as seats of consciousness and connected with the energies of the season. After each event Miche, Mark and I would look at everything that had taken place with our artist and medicine eyes and cohere our findings. Like everything else we embarked on in these years, all these meetings were an experiment. We did not know where they would take us.

The organ dinners took place in Miche’s studio flat with its African-style ancestral fire. The meals were always high-spirited, noisy, full of colour, zest and energy; the food was delicious, as most people we knew at that time were cooks. 

The speaking circles were more difficult. I knew from experience that you can’t do earth medicine shows without finding a devil or two hiding in the cooking pot. Each dinner was challenging in its own way, and brought up the emotions held by each organ: sadness, grief, fear. The spleen dinner brought up mother issues, the lung dinner father issues, the kidney dinner childishness, sex and an underlying primordial turbulence. But we weathered these storms in the name of art and communication. Until it was my turn to host the dinner for The Liver. Liver is governed by the element of wood, the element for Spring. It is the organ of the warrior.

I sent out the invitations on green cards and suggested everyone brought a twig from a tree and be prepared to talk about it as part of the evening. It was to be held the day after the Spring Equinox, after Miche arrived back from Africa and we returned from Wales.

ii

At Isis Lock there stand some fine alder trees.This is the year we have begun working with the Celtic tree alphabet and late March is the time of fearn, the alder. A letter known as “tear of the sun” in reference to its position within the equinox, the time when the year shifts out of the watery depths of winter, and into the light realms of spring. It is also the tree of Bran, and that afternoon I went to these alders to remind myself of his warrior-seer communications, when I came to sit by these trees at the lock where the canal meets a tributary of the Thames. I used to like sitting there at dusk watching everyone walking home along the towpath, the swans and ducks gliding by. Sometimes there would be a tramp sleeping under the bridge. But we did not mind each other’s company.

Alders grow by the bridges, guardians of all the water places. They stand tall, with their straight up trunks. Although they seem dark their bare branches have a fine purplish sheen, and if you look closely at their catkins which follow the willows’ in February or March, you will find they are all the colours of the rainbow. This is a tree famous for its dyes (red from its bark, green from its flowers, brown from its twigs) and if you cut the tree, it bleeds red like a man’s blood. Once highly sought after for its long endurance under water, to construct harbours and bridges and underwater support for the sea-cities like Venice, its wood still has many domestic uses: turned into clogs, chairs, spinning wheels and cigar boxes, charcoal, fishing nets and brooms. It’s an exciting tree. But you would have to have an interest really in alders to appreciate their useful beauty.  And perhaps, like me, you would have to have some affinity with the sombre, a familiarity with the dark descent, the deeper places, with time and structure, with the ancestral realms of Bran where he waits, like the ferryman, in between the living and the dead, between the dark and the light part of the year, holding the doorway of the equinox open.

I stood by the bridge under the tasselled dark tree, at the final lock before the Oxford terminal and the Thames, and looked into the water. A rat was floating belly up. For some reason I thought of Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, of the fisher king fishing in a dead canal, of lands that should have been set in order, of a culture that is fragmented, not connected, dying.

Then there was a great silence inside myself and outside myself. I looked along the canal, at the mud that was thick and churned on the towpath, at the woodsmoke that curled up from the narrow boats moored alongside it. A robin sang amongst the bare trees and then there was silence again. I waited in the frigid, almost-spring air and suddenly I heard the words:

It’s over.

I jumped in shock, my mind racing to ask: what is over? Who says it’s over? But somewhere inside I knew already. So I didn’t ask. I ran my hands softly down the tree’s straight trunk and carefully cut a sprig of alder to take back for the table - a sprig that held last year’s cones and this year's coloured catkins and emerging shoots of green.

iii

In the Chinese Five Element system each organ is related to one of the five senses. The liver is allied with the eyes. So the figure that embodies the essence of wood is not just a warrior, he is also a seer. The visionary who sees into the future. You have to have the warrior on board, the part of you that knows about clean cuts, breaks, being clear, for the solar path. If you lack courage or discrimination, you cannot see the way ahead.

The fourth organ dinner is as usual exuberant. There are noisy cheerful greetings at the door, and great relish as we share our spring-based dishes: shoots and leaves, sharp and sour tastes, steamed beets, olives, live yoghurt, cleansing, vigorous fuel for the liver and blood. Everything is green and lively, Will’s extraordinary nettle soup, Mark’s fragrant sauce made from Mexican tomatillos. We exchange news and then, impatient for business, I suggest we talk about our trees.

At first everything flows: Will talks enthusiastically about the ash, Mark soberly about the silver birch, Miche lightly about the flowering quince. But then I take up the alder sprig and start to talk in a big sombre voice. As I begin talking I notice that no one is really interested in what I am saying, but somehow this is not making any difference to my flow of words. I continue with an alarming amount of energy. I just can’t stop speaking about this tree, about descent and ascent, about water, about bridges, the equinox, warriors. Everyone starts shuffling in their seats and yawning.  I am way too intense. I am remorseless. What has got into me?

I am pushing for something. What am I pushing for? Something deeper, more transformative, more real than this evening’s meal, this artistic happening, but my companions do not want to go that way. Everyone has arrived late and has some other party to go to. One guest even telephoned beforehand to ask me whether he should come here, or not.

“That really is not my responsibility!” I snapped.

Oh, it was very wood! Right from the beginning.

I was pushing for something and all the time knew that something was not going to happen. Pushing is the energy of the wood element - branching out, moving forward, getting out of stagnation, growing upward and out for new life. An energy that often translates as anger, the thwarted emotion of the liver. As I talked I could see the energy for these kinds of meetings was running out. Asking those five element questions felt suddenly artificial and creaky, as if we were just going through the motions. Everyone looked bored, even Miche.

How do you feel when your plans are thwarted?

How do you feel in windy weather?

How is your sense of direction?

What new ideas or concepts have you come up with?

What are your dreams in life? Your hopes for the future?

We had been able to participate in the family organs: the father lung, the mother spleen, the child kidney, but this is wood warrior was a problem. It was something nobody knew about. Something that lives outside the family house, outside the artist’s studio. The warrior in the archaic world is the activating force within the human collective. He is not a romantic knight, or a warlike barbarian, but an initiated member of the human tribe. And the liver is about his initiation.

No one signs up for initiation. It comes towards you from the outside, foisted by mystery traditions and bush schools, by witchdoctors and medicine men, the business of elders and ancestors. If you are a modern person, you sometimes fall into initiating circumstances by accident, and spend years working out the subtle ramifications of your strange experience. But whatever way it happens, your self-obsessed consciousness is violently opened up to the primal forces, the ancestral forces of the planet and you are made aware of what being human really means on the earth. You are in this process wrenched away from your home and pushed into the collective. After this process, you become adult, sober, an individual who is an intrinsic part of the group. You have duties towards life. You are not the same person you were before.

I am looking at these modern men, holding my sprig of alder. Not just these men, but at all men I have met here in Oxford, living on the alternative edge of our civilisation. As I talked I realised these men were not like the A girls. They had not participated in any of our plant or dream work. We had met in the world of action, in the kitchens where they worked, in political meetings. We had climbed trees together but we had not spoken with the trees together. Men often have a strong affinity with trees, with the wild places, but their inner lives can be more conventionally shaped, more mentally focussed, which means they are often wary of anything spiritual. Their ambition is in the constructed world, rather than in the world of relationships, or centred on their inner happiness. These men are not for the establishment, and yet somewhere they hold allegiance to the establishment, because they yearn, like all men, to succeed, to belong, and the civilised world has not been made by deep, mature, feeling, wildwood warriors. But Bran is a male underworld god and he gives no quarter to this upperworld. When he brings his sprig of alder, he brings a kind of initiation few modern men ever get to experience.

As I speak a gulf begins to widen between us. It was not there before. Initiation makes a bridge between the world of spirit and the world of matter. Unless this bridge is forged you live your life in the world of matter. No matter how intelligent, how ecological, how radical you are, your existence is governed by objects and intellectual facts. You have not the spiritual technology to cross the river. Your will, your ego, your intellect, your drive for sex and power, keeps you within the world of the senses. What does it mean to be a warrior? It means you have allegiance to the mysterious spirit of life; you wrestle with the desires of the world, take certain responsibilities on behalf of the earth. It is a mood and an attitude. Something breaks through your old world and teaches you this mood: the encounter with peyote, the entry into the hermitage, years of travel, the desert, the practices, the solar path. You learn to build a bridge across the water.

 One day you cross that bridge.

I am speaking in the alphabet of the trees and can no longer reach my companions. I am speaking at the spring equinox, and unwittingly influenced by  its requirements. In the centre of the table, amongst the dishes, is a sprig of gorse, the female vowel ohn that signifies this solar turn of the year, the moment of ascent into the light, as the autumn equinox, is the moment of descent into the dark. The gorse bursts into flame in March, its shocking gold flowers scald the eye as it sets all the wild commons and scrublands on fire. It would have been easier to have invited the A girls. They would have been teased by the men, played dumb, brought ease and fluidity into the room, taken off the edge of this sharpness. But that would be not to face this moment, governed by the gorse, prickly, bright, uncompromising. 

The young men regard me, like three fair-haired brothers of a folk-tale, ten years between them, at the gorse-covered edge of the solar path. The trouble is I like them, far better than the A girls with their princess self-obsession, and I always have. I like their intelligence, their cameraderie; the way they make me laugh. I feel a freedom roaming about the city in their company. But freedom is not what I see with the alder and the gorse held now in my sights.

The liver dinner falls under my command. As the commander you sit in an uneasy chair. In all these organ dinners, there comes a point where the exuberance wanes, and those who lead them, become still. We realise we are facing the challenge of the element in question. We are no longer at a party, we are involved with a medicine, the impersonal energies of the Chinese system. All around you you experience what needs adjusting and transforming in the social world in which you find yourself. You feel incapable of the task. Those who went before me faced this dilemma with the elements of earth, metal, water. Now it is my turn, with wood.

The warrior sees the world beyond the five senses, informed by the organ that transforms all ingested poisons, discerns what is of benefit and what is not. This room we sit in, full of warmth and light, piled high with cooking pots and books, appears like an island; outside the house the rivers of the city flow, the underworld rivers of Lethe and the Styx, the gargoyles amongst the towers gape and grin, the leaves of the tree rustle quietly at the end of Isis lock. The warrior gazes at the people before him, unbound by personality, by a common narrative; feels the darkness of the night  pressing inward. This is no longer Charles who steered us downriver towards Limehouse docks, nor Arthur leaping carefree into the lake of Cader Idris. These are not the men in whose houses I have been generously sheltered. These are men with the ghosts of the machine world all about them, pressured by the academic institutions of the world, men indentured to the wheel.

In the cities of the world, I have already borne witness to the brightness of men broken upon the wheel, already been shown the fate of spirits trapped in their constructions. What business do I then have lingering in this kitchen, wishing for a good time?  I have seen men, passionate in their defence of the earth, with their fiery spirits thwarted, wasting their life-force in antagonism, battling against the system, burned-out and suffering, eating ashes. I have lived in the world that praises only the hard and the heartless, mother’s boys, good pupils, company men, that calls this anger and frustration a  psychological problem. But it is not: it is the energy of wood. The energy pushing for initiation and spiritual growth. What movement then is required by me?

The tree extends into space, wild and free, unconstricted by the architecture of this world, bursts through its mental abstraction, its economic systems, its chimerical illusions, its roots reaching deep into earth and water. Holding the alder sprig, your feet moored like roots into this physical earth, you become connected with or to the ancestral earth and its implacable laws; your warrior eyes open and see, not just in linear time, but in original time, all-at-once time. You see in the room the world of the city, as it floats above the earth, sucking its energy for its own designs. You are watching an ancient machinery in action, as it freezes the living beings before you, holds their hearts in its heraldic grasp. It is a sobering moment. Before everyone has been chattering and laughing, now there is silence and a cold and stiff feeling in the room; people are restless, wanting to go to parties, to have a drink; you are not chattering, you are speaking from the depth of your ancestral being. The solar year is turning. It is an exact moment. Precise, clear, severe.

Either side of me sit Miche and Mark. They hold a certain commitment, as creators and directors of these dinners.We observe everything that happens around us. It is all of our difficulty at this point. It would have been good if we could have met, all six of us, in the same spirit of enterprise but the fact of the matter is we have not. The manufactured world requires everyone to talk above themselves, as if death does not exist, as if the solar year does not exist, as if this organ dinner has no medicine, the spiny bush with its shiny flowers has no meaning. But when you hold the alder, you speak its wild language and you are responsible for what you see and your allegiances. The action that you take at this moment has consequence. Nothing can alter what you see.

So I fall silent at the head of the table. A river runs through the room and we stand on either bank. The bush and the tree divide us. Robert Bly’s book about male initiation, based on the archaic folk-tale, Iron John, speaks about the wild man who takes young men away from the family compound and brings them into the male mysteries. Boys needs older men to push them down into the darkness of the  kiva, out into the wilderness into their vision quest, he says.  Except of course, in modern life, there is no kiva or wilderness or wild man; we do not live in tribes that consider the sacredness of the sun or earthly life. None of us chose to wield the circumcision knife. We live in times of transition: so we have to initiate ourselves, become our own ancestors, our own elders, make our own way. The poet imagines that fathers are capable of instigating this alchemical work, so their young men can grow like trees, become guardians of this earth, rather than spending their life-force constructing and consolidating power. But the patriarchs and mentors of the civilised world are not the wild men of the woods or warriors. My companions before me already carry the karmic sins and ambitions of such men upon their shoulders. Already they are sold downriver.

How should we then proceed? When I can cross into their world, but they cannot enter mine? To be initiated demands the loss of innocence. It demands the adolescent who runs away, runs rampage, runs eternally back to the compound, to the playground, to his student life, is no longer given any quarter, any place in ourselves. In short it demands that all of us grow up.

Because the alder sprig changes everything. Something that is not human, not domestic, not educated comes into an established world and shakes it. Something that smacked of the hairy one, the one who lives under the water, the wild wood, the other, was entering our lives at that moment demanding all our adolescent friendships came to an end. You want these men to follow your lead, but they are not with you. They will never be with you. The fact is the solar path is not about others. It’s what you have to do that matters. And I had to break away. It was the movement of the warrior.  I had to cross the equinox bridge.

You are alone, the alder was saying to me, down by canal. It’s over. If you want to restore this wasteland, you have to restore yourself first. This work of restoration is a self-only task.

The alder, the letter fearn, marks a bridge in time in the cycle of the year. A pivotal moment, when you leave the nourishing dark, the months of incubation, of dreams, of building a foundation, and push upwards into the light. In the heavenly map this is the moment you cross over from the watery world of the cosmic fish in which you are connected to everyone and enter the ram’s territory of fire, the singular warrior’s field of Aries. When you leave the karma of a cycle of time behind and push forward into what you do not yet know. Tonight, as I let fall the alder twig, I know it is the end of the line. I have no choice but to go through the lock, to leave the city canal behind me.

After tonight there will be no more companions. We have been working with people in this informal exploratory way for ten years and now we will go alone into new waters. We will not meet for the final heart dinner. I had seen that our meetings were no longer correct. Real work is for the initiated. Our plant communications, begun here in Oxford three years previously, were about to undergo a change of directon. The young men, yawning, were leaving for their parties. Tomorrow, Miche will, carry on her kitchen ritual, and we will return to Wales and the plant work we will later call the flowermind. 

The alder is called tear of the sun because to live in the sun’s radiance means you depart the dark waterlands which have been your home for so long. You shed a tear because you loved your companions of those experimental underworld years, and you are a social creature. You loved the ease of communication; you loved these exuberant dinners. The feeling of being together in a band, of sharing the same house, of going up mountains together, cooking together, laughing together. And you loved yourself amongst them, in all that gaiety and conversation. 

But you love the earth better. And it is because your allegiance is to the earth that you go forwards, push out into the river, into the future, alone. 

Unpublished flower from Plant Communications chapters in the original version of 52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth

Paintings: Alder/Bridge/flight by Lucy Voelker (by kind permission of the artist)