It’s my birthday, so I am taking a break from writing essays this week. Instead, here’s a poem from the autumn in France, an ochre story, a recent painting, and an offer. I hope you enjoy them.1
Audio version
Also, welcome to those of you who have recently found my Substack. Normal service will resume next week.2
This month has seen big transformations for me. I have given notice at my paid work so that I can travel every fortnight to take care of close family during a time of change. I also plan to devote much more time to my writing, teaching and art. Each week I spend at least one whole day writing and recording Uncivil Savant for you. I will always keep the general writing here free to read, as I appreciate how times are hard financially for so many of us. To those of you who support me via paid subscriptions, thankyou so much. You are making research and interviews for my next books possible. Look out for the first subscriber only chi kung video coming in early February as a tangible thankyou. I wish you a beautiful winter, an Imbolc full of possibilities, even if in seed form.
Click the button for the special offer, it’s running for the whole of February 2023.
Deep Time Crone Flies Home
The concourse speaks in fragments of marble,
Airport toilets are also earth.
Granite tiles are pining for Aberdeen,
The ceramic sinks for Stoke,
I catch myself in the mirror, smiling, and in that moment land.
This month on tour with chica my red creek ran dry and its well-fed bed regained the green.
What is 'sage' is 'wise'.
Hardy, astringent, drought-resistant, pungent, lush when moist
[a good teacher then]
I've been storing Sunshine 50 years my dears.
The larder is full of good hard cheese, fine herbs and booze.
The Lamb may have turned the water into wine,
But it was the grapevine changed the photons into sugars,
A process equally divine.
Illich said the smallest unit of society is the meal, [not the family]
This week at the table I concur.
The clay jug, the wooden board, the sharp Basque knives, the long breadbasket and the vinyl tablecloth all told me –
The shared meal is a kiss
A lesson
A net
A universe
A pledge first made 1 million years ago which will never be broken.
Pharmakon
- for Heidi Gustafson
Artemis-sealed and bright red in your hands, ochre makes its way from hand to mouth, from gullet to gut. A saining seed, neutralising and transmuting the poison that leached from the machine culture, where you, where now almost all of us, must spend our youths. Sowing stories in your innards the ochre mixes with blood and floods to the capillaries, a flush, a bright tinge, the blush of good health. Stories arise as medicine in the culture, and ochre is a story seed, an image seed. You go to the places where this is most clear, the cave, the shore, the rock, the midden, the carpark, stooping low, as wisdom always pools at the base of things, like water. The ancestors took the red and yellow soil and allowed the images contained in the land and their hearts (which at that time were still joined) to come to life on rocks and the walls of caves. When they stood back, these images sprouted stories like seedlings at the creek edge, to be carried off everywhere the river of humans flowed.
Some clever people say words and grammar come first. This is not true: soil comes first, earth comes first, the colour came first. Intergalactic iron and cobalt landed, rusted, the rest is history. Ochre seeds the image, image seeds the story, story carpets the land: in good times, with wild herbs and delicious nuts; other times poisonous berries or identical wheat ears grow as far as the eye can see.
In my country chalk, the long dead bones of ancient creatures, is the white of the rude giants bearing clubs and the running horses that litter the hillsides. Charcoal from the fires once cooled, brought black to the story. The red, the white and the black, everywhere the blood, the bones and the burned boughs of the earth. These three colours drew images directly up from the land via the hands of the fire-side apes who knapped their new-found flints. Less hairy now, and with tools that own their makers, we sit in wry, disembodied circles on our separate continents and sigh.
But Heidi brings ochre, the pharmakon. The poison of disembodied living has a simple cure. The real is outside the door, under our feet. Madness touches those who will not stoop to touch the earth. Sanity awaits in the teeming iotas, the uncharted biota found in the handful of red earth. Take with the eyes, the fingers, the soles of the feet. Place it on your walls. Artemis of the wilderness wills it so.
This week’s good thing: Over the last fortnight I have been teaching wild materials for the Schumacher College Engaged Ecology MA, and a watercolour deep dive with Plants and Colour. Both are wonderful places to learn, so it was an honour to be asked. Teaching remains a consistent joy in my life.
We are all artists. Earth is an artist.
If you are not British and middle aged or older, the subtitle of this piece may not make sense. This may help explain it…
This week I have recorded the audio on my phone rather than my expensive mic, but it still sounds ok after editing, I think.
Thanks so for opening up this portal back to the ochre and earth. You are eloquent, the earth is the best filter, sorting us out.
I am in the US, turning 60 launching new businesses and hitting the road into uncharted territory and SO grateful for your writing, so deeply nourishing!!! "The poison of disembodied living has a simple cure" Thank you for continuing to show up here and for all that you embody, giving me hope!