Steeped in meaning

a polyphenol meditation

preparing bark for the tanning bath

Join me appreciating plant kin this Yule, while I enjoy with family the flavours and scents of tannin-rich oak, cloves, raisins, mint and bay in our festive food, plus lashings of tea, of course. My gratitude to the plant kingdom has no end. When you raise your glass or cup, it likely contains blessed polyphenols… They, and we, are steeped in meaning. Good Yule, friends!

Audio version

Plants produce tannins to keep them safe from insect attack, grazing, or disease. These compounds make the plant somewhat distasteful to predators. They have been found by humans for hundreds of thousands of years to contain medicines, dyes, poisons, flavourings, preservatives and more. The tannins are a gift beyond compare in the natural world. In the wild, animals will also seek out certain plants to eat for their medicinal properties. Even domestic cats will nibble at what they need. To value bitter herbs is central in Chinese medicine, the religious festival of Passover, and in the flavours of cuisines worldwide, (although this is fading with the ever-presence of sugar and our unhealthy immature fixation with unending sweetness that has paradoxically flowed from the archetypal colonial plantation plant - sugar cane.)  

People go on about the 'search for meaning'. I no longer search for meaning externally, as I find it is an emergent property of being immersed in life. We do not ask ‘what is life about?’ when we are deep in a game with a friend, picking a path through the trees, or as shown in this picture, tanning a hide to make a bag for a loved one. Meaning emerges, is produced, in an almost glandular way, in the body of life, if we do not hive off our faculty for story-making to an outside source. And by outside, I mean Civilisation, and latterly, the Machine. Earth is not outside us, and real meaning arises in the body, which is to say, the earth.

windfall tree bark and waste stream deer skins on their way to becoming leather

Meaning also behaves like tannins, created as protective compounds and kept in the living organism, in the psyche of the person. Meaning infuses us like a tea, it is present when we allow our fiercer functions to dissolve in the warmth of our liquid lives. Too much and we end up bitter. Too little and we cannot taste the flavour of our lived lives. We are insipid if we have never stood up to anything. We will be spit out by those connoisseurs who seek a stronger brew. We will likewise have no success preserving what we love, unless we have formed these compounds, learned how to stave off parasites in their many guises, and how to evade attack.

You cannot tan or dye in a weak bath of tannins. The skin will rot, no leather will emerge, the wool will remain pale and unchanged. If I want to transform the skin, the wool, or the fur of the creatures of my soul biome, who hunt, are hunted, eat and are eaten in unending natural succession within my own wild internal forest, (as it should be), then I must heat a huge pot of my stripped and shredded difficulties, which are where the tannins of meaning are found. I will tend this vat and stir it because it’s a true cauldron. I will dip into it all the raw things life brings me, the waste, the hedge fleece, the flaccid outers, the spiralling intestinal scrolls, the queasy stomach, and with my rich liquor I will turn them all into leather, yarn, fibre, ink, or containers good enough even to carry fresh water with me, wherever I go.  

It is only by being steeped in what is bitter that we become able to discern and preserve what is sweet.

Oak gall tannin tea as ink or dye: round gall, round gall & iron, Aleppo gall & iron

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This week’s good thing: Will Parsons is a pilgrim. Go read about his rediscovery of Old Way, a lost, ancient route to Canterbury, hear him sing ancient songs in situ whilst taking cold harbour in churches in the depths of winter. I walked with him once on an Epiphany Wassail.

The physical and spiritual practice of these islands is walking with intent. Perhaps where you live, this too would be unassuming yet utterly appropriate. May we all relearn how to be a pilgrim.