The land speaks

all is animate

In October 2015 many forces¹ came together in my life, the remaining ripples of which began to settle last year, when I turned 50. Looking back, over 7 years later, I see threads emerging that are now woven into my writing and art life, including here at Uncivil Savant.

Audio version

I want to share something of those beginnings with you, to allow a better understanding of how I came to be exploring this territory, and why I care so deeply about the embodied life as a gateway to wisdom, equal and complementary to paths of scholarship or faith.

In those days I was a busy T’ai Chi teacher, with weekly classes in London, monthly workshops in Scotland and sessions 3 times a year in Gothenburg, Sweden. I studied 2 or 3 times a week with my T’ai Chi master and did a bit of part-time paid work, but all my artistic practices had withered. Real animal joy was slipping out of my life inexorably, and I didn’t know how to go about stemming the flow.

I had recently read The Wake and discovered The Dark Mountain Project and felt a stirring in my bones to meet artists and writers for whom earth mattered more than cleverly illustrating the zeitgeist. I signed up for a small weekend event in the wilds of Glencoe, Scotland, run by Charlotte DuCann and Dougie Strang. Below is the letter I sent as thanks once home on my boat. I have shortened three names for anonymity, and added footnotes where useful, for context. I didn’t write this for publication, but rereading it today, I see that so much of my current life is there in acorn form. Hearty thanks to the wild red wu-wei squirrel of fate, who dug my life back into the ground and then forgot about me so that I could sprout. May my leafy boughs shelter your great grand kits.

Charlotte DuCann teaching at Carrying the fire

Carrying the Fire  

Dear Charlotte and Dougie, I hope you are both well, and recovered from your travels. What an amazing weekend with such open-hearted folk. Thank you both again. I needed to write a few words about what happened at CTF, and what was revealed about those events even as I was aboard the train on my way to Glasgow.  

Firstly, I have to say, I had never heard the names 'Ossian'² or 'Cailleach'³ before that weekend, I did not know what they meant, any tales about them, or indeed about Finn McCoul, to my shame. I know a little more about the Roman, Greek, Indian, Viking or Taoist mythic worlds, but not so much from the Celtic lands. It's hard to know where to start with this tale, so I'll just start telling it and see what happens...

Since my friend B and my student N died, this last month, and as Samhain approached, both my partner and I had felt the veils between life and death to be thinner than we'd ever felt them to be. This was not an abstract conception, but a felt sense, sort of tremulous and shimmering, accompanied by a heightened awareness of the fleetingness of ordinary life, and the sheer luck of our particular existences. We talked about this over the week before CTF, and discussed the premature yet exemplary way in which both men had died: without struggle, with their dear partner beside them, in their own homes. Feeling blessed to be alive, and with no plan other than to be really present at CTF, and to be prepared in my heart to give a eulogy at N's funeral, I arrived at Corrour to find the stag⁴ and be led to where I had to go.

Dougie's stories bound me to the place. Immediately, I did not feel like a tourist. I often haven't enjoyed story tellings, perhaps my head has been all wrong, too accustomed to the written word, and to film's familiar pace, or perhaps the teller has been heavy-handed. This time I was transported to exactly where I was, just not when I was, but somewhen more ancient. Throughout the introductions, the meal, the amazing fire circle singing and telling, I felt part of a family outside time, which I had only felt with my T'ai Chi posse over the years, and perhaps with a few special friends, and on my own a few times in nature, (one of which I sung about in the circle). It was not a psychological or therapeutic setting, but a deeply connected almost mythic space, which you helped create. I have only seen it properly described in the words of Riddley Walker, or perhaps the books of Ursula LeGuin, ‘people’ are not the only people there. Land, rocks, mountains and lakes, beings and heroes of the past, forces and gods are at the fireside too. I had not realised the extent to which a human heart, made soft and yielding by sincere practice and by fate, (by which I mean the events of one's life over which one has no control), could be so thoroughly permeable to these other guests at the hearth. I had not realised how much I had been hollowed out, and therefore how much I might get filled.

Beinn a Bhric

The second day: Cailleach and the Medicine Wheel. I slept very well and woke to incredible sunshine, then practiced T’ai Chi by the loch-shore like some 'Come to Scotland' advertisement. Charlotte echoed what was in my heart about silence, stillness and letting go and I was glad to get out on the rocks that Cailleach had strewn from her apron. I had planned to sit but as soon as I was upon the right rock I just stood there facing the mountain. For me being silent for a whole week or more is, if not exactly commonplace, then what I do at least every year on retreat. Also, to just stand, or just be, in a place is what I deem to be good medicine. Frequently, the very first thing we teach a new student in our tradition is to stand still, feel the earth, and listen attentively without interfering. And yet I have never stood quite like that before. My feet felt like knees or thighs, and the rock or even the bedrock under the peat felt like my real feet. When the wind blew, I did not sway in the usual way, but seemingly from below where I was standing. In telling this tale I may begin to sound 'woo-woo', (which is a term I have picked up from Dougie and run with - it's excellent!) However, you didn't know me before Samhain, and so don't know quite how un woo-woo, unmagical and frankly how averse to New-Age or vaguely spiritual fluff I have been, especially up until my late 30s.

So, I stood facing the slopes, really still, totally relaxed, quiet-minded for about 25 minutes. When my body naturally turned I felt myself facing a quarter turn right to the hills, then later towards the loch, then facing the sun, finally back to face the mountain. I climbed down onto another rock which had a large shaped indent, where I lay semi-reclined facing the mountain. From somewhere I started singing to Cailleach for about 8 minutes, the song didn't repeat and I didn't interrupt myself as to why the song came out. I only remembered 4 lines when I came back to the group, and someone asked me to sing it. For some reason I had the goddess Brigid (Bridhe, Bride) on my mind all day, and had even asked Dougie about her. Her name is in many places in Dorset, where I am from, and she was in my song, though I had no idea why. It began something like:

Cailleach I bring you word

I bring you word from Brigid

A greeting in this song

Brought by my southern daughter

The rest of the content of the song was propitious and seemed to be some kind of gift or offering. Again, it ended by itself and I walked back humming the tune (which I still remember) and joined you all at the hostel. It was difficult to begin to speak in words. The dream map was drawn up, food shared, the walk to the station magically happened at dusk and songs beneath the stag rounded the circle.⁵  

All of this great beauty was already enough.

Awaiting the train at Corrour

Then you guys got off the train at Crianlarich. We all started singing 'Ghost of John'. A young couple who had been to a performance on Skye someone had mentioned during the weekend, by Hanna Tuulikki, got talking to some of us and I took them some chocolate a while later. As they chatted I looked at the program they had brought. As I read it I realised it told the story of the annual ceremonial defeat of Brigid by Cailleach each Samhain and had been enacted at the tomb of a real sacrificial Iron-Age 'Brigid' at a High Pasture Cave on Skye. As I sat there slightly spluttering and getting hotter the others asked me what had happened, and as I read more it became even stranger. My ad-libbed song seemed to tell a large part of the mythic story as outlined in the research notes in the leaflet. I have never read the story before, I didn't know any links between Bridhe and Cailleach, in fact I had mistakenly thought they might be analogous, rather than separate aspects of the Triple Goddess. Over the rest of the journey I talked with others about what had happened: my group of three others from earlier remembered the song and were as gob-smacked as me. The young couple came and gave me their program later on, saying they could get another and that I needed to have it.

We all left the train in good cheer. I arrived at my hosts’ home in Aberdeenshire at 2am and fell fast asleep.

And all of that was uncanny and wonderful enough.

We set out early the next day to N's funeral, held at Finzean church on the banks of the River Feugh, where I had visited as a young child with my maternal grandmother, who was from Aberdeenshire. N had lived here most of his life, apart from his ‘difficult / creative’ time in London. It was at Finzean, aged eight, that I had first seen salmon leaping the falls to make their way upstream. The shape of their dark bodies against the white frothy water is one of my clearest childhood memories, and is why I recognised them again with joy in a split second when I saw fish jumping at the new state-of-the-art Thames fish ladder right by my boat, earlier this year. The funeral was the most amazing ceremony I have ever had the honour of attending. Between N's express wishes and the sensitivity of his partner A to conveying his life and way, the most beautiful alchemy occurred. Everyone was in their favourite colourful clothes, by N's request. The atmosphere was a continuation from CTF, T'ai Chi and Shiatsu colleagues, friends, family and neighbours sat around his beautiful wicker coffin which rested simply on the ground. Music, eulogies and singing took place. I told how N would have loved the song around fire at CTF and how folks had said 'He is here!' and how people, when united in fellow feeling and in nature become a kind of kin.

Then S, N's younger daughter, played an incredibly moving work on violin: the piece - Ossian - by J Scott Skinner.

Outside, N had asked that we do a T'ai Chi Short Form around his coffin, and in the unseasonably bright, hot sunshine we did that, as well as movements we call 'Front Heart Salutations', which our Grandmaster John Kells created, which, in a nutshell, are a physical practice to encourage us to outreach into, and call back from, the unknown, in a similar way to how the CTF weekend felt: ie with openness, rawness and heart. I invited anyone to join in with these, and to feel all these people around us moving together without rehearsal, natural and unselfconsciously, was a real joy. Two friends gently drummed us down to his plot in the burial meadow, (which I learned in Scotland is rather wonderfully called 'the lair'). There was a round sung even as we threw earth onto the coffin after it had been lowered into the soil. Between tears and sobs there were also coherent melodies, and simple words, weaving and entwining, before breaking down again, but always someone carried the tune, and so we could re-join again after the next breath. It rose and fell for as long as it lasted, and then softly returned to silence. I felt I learned something of the inklings of the beginnings of song, of true mourning, of real community, of something genuine and so much older than any specific religious church service or sanitised Humanist ceremony could have offered.

The wake at Finzean Hall was to be a celebration of N's life and so people brought lots of wonderful food to share. Everyone spoke with everyone, stories were shared and tales told, lots of laughter and tears as well as endless tea and coffee, some wine and delicious aged cheese from Holland courtesy of A's family. At some point music was being played and the sun went down. A violinist and pianist were preparing to play traditional songs so we could all dance a few sets and have a ceilidh. A little boy of about three years was running about naked until his mother called him back before the first dance:

'Ossian! Ossian! Come here so you don't get your feet stepped on!'

Dashing White Sergeant, The Gay Gordons, one other I forget the name of and then an Orcadian Strip The Willow. These dances, which I mostly haven't danced since I was a young girl at the Caledonian Society in Bournemouth, were still there in my body and the caller called them out of me. We all danced our hearts out, threw our partners around and yee-hooed (I am sure there is a hidden Scottish martial art encoded in Strip The Willow). Afterwards, to many a 'N would have loved that', we also agreed that he had started a craze: everyone now wanted a funeral like this!

Loch Ossian

I finally headed home the next day, and over the following week at classes shared the story of the celebration with all the London students who had not been able to come. N was well-loved in the school, in Scotland, Sweden, and in London, and will be greatly missed, but will also be held as a great inspiration. Now I have heard a little of Ossian, I realise those qualities of the bard, the musician (he played fiddle), the poet, the warrior and the lover, of nature, the land and of people, were so strong in him and why S chose to play that song. It was his real life and genuine daily practice that made him who he was. He built his own wooden house, raised his garden, nurtured his family there. In teaching T'ai Chi and Shiatsu he directly alleviated suffering in his community and benefited those he met. It is our lived lives and our everyday choices that express our hearts, not flimsy 'intentions' or wistful thoughts. His practice was in no way held up or inconvenienced by illness or death. These were opportunities to practice his heart work, and love.

I can't say how or why Ossian, Cailleach and Brigid found their way into my lived story that weekend, or what it means, if it means anything at all. I am eternally grateful for your part in it, Dougie and Charlotte, and to all those who were there with us. All I can say is that I was genuinely raw, open, and truly interested in the people and land around me, in other words, not busy dwelling on self. Perhaps some aspect of the land sung something through me, to itself: sort of, ‘Here's a nice empty one, let's borrow her for a while to sing that old song again.' The feeling of the weekend was the same immersed naturalness that I first felt again since childhood, aged 30, under an oak tree by Derwent Water, whilst attending to a call of nature... Sharing the song of it in the fire circle on Samhain was perhaps a door to the way of being that I was singing/re-membering. Anyway, my ideas about what happened are immaterial. I just wanted to share the story with you, whilst it was fresh in my body, and this is the first evening I have had to write.

I genuinely love the land of these Isles that make up Britain. I love many of its customs and ways, especially some of the old ones, and a few of the new ones too. When I find fossils on Portland I get bone-deep joy. But if you showed me a far-off society where Samhain was celebrated as we did at Carrying the Fire, and the death of a dear one was marked in way it was for N at Finzean, I would go into exile from this country to live there with those good people and become part of that culture. Ceremony, gathering together and marking the passage of the year and of our lives are so important to me, and are lost in the wider human culture in Britain from which I am mostly alienated, (and manage to evade by living moored beside a tiny island in the middle of a river). My heart was at home over Samhain, and through unparalleled good fortune, I was at home both culturally and geographically. People are made refugees every day and must leave their hearths for uncertain futures. Even within this country, Britons are displaced from the beneficial aspects of their culture and nature, by the market, homelessness, delusion and a thousand other causes. I don't know why I have had the luck over time to find the sanghas I need to stay sane and reasonably well, but I am grateful, and hope to sing more songs of thanks to ancient landforms and to excellent persons, mythic or otherwise, as the earth and time so moves me.

I send love and best wishes, and count me in on the springs and wells cleaning - I have chest waders and will travel. Caro x

13th November 2015, River Thames, Surrey.

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Dr Theresa Emmerich Kamper teaching leather clothing-making in Netherlands 2022

This week’s good thing: I am writing to you from the spare room of my dear friend Dr Theresa Emmerich Kamper, as I am in Devon for our long-planned 3 week hide tanning, crafting and DIY catch-up. You might have seen her on Alone Season 8 on the History Channel or on Surviving the Stone Age. I first met her when she was instructing at a buckskin making course at Wilderness Survival Skills, the excellent bushcraft school where I go whenever I can. I am happy to say she is as skilful and positive in real life as on the telly. Inevitably, admin and unforeseen jobs have crept in, as has building a boat out of willow and hide for a future Thames adventure. But now I can at last tell you about her great courses, as her new website is finally finished. She teaches hide-tanning, ancestral skills and more internationally, so go look and see what’s coming up near you. We’ll be teaching and touring the States together this spring and have designed a special course where you’ll make deerskin parchment with Theresa and traditional oak gall ink, natural paints and feather quills with me, then use them on the parchment. This will be held at In Situ Polyculture in Vermont, USA, 13-14 May 2023. Maybe see you there.

1. Perimenopausal upheaval, the loss of two friends, living in a small boat on a tiny island in the The Thames rather than on land in bricks and mortar, and more.

2. Ossian or Oisin, the legendary poet and warrior of Ireland.

3. The legendary old Scots and Irish ‘Old Hag’, goddess of winter, creator of the land, storms and weather; the Crone of the Triple Goddess archetype. I may not be pronouncing it perfectly on the audio version, I have heard it spoken in very different ways, from ka-lee-ack to kye-ach (with soft ‘ll’s as in French), and more, so forgive me if it is not exactly how the Scots Gaelic should sound.

4. Jack from Dark Mountain, dressed as a stag, with antlers. Quite a way to be met from a train.

5. There’s a small sound fault at the start of the song on the audio version which I noticed too late to remedy, having over-zealously deleted the original recordings. Interestingly, it is the first word ‘Cailleach’, which cannot be heard, and instead there is ‘yip!’ The old Crone gets her own way again, which now, deep in January, seems utterly appropriate.