This Week's Good Things
Interlude
Not one, but several good things for you this week.
Maybe one year I will manage to pre-schedule in advance four posts for the month of August, when I traditionally take time off to not look at screens. However, I am very happy to spend an hour or two sharing these things with you now that I am back home after a wonderful week away ‘up north’ (York), and then, up further north (Scotland). Of course, York is ‘down south’ to the Scots, reminding me of the scornful opinions regarding Winterfell by the Wildings from beyond the Wall from the A Song of Ice and Fire books, known to most these days as Game of Thrones. It’s good to remember the idea of north is relative.
Well, now I am as far south as you can go around here, minus about 300 metres.
Heartwork movement class
The next online Heartwork Movement class with me will be on Saturday 14th September 2024 at 4pm UK time, 8-11am USA time zones. If you’d like to come along, just become a paid subscriber and you’ll get the link early September. In the meantime you can watch the Heartwork video in the archive and get ready for the next session. We will revise the Front Heart Salutation, learn the bones of the Back Heart Salutation, and have a Q&A. Then after the recorded hour, I hang out for 30 mins to chat with anyone who’d like to stay and discuss anything. You don’t need any special clothes or experience to join in, just to have watched the previous session and had a go at moving along with it.
I’ll also be teaching all this in person in Vermont USA on October 18th 2024 10-4pm, details are here.
Feral Fruit
Last week saw the first windfalls of the apple season in Dorset and this week Yorkshire followed suit. I travelled north with an experimental Dorset apple cake weighing down my backpack, containing no wheat or milk. It was still delicious, if somewhat more wholesome than my usual indulgent plinth for clotted cream. Yesterday we picked punnets of wild (or feral, depending on how you classify those terms) blackberries rubus fruticosus, evading stinging nettles, massive inch-thick bramble stalks and the other people picking in the same park. Fifteen minutes into the deep peace that always descends upon me when gathering this, the very first fruit of my foraging life, my partner’s voice could be heard from the other side of the thicket saying, ‘Are you still there?’ A completely silent Caro when out and about is a rarity unless specifically requested.
While certainly embodied, present, and completely immersed in the picking, 'I’ was probably not really there, at least for a while, which was a delight. Possibly not just for me.
Perhaps you hold there is a Creator, or that we evolved, or maybe like me, you do not find those two things at all mutually exclusive. Whichever way we got these fingers, in the Garden or on the savannah, successfully picking berries deftly in spiky environments with loved ones is surely the pinnacle of ancestral movement: purposeful conviviality, skilful manoeuvring, belly-filling, hand-scenting joy. I am intensely grateful for freedom of movement and association, that I can pick these berries to add to food for friends, that I am not currently barely subsisting, or fleeing bombs, or denied reprieve from hellish conditions. Every day I walk or eat or take medicine I am full of thanks and grief in equal measure.
I went home and made foraged blackberry and apple cobbler for everyone in the household to have for breakfast today: it was good! Apple cores went under water and are becoming apple scrap cider vinegar which is perhaps the simplest and most useful free food thing there is.
Photo Book
Murmur, by Darren Andrews is a stunning limited edition book of photographs of huge synchronised flocks of starlings, known here as murmurations. I found the book in a friend’s bookshelf and spent a long while looking through it. Most of the photos are from the north of England and they are truly superb. The book is available again in a new edition here and there are a few pictures here on his website. Enjoy.
Fall
This week I heard that a loved-one’s niece asked her father how long it was until her fifth birthday. Knowing that ‘late November’ might not mean much to her right now, his wonderful answer was:
‘It will be your birthday when all the leaves have fallen off the trees.’
Now that already inquisitive four and a half year old will be paying even more attention to trees and getting a deeper sense of the seasons’ changes. Skilful dadding.
Rock Samphire
Lastly, here’s beautiful, salty, rock samphire Crithmum maritimum from a couple of weeks ago, clinging to the Jurassic Coast. Before it flowers, the leaf tips are tasty raw, pickled or lightly steamed. Now they’ll be a bit chewy, but they still look tremendous. They are one of the first plants to populate the scree after a rockfall, followed by sea beet, which you can also see germinating in this photo, top right. Edible pioneers, happy on disturbed soils, like dandelion, plantain, nettle, bramble and rowan, are all firm favourites of mine.
Food is everywhere for those prepared to squat down, reach up, carry a basket and occasionally get a scratch. See you next week.
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How do I watch the previous heart centered practice?
Lovely thoughts. Thank you