Tidal / Wilding / Softening
Interlude - fragments
With the sound of courting herring gulls hark hark harking on the roof opposite my desk, I just sat down to complete the next longer essay and briefly looked through my ‘drafts’ folder in the Substack editor. Words jumped up and said ‘hear me now!’ So, this week, while I continue writing the longer essay, perhaps completing my current delve in ‘not resisting evil’ and yielding, here are some fragments - shorter thoughts and thinking points - which wanted to be shared with you. Also, you might appreciate a break from long-form essays from me.
Wet, windy, not-yet-spring-but-something-has-changed greetings from me.
Human resources
I will strip-mine neither you nor myself.
What is this urge to always be productive? Are we some sort of cough issuing from deep in the lungs of life? How did the metrics of industry become the way we gauge our embodied selves?
Social media, the great expectorant.
Please just waste your time in my arms and do not count the hours.
Semi-tidal, fully feudal
The Thames and the other navigable, habitable waterways and estuaries of England comprise a long thin hidden county. You can only truly know this occulted county by living there full time, with nowhere else to go. A secret lock gate opens up and you pass through it, unaware that the flow can only go one way and you cannot un-go there, like you cannot un-see an uncanny image. It is also sadly one of the last strongholds of serfdom and petty tyranny.
There are three ways to leave: by choice, by upheaval, or by death. I left by upheaval. But once gone, it’s all the same.
I miss two friends, the swans, and all the space in the world to tan deer hides and do wood crafts like my ancestors. Swing an axe on my street on dry land and they’ll call the police. I was hanging a smoked fox skin out the window to air last year, and got complaints. No problem to shroud yourself in plastic faux fur, sending undying fragments into the air with every smug outing, but woe to anyone who values not poisoning the Earth by laboriously making their own leathers. Nevertheless, I put the furs away and closed the blinds. The price of civilisation? The obligation to not offend anyone.
What else do I miss of a decade afloat? Little, it seems. Certainly, the camaraderie between the boaters, the beauty of mist rising on the water in winter, the glory of red sunsets looking west from the weir walkway. Back at Petersham, the feeling of a full water tank, a full diesel tank, a full store of wood and plenty of good food in the cool box and therefore no need to row ashore for anything, the whole weekend.
But nothing would draw me back to the jaws of that invisible trap, the last gasp of feudal England and the so-called contracts between land-owner and mooring-holder. Words, printed in ink, but soluble not just to river water, but to the whims of the marina owners’ gall bladders, acidified by their fragility and hubris. Never have I paid so dearly for something I truly wanted, which was to live in peace, free of coercion. I learned that when a tyrant comes to know what you deeply want, you have already been foul-hooked and it is just a matter of time before they reel you in, fighting.
The moral is a simple one: stay out of the water or learn to swim very well.
In other words, either tell no-one your heart’s desire, or tell everyone.
(I imagine you can gather which of these two equally noble paths I now follow.)
Giving and seeking permission
My T’ai Chi Grandmaster John Kells used to say his teacher Dr Chi had already yielded to him before he got up in the morning. There was nothing John could do that would unsettle, land-on, or destabilise Dr Chi. I often imagine the times when they worked together in Taiwan, Dr Chi teaching with such great skill in softness with John, a younger Irish man, full of fire and a desire to learn.
Tempering the ego, training the body, refining the mind. It’s mainly bitter work, but if we don’t do it we remain uncooked.1
This jumped to mind when a fellow pigment person asked me about foraging practice and how I would explain it in Drawn From the Wild. I suggested being in constant touch with the land as our practice, in audible or silent conversation with all things, (or indeed The All-Thing, as in prayer), so that one does not have to discreetly ask for things every time. In this sense it is like becoming the partner of someone, as opposed to dating. On dates, we are explicit in our politeness, ‘please could you pass me the water?’ and, ‘no, after you!’ Once we are in the deep, radical, implicit friendship of being lovers and partners, we find the water glass is already filled and we process through doors together like eels streaming upriver, with no thought for such terms as ‘before’ or ‘after’.
With the land, after developing a relationship based on time and attending, (not just upon intention, which is a slippery thing, it turns out), we can begin to trust that the hand does not move to where it is not wanted.2 I would rather spend years attending to the yesses and noes of the earth, felt in the gut, heard in the heart, then noticed by the mind (that is the correct order of sensing…) than follow a rule from a book or a guilt-induced formula. If we cannot feel what is right, or if we never question our sure assumption about what is appropriate, then yes, rules and formulas can be useful to get us started. Longer term, what I would hope to encourage is remembering our enduring marriage to, deep husbandry of, and ancient identity with, land.
I will always remain anti-colonial but I also resist the currently popular narrative that people of European ancestry, such as my family, are separate from Earth, especially if we are not the Indigenous people where we reside. Personally, I remain living in the place where I am from, and where my forebears are from, but that is not the point. Unless you are very rich, or from the landed classes of your nation, ‘where you are from’ is an accident of birth and where you live and how you work, in these times, is rarely purely a matter of personal choice. I do not believe ‘the sins of the father’ are, or should be, visited upon the descendants. The pull towards right action is a welcome responsibility, not an intergenerational curse.
The practice of yielding to the real is for everyone, in all places. There are no conditions upon belonging on Earth: it applies to every single living organism here: earthworm, plover, bacillus, lichen, shark, human.
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This week’s good thing: Jim Ghedi’s unbelievably great new lp Wasteland. This is the best new music I have heard for a year. If you enjoy hearing the rich sounds of musical instruments without layers of digital ‘correction’, the timbre of a unique voice, really heavy bass and shimmering strings, then this is for you. Is it folk? Who knows? It is also Rock, Trad, Experimental as well as Post- all those things. Do yourself a favour and buy this on vinyl or digitally on Bandcamp. The production by Sheffield’s Tesla Studios is as good as it gets, lots of analogue gear and amps. My ear said, ‘Fender Twin Reverb, vintage valve mics?’ and sure enough it was, when I checked photos of the studio, (at which I swooned). Sounds clear as Dance Hall at Louse Point, Led Zep IV3 or the best tracks from There Is. Ah, music, welcome, welcome back in my life almost 9 years now. We are sadly missing Ghedi’s tour due to being down south, but we’ll see him again as soon as possible.
A Chick Pea To Cook – Rumi
(version by Coleman Barks)
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.
Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”
Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.
Eventually the chickpea
will say to the cook,
“Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can’t do this by myself.
I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your cooking.”
The cook says,
“I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.
My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.”
Similarly to the way we know from loving-experience how the beloved prefers to be touched.
Thank you caro for modeling the light footprint in a world it seems the monsters are running. Your sentences feel like they’ve fallen from an angel’s lap.
I lived for years in a boarding school dorm called barks hall just shortly after Coleman barks’ father was headmaster. This marvelous poem was crafted on a formica table in the bluebird cafe after English class in Athens georgia From the translations by your countrymen arberry, Nicholson and others. It often feels a disservice to Rumi and Coleman both to say Coleman’s ‘transreading’ (William gas) is authored by Rumi. The chickpeas Coleman is thinking of in this poem came out of the frantic kitchen of our enormous dining hall in white plastic serving bowls by the steaming dozen in Chattanooga Tennessee.🙏❤️