Under the Hill
Hermitage, Heart, Song
This morning, head full of book planning and wholesome to-do lists, I prayed for a loose divot in the too-neat greensward of my mind. This week’s piece, and the song at it’s foot, comprise an interlude from the underworld, (so perhaps an underlude). It was prompted by my friend
‘s beautiful recent post Falling Into the Story which I heartily recommend you read now. Her work is full of ongoing attention to the both the boulder and the iron-rich spring.A Door
Yielding to Land1 is a rigorous art. To make yourself soft to a hard place is to open something akin to opening a faery-door - not some pretty fabrication glued to a tree by a well-meaning parent - but a gaping cave mouth in reality. There is darkness in there and the possibility of madness beside the real prize, wisdom. There is also a price to pay: everything you had constructed on top of the ground of yourself, before.
Wisdom flows downhill, like water. Unless you lower yourself, and present something empty, you cannot gather it.
It is winter, so I notice more of that which is yin: lacunae, voids, injury and grief as doors.
Eviction, expulsion, exile (whether forced or chosen), all scour pride (at first) and make us permeable to place: whether temporary place, next-best place, place of no return, or destroyed place.
Accidental place, where grace falls on everything but our shadow.
Or we wrap our wound around us like a flag and permanently laminate a nationalism of the un-tempered heart. To be stuck in place, cocooned like this, is to be good food already rotting, still in its wrappers, no longer fit for the feast.
Better to wander around lost, host to the all-thing, a bare table, an empty singing bowl.
Discomfort, turned on its side, is the footstool of gratitude.
There’s the still small voice of the Great Mystery, but also its bellowing,
‘I WANT YOU TO HEAR THIS THING RIGHT NOW!’
To make room for grace, we throw out the accumulated tat of civil trinkets.
Society pre-dates civilisation by a million years. Apes, dolphins and whales have culture and customs.
What will we pass on?2
Insular
The British mainland is an island, surrounded by islands. There is no real ‘main land’ this far out at sea. For 500 years, men (and later, women) in boats who could not withstand the tidal forces of the wild -be of -belonging to an archipelago made sure they created an equal sense of exile wherever they went.
There is another way to journey, which does not leave a world uprooted in its wake.
The desert hermitage is an inland island.
The heart of a hermit is an island set in a loch.
The well-tempered heart of the hermit withstands all the longing the conqueror cannot, and stays in true connexion even when alone.
The hermit who returns to everyday life - who knows once again they are an island in the archipelago - establishes connexion between other hearts and thereby prevents and heals others’ exile. How?
Keeping the heart empty of cares about the self, and tempering the bloody heart with the nestling thymus3, the community hermit places their heart downstream of the flow of life, of need, of love. People can feel this and tumble out of themselves into the yin space of such a receptive heart. Then they are buoyed up by the yang force of the conviviality that springs from simply having been received.
Crucially, none of this is done by conscious force or manipulation. It is a spontaneous arising between receiver and received and the flow may even reverse and strengthen under the influence of radical delight.4
The true hermitage, the tempered heart, is open. Its outstanding quality is silence. In action it is faultless, because, like the muscles of the heart itself, it moves without the intervention of the conscious mind.
A Feast
The daily Langar meal is as blessed as the mead-hall once was.5
Make bread, mead, or curtido!
To those who would be betrothed:
Fingers already covered in rings will find nowhere to place the real wedding band.
This week’s good thing: The Witch of the Westmorlands a song written in 1976 by Archie Fisher. This song has enchanted me since the moment I heard it last month, in the starlight amongst friends, sipping whisky under a pale comet, on a deck in Vermont… sung acapella by my wonderful friend Candace Jensen, who had previously herself been enchanted by the You Are Wolf version. I texted all things folk buff / clown Stewart Lee to see if he knew it, as I thought he would, and that if not, it would be right up his street. He texted straight back that Barbara Dickson (yes that Barbara Dickson) had done a very good version in the 80s, after a more trad version in the 70s. The version I love I can only find on Spotify, and it’s here for you. Alternatively, here’s a great live version on video from her tour of that era on YouTube. There’s something very Jig Of Life by Kate Bush about it, (which I love), in the pipes and unconventional arrangement.
I had not expected such a rendition from someone whose music filled the pop charts in my youth. As so often is the case with great musicians, there’s plenty that stays under the radar of popular consciousness, as with Karen Carpenter and her phenomenal drumming, as well as singing... I am hoping me and my man will learn this tune together over the winter. Bass, mandolin and vocals? Or whistle, drum and singing? Who knows what we’ll do, but the song has its under-hill magic in us now, so sumthing’s cumman.
Or Story, or The great Mystery, or Love.
We have passed whatever it is on well before we die, whether we like it or not.
A method taught by my late T’ai Chi Grandmaster, John Kells.
After which, it may oscillate and settle into a rhythm, which can be the seed of alchemical marriage.
Aged 12, I received prashad at Southampton Gurdwara on a visit for Religious Studies and knew I was also receiving grace. During lockdown, Sikhs in Britain continued to provide meals to anyone who came each day to a Gurdwara. Seeing this, amidst the fragmentation of my country, and the concurrent circumstances of being forced to leave my home and community in summer 2020, I was heartened. The memory has come back to me today strongly. At Langar, everyone sits in rows on the floor and eats together, with no divisions by age, sex or status. The table and the dancing floor, the place of prayer, all one.
On my little patch of land I am in the process of rooting: from the soil Ph, heavy clay and sandstone bedrock through the grasses, plants and fungi to the hedges and oaks and all the creatures that live here. It is a muddy, weatherworn, listening and opening process and my ashes will one day be scattered here. We guard this place for the future and it feel profoundly grateful for the privilege.
I’ve only just caught up with this. Thank you 🙏🏻 just what I needed to hear this morning