Lesson no. 1

Lesson no. 1

This year has bought to me many challenges in which I have had to learn deeply and honestly about myself and my interactions with the world. Throughout these past days, stretching back to new years day there have been some words of common goals from unknown faces, stories, sage scented advice and pointers that have helped me along the way. I have gone back to these 'lessons' over and over this year to bring me back to reality and to my own motivations for how I wish to take ownership on my life. This poem by Marge Piercy was the first of the lessons.


To Have Without Holding.

Learning to love differently is hard,
Love with hands wide open, love
With doors banging on there hinges,
The cupboard unlocked, the wind
Roaring and whimpering in the rooms
Rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
That twack like rubber bands
In an open palm.

It hurts to love wide open
Stretching the muscles that feel
As if they are made of wet plaser,
Then of blunt knives, then
Of sharp knives.

It hurts to thwart the reflexes
Of grab, of clutch; to love and let
Go again and again. It pesters to remember
The lover who is not in bed,
To hold back what is owed to the work
That gutters like a candle in a cave
Without air, to love consciously,
Conscientiously, concretely, constructively.

I can't do it, you say its killing
Me but you thrive, you glow
On the street like a neon raspberry
You float and sail, a helium baloon,
Bright bachelors button blue and bobbing.

On the hot and cold winds of our breath,
As we make and unmake in passionate
Diastole and systole the rhythm
Of our unbound bounding, to have
And not to hold, to love
with minimised malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.

Separation

The darkness has come
Like the nettle stings all over my knees and arms,
tingling, pulsating at the attack.
Fair play I tell myself
For I pulled out many by the roots today.
They are just trying to survive
and still as I lay beneath the blackcurrent bush
Using all my weight to pull out deep roots,
I notice how the raspberries are still raspberries
Even though they are drowning in nettles, cleavers and buttercups.

'I've done nothing wrong' you say.
'I've had something put upon me' you say.
But I have done wrong.
I have remained a girl whilst in your arms
Submissive and lazy.
I have not grown but stayed timid and disengaged
For fear of revealing parts of myself that I don't like, not ready for.
And now I am alone in the home that we built
Hating myself for not allowing those parts
to flourish and to allow you to see them.

Stolen chocolate from the chocolate box
That keeps me dependent and disenchanted
Rain pours down again, its been a while
And the pumpkin seedlings left out to harden off,
Experience it for the first time.
Such innocence being battered by the will of the skies.

I search your eyes for news of her.
I search her eyes for news of you
and yet I do not want to know.
I am ripping myself away from you both
as if I was to gut a chicken
Its uncomfortable, its undesirable
But necessary for us all to fed.

(The small black cut on the sole of my foot,
infectious and bleeding,
dirty and painful.
I want it gone
but I cannot focus enough to deal with it.
I image it going sceptic,
I see it go green and spread to my toes,
my precious toes
and I watch each one fall off in solitude)

Passion dulled to a heavy smog
licking my core out.

Dance Free

Until I can't love you anymore..

Until I can't love you anymore.
I have loved you with all I have.
And will continue until all my energy has been drained
Pulled out of my body in a vortex, spiralling in emptiness.


Until I can't love you anymore,
Tears create floods, swans sit on dirty water where fields once were.
I isolate myself on an island for a short while
To clean out the debris.

Until I can't love you anymore,
And you throw more and more my way,
Endless tests to my compassion.
And yet I still love you.

Until I can't love you anymore,
This may never be.
I will love others, just as deeply,
Responding to the rhythms.

Until I can't love anyone anymore.
And I die a little death.
For the cycles will begin again.
Loving innocently and purely. 

ljmh 2012

An abundance of abundance and beyond.

Buddhafield festival has been and gone. It was a pretty beautiful process.

There is something about arriving in an empty field and 3 and half weeks later, after building a mini community for 3000 people enjoy for 5 days, leaving an empty field.

I felt much more involved and apart of the Buddhafield community this time as I know more people and I had an actual role. I was jointly co-ordinating the decor team. Responsibility that usually scares me but it felt that I had been given an opportunity that I couldn't pass up and trying to keep hold of what I had learnt on retreat about fearlessness. I tried my best.

There were envitable meltdowns. The usual 'I'm not good enough' drones, battles of creative wills and my own personal attacks on a creative part of myself that I don't quite trust or fully understand. But I was so proud of myself for creating something that I never thought I would be capable of creating.

And I'm so proud of the team that came to help. The decor at this years festival was amazing, beautifully detailed and bringing to life more of the natural beauty of the site.

So this being that I created. The Abundance tree. The theme of the festival this year was that of Abundance and I had an idea over Christmas of something that people could write on little tags saying what they were feeling grateful for that day. So I created a tree out of willow.

Initially I was so scared about this beast of an idea that I had conjured up and had to put into action. I had no clue of how I wanted to look, what it might turn out like but with enough support and confidence from other people I got a grip of m yself and got into.

Willow is a beautiful material and weaving a beautiful action. In and out and what I really enjoyed about doing the sculpture was the how organically it grew from nothing. Thank you Claire for initiating the freedom of the weave as I was thinking far too formally about it!

Two of the best days that I have had over the last two months have been days were I have got up at sunrise and got to bed at sunset. One of these days was for the Solstice whilst I was helping to set up the cafe at Glastonbury, it was a fairly physical day but I felt I had a clarity that I hadn't felt before. The other of these days was at the festival when I got up really early and meditatively wove the trunk of the tree before breakfast and continued to put all my love and energy into it for the rest of the day.

The finished tree had everything of myself in it. It was a tree. It was woven. It had edible flowers and herbs growing out from its base, its branches were taken from the trees on site - the idea of life and death in one place. Two of my friends added lovely little details to it; dragonflies, caterpillars and charms. And Tara sat at it's base. It was my representation of nature and my representation of my creativity, my inspiration and it was a beautiful process.

And now the tree sits on a retreat site, I d on't know how it looks. I had to let go of my attachment to it, it might be burnt in a ritual or it might be brought back to me with stories to tell.

I have my own stories to write and as I sit here struggling with negativity I am trying to remember that fearlessness I felt when I put myself out there, the positivity I felt over the festival itself, the warrior in me poked her head up and I must let her rise again. I must let myself be and not let myself be bought down.

The Welfare of the Woodland

The Welfare of the Woodland.

I volunteer in a beautiful woodland in the Wensum valley, west of Norwich, in Norfolk. I came here as a WWOOFer in February and March 2010. I was humbled and grounded by the variety of habitats and species here, and the intuitive management of the woodlands owner. I am now a part of the team and volunteer here for a few months a year. This site is primarily managed for the wildlife, with a smaller area of ancient hazel coppice in which the humans can play. Storytellers come and teach children through tales and song. Sensory camps are held here for children with special needs focusing on the senses of hearing, sight, touch and the noticeable change in atmosphere experienced in moving between the woodland and the contained patch of bamboo. There is a vast reed bed around the edge of which wood cock and reed warblers nest, and deer forage. The site also has a large blackthorn thicket in which Nightingales nest. Nightingales are officially endangered.
From the amount of different habitats, this feels like a place that must have a very industrious history but it now has been reclaimed by wildlife as a haven from the open spaces around. It has been a brilliant place for me to come and learn the art of coppicing, traditional sustainable crafts, woodland management and stepping lightly on the land.
Unfortunately, there are power lines that run through the land. They run over the bamboo island, through the reed bed, over the dense blackthorn thicket and off out into the rest of Norfolk. The power lines mean biannual maintenance work by the energy company, and in the time of the woodlands current management there has never been a problem.
This year was different and the maintenance company got it wrong. An in depth meeting was held with the maintenance company, and the trees to be cut and trimmed were decided upon but this information did not reach the operatives that carried out the work. Trusting that the operatives were aware of the plans in place, they were left to work unsupervised, and when the owner of the woodlands, returned, she found what looks like a super highway cut through the reed bed, through the blackthorn thicket, through the bamboo island. Vital shrub margins along the edge of the reed bed have been decimated. The shrub margins themselves are an NVC (Natural Vegetation Classification) in their own right. A 1/3 of the ancient blackthorn thicket has been destroyed.
There had been no attempt made to look at the site immediately before the work was started. The blackthorns do not grow anywhere the height of the power lines, branches and trunks were cut that would have no impact if they fell, and yet obviously over hanging branches have been left, trees have been left unstable, making them more likely to fall on the lines. The stumps have been cut into with a cross hatched pattern, causing them to rot easily, thus making them unable to produce any harvestable re-growth.
I do not wish to name this company nor want to incite hatred towards them, I merely want to bring awareness to this situation and to the welfare of our woodlands in general. They are so important for the wildlife that live in them and for the humans that rely on them: more awareness is needed. More attention is needed to what makes the woodland tick. There must be an intelligent and insightful compromise when dealing with the necessary maintenance work on sites of this delicate nature and if left in the wrong hands, hands of people ignorant to these delicate ecosystems, our woodlands will be destroyed before we know it. There is an example of this kind of ignorance here and it is just a matter of waiting for the spring to take hold of the days to see what has been destroyed forever.

This article is to be published in Living Woods magazine and Permaculture magazine.

I believe, I believe.

No, there are no fairies in this woodland,

I believe, I believe.

But to see an old ash stump, covered in trooping crumble caps

Growing out of the soft green moss,

Like the ones that where there one day

On the great old black poplar tree.

Thoughts of fairy cities are conjured

And I take off in search of stories.

And though no fairies live in this garden

I believe in the majesty of nature.

I believe. I believe

That nature fills us with marvellous visions

And the glory of that is enough.

(But still, the idea of fairies has its own faculty in my imagination.

A search for stories of magical beings

Float around it’s own little mushroom world.)

Now my childlike joy of otherworld beings

Runs alongside my joy of nature.

The fascinating sights and sounds

That would usually pass most by

Have captured mine fully and I can tell you,

(I believe, I believe)

That I heard a hillside of bluebells

Closing up for the night to get some glorious rest.

(And that sound of gentle raindrops pattering on ancient oak leaves was actually bluebells snapping shut).

A rapturous round of applause at the end of a startling day.

And as my imagination is fed more by amazing reality,

My mind has more space.

In my stillness, one moment of clarity,

Sunshine through a green leaf is a pure light.

Amazing reality offers me more and more each day.

The subtle movements of a tree,

I believe, I believe

Like a pair of lungs exhaling

And inhaling.

Grounds impermanent me.

ljmh Nov 2010