The Inward Eye

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are my 2 favourite English Romantic poets. I've been reminded of Wordsworth this springtime by the lavish displays of daffodils in park, orchard and garden; and by the yellow-and-green woodland carpets of the shyer, more retiring lesser celandine. Wordsworth wrote poems about both flowers, though his 3 poems on the celandine are perhaps less memorable than his justly famous and much quoted poem about the 10,000 daffodils dancing in the breeze: I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud. This is as perfect a poem as you might ever wish for. It's very familiar, I know - but just read it again, as if for the first time, without any clouding thoughts or prejudice, and I think you'll find it a pure delight:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed - and gazed - but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

This was one of Wordsworth's poems (there were big chunks of other poems of his too) I had to learn by rote as a teenager at school in the 1960s. (I've written before about learning poems off by heart here.) I've loved his poetry ever since, even though you sometimes have to sift through reams of more uneven and pedestrian material to find the real thing. This can often be the case with prolific poets - for, even if they show a rare poetic genius, they can't be first-rate all the time. It's rather comforting to know that a genius is only human after all. But I digress.

Wordsworth penned some exquisite short poems (eg Song and Stepping Westward) and sonnets (eg The World Is Too much With Us and Composed Upon Westminster Bridge), and a variety of longer, more discursive poems which are nothing short of sublime (eg Ode and Lines Written A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey). The best passages in his best poems remain unsurpassed by any poet - except Shakespeare (and no one can surpass Shakespeare). The magnificent, long, autobiographical poem The Prelude is his masterpiece, a poem I dip into for inspiration time and again.

You sense in many of his poems (eg The Solitary Reaper, The Ruined Cottage, The Old Cumberland Beggar) that Wordsworth identified strongly and sympathetically with pedlars, beggars, shepherds, poverty-stricken cottagers, and other solitaries and vagrants; I think he wrote somewhere that, if fate had turned out slightly differently, he could easily have been one of society's outsiders like them, poor in coin but not deprived in spirit, full of fortitude and a secret wisdom such as that shown by the leech-gatherer in the poem Resolution And Independence.

Finally, and returning again to I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud - if I had to point out one of Wordsworth's recurrent and major themes, it's encapsulated completely and unambiguously in this short, well known poem about daffodils. The theme concerns how you can have a direct, immediate, life-enhancing, joyful experience of nature (often when young and 'thoughtless'); and then how you might later recapture and relive the experience in comfortable solitude using one's imagination or 'inward eye'. This idea of the recollection and attempted recovery of past, quasi-mystical experiences (usually from one's childhood) is explored in many of Wordsworth's poems. But more of this in subsequent posts...

(Thanks to Riverdaze for being one of the inspirations behind this piece.)

Dogging It In Duke's Wood

Duke's Wood, near Eakring, Notts, was the site of the UK's first oilfield. Thanks to the expertise of American oilmen, by the start of WWII 170 'nodding donkeys' were pumping 64 barrels of oil a day, and 1200 people were employed here. In 1989 British Petroleum donated the land to the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust. Now it's a delightful area of broadleaf woodland, and only the odd ghost from the past remains (see pic below of a preserved 'nodding donkey').

Yesterday I went for an idling walk in this wood. The sun shone, the sky billowed with cotton wool cumulus clouds, and spring flowers studded in profusion the dappled woodland floor and the edges of the woodland brakes and rides. The flowers of red campion and stitchwort were just opening - stitchwort so-called because herbalists used to prescribe it for 'stitch' and other pains in the side. Bluebells rubbed stalks with celandines - a classic blue-and-yellow spring woodland combination. Cowslips dotted the open grassy glades, and bird's-eye speedwell lined the paths and tracks - named 'speedwell' because it was known to heal wounds effectively and aid a speedy recovery.

The golden flowers of primrose and yellow archangel lit up various shady corners ('archangel' after the Archangel Michael, guardian against evil spirits). I also found patches of wood anemones, some of my favourite springtime flowers, their delicate heads - coloured off-white with a tinge of pink and lilac - drooping in the shade. They're also known as windflowers, reputedly because the flowers won't open till the wind blows. Their fragile appearance is deceptive, as they can actually withstand the wind rather well.

Common dog violets grew shyly in the shadow of oak and ash, hazel and birch. The dogwood shrub is also found here - the epithet 'dog' meaning 'inferior' in this old usage: the odourless dog violet is supposedly inferior to the scented sweet violet, and the dogwood a producer only of bitter, inedible berries; dog rose the 'underdog' of the cultivated garden rose, and dog's mercury second cousin to annual mercury, which was once considered a useful folk medicine. The leaves of dog's mercury carpeted vast swathes of Duke's Wood; the flowers had not yet emerged. Myself, I like the 'doggy' plants. I don't think they're inferior at all!

Contact! Contact!

In wilderness is the preservation of the world. HENRY THOREAU.

Continuing my exploration of Richard Mabey's insightful book, Nature Cure, I found this, his belief about wilderness: Truly wild places should be for the wild creatures that live there, and only secondarily to give us revelatory experiences. If we go into them it should be as a privilege, and on the same terms as the creatures that live there, unarmed and on foot. They cannot be treated as convenience habitats, available off-the-peg...

150 years earlier, Thoreau spoke in favour of the tangled fringes of Walden Pond in Walden; Or Life In The Woods; and in Walking And The Wild he wrote: I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village... When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of nature.

For Mabey, his renewed appreciation of what he calls the unmanaged energy of nature is a key element in his recovery from depression and breakdown. Thoreau too found release and illumination in his contact with what Mabey describes as nature's membrane, pulsing with interconnected life, busy with communications: Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact!

But it isn't only wilderness, or deep woods and dank swamps, that can provide a 'nature cure'. Country walking pure and simple can help sort out emotional and mental problems (Solvitur ambulando, as the Romans put it). And, as Mabey states: The medievals made mass pilgrimages to rustic shrines. John Keats, mortally ill with tuberculosis, fled to the Mediterranean to find that 'beaker full of the warm South', away from that place 'where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.' 'The country, by the gentleness and variety of its landscapes,' wrote the philospher Michel Foucault, 'wins melancholics from their single obsession by taking them away from the places that might revive the memory of their sufferings'.

Perhaps The Time To Dance Is Now

I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking. PAUL VALÉRY.

Dance is the hidden language of the soul. MARTHA GRAHAM.

Dance first. Think later. It's the natural order. SAMUEL BECKETT.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to seek, and a time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to throw away; A time to tear, and a time to sew; A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate, A time for war, and a time for peace. ECCLESIASTES 3: 1-8

Crane Dance

The cranes' full dance eludes me... Yet it's been a compelling, infectious motif throughout history. A crane dance was performed by Theseus on his return from Crete with the youths and maidens he had freed...There was a 'dance of wild cranes' in China in 500 BC with a ritual pattern so similar it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the two were related... John Clare describes a dance called 'acting the crane' which was played at the Harvest Home feast... In nineteenth-century America, when whooping cranes were still common, the Florida backwoods naturalist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote an evocative account of their evening ceremonials: 'The cranes were dancing a cotillion as surely as it was danced at Volusia. Two stood apart, erect and white, making a strange music that was part cry and part singing. The rhythm was irregular, like the dance...

From Richard Mabey's book Nature Cure.

(Photo taken last year at Pensthorpe Nature Reserve in North Norfolk. Double-click to enlarge.)

Human Dance

Thanks to Val over at www.mattersofintegrity.com for bringing this exuberant video into my orbit.

Radiant

Today, as I travelled between Lincoln and Caistor, the countryside was a dazzle of fresh green leaves and new green corn shoots; pink and white blossom; the bright yellow flowers of celandine, dandelion and oilseed rape.

Later, back home, the late afternoon sun fell slantingly over the village, bathing the churchyard in a warm and glowing light.

Play

At times it seems as if the whole company of nature, ourselves included, is simply at play.

It's evident to me that animal 'play' happens out of sheer spontaneous joy, curiosity and invention - rather than purely to fulfil some narrow, evolutionary purpose. Look at puppies running after a ball. Lion cubs pouncing on their mothers' tails. Young polar bears play-fighting. Dolphins blowing bubbles, chasing them to the water's surface, then bursting them. Homo sapiens applying pigments such as ochre, manganese oxide and charcoal to cave walls and with them creating images of horses and bison, aurochs and reindeer.

Play is the opposite of Management by Objectives, the current creed which rigidly screens out spontaneity, imagination and surprise as parts of the creative process.

Spontaneity. Imagination. Surprise. All of which, at least for me, are essential to the human experience. And the animal one too?

So many of the transactions between different organisms seem almost incidental, wildly gratuitous.

What is the nature, the meaning of these 'gratuitous transactions'? To my mind they can't be completely understood simply by following worthy-but-dull, cause-and-effect scientific reasoning. Is 'sympathetic magic' coming into play?

(All quotations come from Richard Mabey's book Nature Cure. All opinions are mine alone.)

The Sound Of Spring

The temple bell stops/But I still hear the sound/Coming out of the flowers. BASHO.

Spring arrived with a fanfare of flowers in our sunlit garden this afternoon.

Sympathetic Magic: All Is Metaphor

Every tree is strange to me. JOHN CLARE (Written during his illness).

Some time ago I read Nature Cure, Richard Mabey's confessional book about his nervous breakdown. (I mentioned this book recently, and Beating The Bounds blogged about it here.) Mabey recounts how his recovery was made possible thanks to writing, the kindness of friends, and the love and dedication of one particular woman. With the help of these he was finally able to re-establish, as a human being and as a natural history writer, his connection with the natural world - in an East Anglian setting of fen and breckland, under huge skies, between long horizons, and in the company of multifarious wild plants and birds.

In chapter 4, The Naming Of Parts, Mabey writes: Certainly... a natural science confined to the naming of parts and simplistic models of cause and effect is neither adequate nor particularly helpful in describing a world in which memory, feeling, spontaneity and a growing and necessary sense of the wholeness of things are intertwined.

He amplifies this by introducing the ancient and primitive belief in 'sympathetic magic': Sympathetic magic is often simplified to the formula of 'like cures (or generates) like'; but it is really a more comprehensive (and seemingly almost universal) approach to the search for order and connectivity in nature. At its heart is the idea of analogy, the ecological, if 'un-scientific', belief that the different layers of life are not only connected, but in some way physical reflections - metaphors, if you like - of each other. Exterior likenesses are clues to inner processes and likely resonances. The shape and colour of plants reveal their powers. The mating dances of animals, if mimicked by humans, will make the animals more prolific - and maybe the dancers, too. The woodpecker thunders, and the heavens will thunder as well. (In the myth and folklore of many cultures woodpeckers are believed to foretell rain, influence the growth of crops, even predict the future.)

Mabey makes clear that Sympathetic magic isn't some primitive stage on the upward journey towards real science. It's a different way of understanding and, its followers hope, influencing the world. It begins with observations and experiences, but then, instead of attempting to explain these by reducing them to ever smaller and more discreet parts or 'atoms', looks at them more broadly until they seem to fit into the weave of the world.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as unscientific, New Age nonsense, but I think it deserves more serious consideration. I myself think it's an exciting, provoking, imaginative and wholly different way of looking at the world - one that I (and I suspect many of us) have likely been practising all the while without realizing it. The poetry of William Blake fits in very well with this holistic world view - as do the Gaia theories of James Lovelock (to quote a quite different sage from more modern times).

One example of this approach (which is beyond the purely taxonomic or test-by-theory methods - and more inclusive, as it brings together the personal and the human, observation and memory, both science and art) is the idea of 'play' in the animal world. Consider the acrobatic jackdaws I saw on my recent walk, swifts screaming in fast and joyful flight, kittens mock-fighting, humans messing about with paint or clay or words. I think you'll find that science alone hasn't yet come up with a convincing, watertight reason why animals indulge in these 'playtime' activities, 'games' which seem to serve no immediately 'useful' purpose, and which seem to arise from no other motives than pure pleasure and delight.

More of all this in a coming post... But in the meantime, can I ask: do you believe in sympathetic magic? Is it the stuff of mysticism, or is it really, objectively out there? I'd like to believe so.

Wherein Does Our Finchness Lie?

What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there's no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it's the thing that gets us through. The 12 separate varieties of finches that Charles Darwin found on the Galápagos Islands had all made local adaptations, but when the ornithologist John Gould examined Darwin's specimens in 1837, he could see that these were not different birds, but 12 variations of the same bird. In spite of random mutation and natural selection, their finchness, their essence, was intact.

As individuals, as communities, as nations, we are the constant adapters of ourselves, and must constantly ask ourselves the question wherein does our finchness lie: what are the things we cannot ever give up unless we wish to cease to be ourselves?

Salman Rushdie writing about adaptation in The Guardian Review, Saturday 28 February 2009.

Easter: An Alternative View

The cathedral church of Sefwi-Wiawso, set on the top of a hill in a remote part of western Ghana, looks out over miles of what was once forest. The land from here and across the border to nearby Ivory Coast is where the majority of the world's chocolate comes from. The chances are the chocolate in your Easter egg comes from somewhere nearby. But in order to produce more chocolate, vast areas of the forest have been hacked down and converted to cocoa production, with the result that much of the good soil is washed away when the rain comes.

There are echoes here of past miseries. For the European sweet tooth drove the slave trade in the 18th century, creating the demand for sugar that led to the capture and forced deportation of millions of Africans to work on the plantations of the new world. Huge seaside forts were built on the then Gold Coast to act as holding pens for slaves. And above these prisons, the Europeans built their churches and chapels. Given the way Christianity arrived on the west coast of Africa, it amazes me that it has flourished as it has.

Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney (from The Merciful Crucifixion, an article in The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009).

Enlightened Thinking

Recently Gleaner-Of-Possibilities wondered whether 'the transformative ideas of the Enlightenment' were under threat. Commenting on her post, I cast some doubt on certain aspects of Enlightenment thinking, its unquestioned belief in the efficacy of 'progress', and so on. In one of those coincidences quite common to bloggers, I read several days later in The Saturday Guardian a review of a newly published collection of writings by the philosopher John Gray about this very subject. I quote:

It is not too much to say that Gray considers the Enlightenment to have been little short of a catastrophe, for it was the philosophers, unconsciously pining for the certainties of the old religion, who instituted the notion of the human adventure as an ever-ascending journey towards perfection and worldly redemption. For Gray, the Enlightenment idea of the soul progressing in tandem with technological advances is pernicious. Progress in science is real - painless dentistry and the flush lavatory, he concedes, are certain goods - but spiritual progress is a myth. 'Scientific and technological advance had not, and cannot, diminish the realm of mystery and tragedy in which it is our lot to dwell.'

Gray is rightly dismissive of contemporary millenarianism which, until very recently, considered that we had arrived at the 'end of history' and the dawn of a new age of endless expansion - 'the project of promoting maximal economic growth is, perhaps, the most vulgar ideal ever put before suffering humankind' - and sees, in the destructive and exploitative activities of Homo Sapiens, an unwilled urge towards our destruction. He argues for an entirely reformed attitude to the world and our place in it, and above all urges that we relinquish the delusion of progress.

'The idea of progress is detrimental to the life of the spirit, because it encourages us to view our lives, not under the aspect of eternity, but as moments in a universal process of betterment. We do not, therefore, accept our lives for what they are, but instead consider them always for what they might someday become.'

Now, philosophically speaking, I agree with what Gray says. But he raises far more questions than he answers. Sure, you can't confuse spiritual and material progress - the two are entirely different beasts. And yes, the era of 'endless expansion' has imploded suddenly, inevitably, faced with the current global economic meltdown.

But we're still left with the issue of how practically to solve the big, environmental problems of the day - and potentially catastrophic ones at that: climate change, global warming, eco-devastation, the biological ill-health of the planet. It's 'science' - coupled indeed with moral and spiritual thinking - that must clarify and in the end solve these problems. Just as it was 'science' which caused them in the first place.

(John Gray's book, Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings, is published by Allen Lane.)

Wasn't Born To Follow

She may beg and she may plead and she may argue with her logic/Mention all the things I’ll lose that really have no value/Tho’ I doubt that she will ever come to understand my meaning/In the end she’ll surely know I wasn't born to follow. Wasn't Born To Follow. GOFFIN & KING.

The legendary Carole King is over in the UK at the minute promoting her Tapestry: The Legacy Edition release. I remember that record was never far away from my turntable in the early 1970s - along with James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, John Lennon's Imagine and Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Yeah, I know, maverick bolshie bloggers that we are, we 'wasn't born to follow', right? Nevertheless -I finally got round to putting up the 'Followers' widget on my blog.

So I suppose that's OK, then. Blogs is different. You know they are! We can now follow (at least a little bit). Without a trace of guilt or the tiniest compromise to our rebellious individualism!

I'm quite overwhelmed by the steady stream of visitors to my blog - both the one-offs and occasionals, and the loyal core who come back time and again. Thanks so much for reading - and commenting. I do appreciate it.

The Ramblers' Church

From Walesby village, the centre point of my figure-of-eight walk, I made a gentle ascent along a grassy ridge to the small farming community of Normanby-le-Wold. (Normanby's just south of completely unremarkable Wolds Top, at 168 m the highest top in the county, which I've described before here.) I ate my packed lunch on a convenient bench opposite St Peter's Church...

... and watched a flock (the archaic collective noun is a 'clattering') of noisy jackdaws - there must have been around 50 or 60 - cavorting acrobatically over the churchyard, riding the wind, seemingly for the pure pleasure of it. It was too cold to sit for long - the chill wind reminding me that winter had not long departed despite the colourful riot of spring flowers in the cottage gardens - so I quickly made my way back to Walesby. Nowadays the village lies wholly at the foot of the escarpment, but in former times it clustered at the top of the slope - as the humps and bumps ( signs of earlier dwelling places) in the fields testify. The only building that remained of the previous settlement was All Saints' Church, which popped up suddenly among trees on the skyline...

This church fell into disuse as the villagers gradually moved downhill, and was almost demolished in the 1930s, but it was saved at the last moment by the efforts of a certain Canon Harding from Lincoln. Today it remains wonderfully isolated, and atmospheric, and the interior is unspoilt and medieval. It's known as the Ramblers' Church, and once a year, on Trinity Sunday, a special service is held there for walkers, cyclists and lovers of the countryside. Inside I found two rather serious, fresh faced walkers depicted in a stained glass window...

Leaving the church a tad reluctantly, I headed up and over the hill, and followed the Viking Way back to Tealby and my starting point. This was my last view of the lovely Ramblers' Church. Note the yellow and black Viking Way marker...

On the way I skirted yet more chalky fields and noticed nodules of flint embedded in some of the lumps of limestone. (This underlying band of chalk sweeps south from the Wolds, then roughly south-west into Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and ends up at the crumbling cliffs of Dorset.) A redwing flew past - I could see quite clearly its red underwing and dark eye stripe - and fieldfares too were still about (once previously I'd seen a great gathering of fieldfares, hundreds strong, sitting in a ploughed field, all absolutely motionless and all pointing the same way). Both birds were a further reminder that the winter cold was still not quite behind us - though both these winter visitors seem to be staying south for longer and longer each year. Yet another sign of global warming?

The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine

On my wolds walk I couldn't help realizing how my interest lay not in the prairie-like, uniformly cultivated fields, nor in the large industrial pine plantations - but in the fields' edges, in the hedged borders and ditches of the lanes, in the grassy banks of the byways, in the broad roadside verges. In the field boundaries straggly with wind-beaten trees. In the tussocky wasteland areas, and in the few odd corners of marsh and fen which had survived undrained and undeveloped. In the tiny remnants of copse and spinney which had escaped axe and chainsaw. In the sunken ways and sparkling green lanes weaving and winding among monotonous acres of cereal crops and factory farms. In the scattered scarp slopes too steep for ploughing and tilling -which had been left, undisturbed, to the gorse bushes and the sheep.

It was in these marginal strips, these border territories, these wayside edges, these 'unproductive' fringes, these fertilizer-free zones, that my imagination was stirred. Or, to put it a different way, here were the most interesting, the most biologically diverse ecosystems. I forgot the big picture, and absorbed the smaller details. But in fact the smaller details were the big picture. Here, in these narrow green corridors and isolated verdant corners, remained some of the ancient wildness of nature, with its greater variety of species, and its microcosmic beauty. Here was the true, the old countryside.

(My photo shows a single Scots Pine by the side of my path, at the border of a field and on the brow of a hill somewhere between the villages of Tealby and Walesby. It looks as if it's on the edge of the world.)

To be continued...

Top Of The Wold

From an old-fashioned village butcher's shop I followed a rising lane bordered with banks of pale-yellow primroses and starry golden celandines. In the shadier spots grew wild arums (aka Lords and Ladies or cuckoo-pints) - their glossy green arrowhead-shaped leaves newly emerged (the flowers would come later, protected by a broad greenish-yellow hood or 'spathe'). A Brimstone butterfly flickered past.

A path led north-west out of Tealby over the shoulder of a hill and down to a minor road lined with blackthorn and hawthorn hedges. Some of the hawthorn was already in soft green leaf; other leaf buds had yet to unfurl. With blackthorn the flowers arrive first - you could see them in tightly packed buds looking like a dusting of snow on the black, spiny branches.

From some nearby trees came the call of a chiffchaff, one of our earliest spring migrants - 'sooweet! sooweet!' - and then its two-note song - 'chiff, chaff, chiff, chaff' - cut through the air like a whip. Except that the song was more like 'chiff, chaff, chaff, chiff, chaff, chiff, chiff'. Variations on a simple theme. It remained obstinately out of view - though normally these small, green-brown warblers are easy to spot at this time of year before the onset of foliage and flower.

My route would trace a figure-of-eight pattern along the chalk escarpment of the western wolds, connecting three villages - Tealby, Walesby and Normanby-le-Wold. In common with many places in east Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, their names end in the suffix 'by' - denoting settlements of Scandinavian origin. Yes, 12 hundred years ago the Vikings were here. Indeed, part of my walk coincided with the Viking Way, a present-day long distance footpath meandering from the river Humber to the shores of Rutland Water.

From a windswept grassy ridge I could just make out the smudge of Lincoln cathedral on the westerly horizon. In between scarp and skyline stretched a vast flat plain of heavy clay soils and agri-business fields, broken up by the occasional conifer plantation. To the east was a more varied, gently rolling landscape of cultivated farmland (notice the faint gleam of chalk shining through the light sandy soil of the tilled field in the picture) and rough sheep-pasture - a typical wolds backdrop of big skies and wide, open views:

From an adjacent copse I heard the croaking calls of invisible pheasants, and two partridges exploded from scrubby grass at a field boundary, whirring away like clockwork toys on stiff, downturned wings...

To be continued...

Borderland/Heartland

I live in a village on the county border of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. I've always been attracted to borders, margins, the edges of things. I feel at home there. Perhaps it's because borders are a little insecure, a little unstable, neither one thing nor the other but a little of both: a no-man's land. The shifting nature and illusory quality of border regions definitely stirs something deep and inexplicable within me. Is this why I feel at home on the Camino? Or am I just some restless spirit, doomed never to find his geographical or spiritual home? Strangely, most of my life I've never actually lived on the edges or extremities of countries. Most of my life I've lived in various parts of Middle England. But I've always dreamed of living in the Pyrenees, that exciting mountainous frontier between France and Spain; or anywhere on the coast; or in the far north of Scotland, or the furthest west of Brittany. I've written before about borders here.

For some reason I was thinking about all these things on a walk I did today. I hadn't been out on a proper walk for ages, what with one thing and another - and this morning I was really relishing the prospect of a good long walk in the countryside. The day dawned dull and grey, but by late morning the sky had cleared and the sun was playing hide-and-seek with the clouds, so I set out for Tealby in the Lincolnshire Wolds. I'd resolved earlier in the year to get to know better the land on my own doorstep.

The Wolds are a series of low chalk hills and steep-sided valleys in the heart of Lincolnshire. They were designated an Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in 1973. All Saints' Church, Tealby, is perfectly situated on the hill at the top end of this picturesque village...

To be continued...

G20: We're All In This Together

Bob Geldof at the G20 Summit in London yesterday talked to reporters about free trade and free money...

A retreat into protectionism is a retreat to militarism and national bankruptcy. We will ruin countries and in their ruin they will strike out. That is what happens. We require the exact opposite of protectionism. We require expansionism. Where can we expand into and take part in trade? The great triumph of the 21st century is the lifting of 400 million people in China out of extreme poverty through trade. What is significant about this crisis is the lack of trade. It has shut down and we are losing jobs.

It's quite right that there are thousands of people protesting about bankers sticking their noses in the trough while regulators looked the other way and governments smiled as the tax take grew. But the truth is that they may as well protest against themselves, because we sucked on the tit of free money and the bloated bubble that burst was us.

In a globalised world, defending the interests of the poor is now in the self-interest of rich nations. If we are to have a proper lifestyle for ourselves and our kids we need to understand that globalisation is not some abstraction. It is a reality. Global inter-connectedness is not going away. It requires co-operation.

Looking strictly to the national interest is impossible, reductionist, unnecessary. Global co-operation must be the political paradigm for the 21st century or else watch out for the new global disorder.

Yep, money ain't free. And freedom ain't just about money. (But a little of it helps.)

I do agree with everything Geldof says here.

Talkers And Dreamers

There had never been anything wrong in my life that a few good days in the wilderness wouldn't cure. PAM HOUSTON

Richard Mabey, one of our foremost English nature writers and compiler of Flora Britannica (about the folklore of British plants), published in 2005 a highly personal memoir called Nature Cure which documented his nervous breakdown. His recovery is closely bound up with his rediscovery of and reconnection with the natural world. He says this about language and nature: It is as if in using the facility of language, the thing we believe most separates us from nature, we are constantly pulled back to its, and our, origins... Learning to write again was what finally made me better - and I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it... Culture isn't the opposite or contrary of nature. It's the interface between us and the non-human world, our species' semi-permeable membrane. This is in fact similar to what The Grizzled Scribe was saying in his comment on my post from yesterday.

Mabey cites various writers who have explored this 'interface' - Aldo Leopold, Henry Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, and the poet John Clare, of whom he writes: Clare was one of the few writers... to have created a language that joined rather than separated nature and culture. I would also add the name of Edward Abbey to this list - for out of the wild anarchy and bitter irony, the anguish and contradictoriness of Desert Solitaire, comes a plea for the absolute necessity and importance of wilderness, and an appeal for a true, universal 'civilization' rather than the one-sided, prejudiced, short-sighted 'culture' of a particular society in a particular tiime and place (when his book was published, in the 1960s, issues such as overpopulation, nuclear catastrophe, industrial tourism and the destruction of wilderness were very much on Abbey's mind). Through his brilliant writing, through his words, thoughts and ideas, Abbey demonstrates (to me at any rate) very much a 'civilized' mind - pointing out as he does the gulf between mankind and nature, and hinting how it may be possible to bridge it.

Yes, language and imagination are quite definitely natural products of human evolution, and may be used by poets, by writers, by all of us in order to reconnect with the natural world, a world we lost in the Garden of Eden after the Fall from Grace (if we choose to see it in these mythological terms). As Mabey writes: We have evolved as talkers and dreamers. That is our niche in the world, something we can't undo. But can't we see those very skills as our way back, rather than the cause of our exile?

In summation of the rather difficult subject I've tried to tackle in these last few posts (hopefully I haven't tied myself in too many knots!) I'll quote Gary Snyder from his book Unnatural Writing: Consciousness, mind and language are fundamentally wild. 'Wild' as in wild ecosystems - richly interconnected, interdependent and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient and full of information... Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world. All our literatures are leavings, of the same order as the myths of wilderness people who leave behind only stories and a few stone tools. Other orders of being have their own literature. Narrative in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer, with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of bloodstains, a bit of piss, a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone.