I am lost amongst the heather, at sea
in an ocean of dusty fragrant purple. Walking down the coast towards Westleton,
I’ve taken a cut across Dunwich Heath. I
do this walk almost every year as summer tilts into autumn, but somehow I
always lose my way. I’ve arrived at one of the silver sanded tracks that wend
across this luminous landscape, fringed with birch and lime woods. Do I go left or right? The left will take me
back to the visitor centre, which peeks above the Scot’s pine like a cliff top
beacon, and the right will take me towards a place I cannot see.
I’m not going to get it right this year either. I will
plunge myself into a repeat cycle: following the path that goes alongside the
reed beds, getting frustrated, losing time, asking visitors who know the heath
even less than I do, and finally, taking
a risk, I will double back on myself and come across a tall old man with a
scythe cutting bracken, who points out the way.
It turns out I was on the right path all along, just going
in the wrong direction.
Anchors
Last week my neighbour David Moyse was buried in the local
churchyard. His grandparents once lived in my house, a brick cottage tied to
the local farm. His grandfather was in charge of the horses that ploughed all
the surrounding fields, his father was the village blacksmith. In the church,
listening to his childhood friend Ruth talk about his working life as an
engineer, it sounds like a litany of enterprises that were once intrinsic to
every country neighbourhood: the dairy, the laundry, the school.
The following autumn David gave me a bag of his home-growngreen tomatoes, and I made chutney for both our larders. It was the first
direct exchange I made in my new neighbourhood, and the encounter formed the
basis of most of the Transition pieces I then wrote about making ourselves at
home. David gave us wood when he chopped his trees, he lent us his mower when
ours broke down. But most of all he was always there at the top of the lane,
like a guardian of the place, the church steeple keeper and key holder, the
history man of the village. We always waved at each other, as we cycled by. Here we are, here we are!
For years I yearned to return to the countryside I had once
encountered when I was young. For a long time I thought this was a nostalgia
for a summer seaside childhood – an escape to a rural idyll from a cynical city
world. When I came to live in Suffolk I realised it wasn’t a personal longing:
the sparkling sea, the rustling marsh, the big sky, the oak that spread its
arms wide, the scent of marram on a hot July day were all part of my becoming
a real human being. Which is to say a human being who is at home on the Earth.
This wasn’t just about having a relationship with the land. It was also about
recognising the people who were already anchored in the territory.
David was like the country people I knew when I was a child,
who were fierce and yet kindly, who grew cabbages and dahlias in their gardens,
who knew the names of the birds and kept their tools in good order. And
although we were from a different generation and different backgrounds, we
loved the same place.
When he died, it was as if a great ship had been unmoored,
and you could no longer hear its mast stays rattling in the wind. That’s when I
realised at some point you have to become the kind of people you want to see in
the neighbourhood. And perhaps the greatest gift I have gleaned from Transition
is a narrative, a frame of how to become an anchor in a place. A chance to
start again.
Relocalisation has been a task. Because there is a big
restlessness in the world. I am one of millions of disconnected people yearning
to belong, who at the same time, are pulled and pushed by a culture that
demands that everyone moves all the time.
What happens when you stop? What happens when you don’t
leave? What happens if you go to the place where your heart leads you to go,
and are prepared to forego the conveniences and glamour of an urban, consumer-driven
life?
Downturns
There are stats you come across when you run a newspaper
about grassroots activism that make the environmental and social challenges we
face very clear. One of them is that 86% of energy in the UK comes from fossil
fuels. The other is that the UK also has the richest and poorest neighbourhoods
in Europe. We are more unequal and less prepared for a low-carbon future than
most other countries.
When I first came to the lane I interviewed a man called
John Minahane who had given up his city life to live in the country. He was the
warden of a reserve, rich in salt and freshwater plants.
“You can
make a living here, if you are not proud,” he told me. And though this may be
true of many places, you have to have strong reasons for taking a deliberately
downward step, and something you love to sustain you. For John, this was a
grand vision for a handful of scratch meadows on the curve of the road to
Southwold. He wanted to create a habitat for bitterns. And in the last decade
of his life he did: he helped transform
those fields into reed marshes, that now house otters and water voles, as well
as the shy booming birds he loved.
Looking at the stats it’s clear a lot of us need to take a
downward step if we truly wish to live in a sustainable world. What stops us
are the pleasures of being a visitor, granted by the use of fossil fuels:
holidays, cheap fancy food, the individualistic lives we can control at the
flick of a switch. In harder times, our pride will not help us. But nature
will, if we can access it in our ordinary lives.
For the last six years I’ve been involved in a collective
practice that you can do (almost) for free anywhere: growing veg, saving seeds, living with the seasons,
making plant medicine, walking, wild swimming, foraging, chopping firewood.
Learning to see the working of the universe in the small beauty of everyday
things.
These are not, I’ve learned, add-on skills: these are skills
that signify and embody a different way of being on the planet. In the opening
essay of the latest edition of Dark Mountain, The Focal and the Flask, Tom Smith discusses the difference between
the technology-based world and a human-framed ‘focal’ one – where cultures are built around the
collective focus of a fire. Focal things ‘involve real reconnection with
people, species and landscapes… entail greater involvement, greater work and
knowledge, greater negotiation with others, all often seen as inconveniences in
the narrative of modernity.”
To reverse the destiny of our restless machine-driven world
we need to take up practices that go in another direction entirely. We need to
learn another way of relating to and framing our lives, the practices another
generation knew.
Harvests
You can’t take a downswing without the planet’s help, and
how you get that help is not done by pushing buttons or paying money. It is
done the slow way, the hard way, with encounter, with patience, with loss, with
solitude, with exchange. By walking in the opposite direction of restlessness.
By knowing a place deeply and intimately, and not wanting to be anywhere else.
You can’t become a belonger on holiday or at a festival, on a
retreat or at a workshop. You do it by immersing yourself in a neighbourhood
over time, and not moving. And when the romance and nostalgia have blown away
like chaff from these seeds, the territory will reveal itself for what it truly
is. These moments appear like the flash of dragonfly wings, like a shooting
star at dawn, and you need to be alert to recognise them:
“You mean
Minsmere Woods?” the old man said, as he paused with his great scythe. “Well,
if you follow the track over this rise you will find a kissing gate. Go through
the gate, and you will be there.”
Dunwich Heath, 2014; bunch of asporagus kale and kale buds from the veg patch; Hen Reed Beds; one of the archive photographs from David Moyse's book about Reydon, The Village Where I Went to School, published by Southwold Press and available from Wells of Southwold or Boyden Stores, Reydon, £7; EarthLines Spring Issue 2015
Dark Mountain: Issue 20 - ABYSS is available 