the darkness around us is deep

I am walking towards the statue of Peter Pan. It is a cold grey winter's day in a winter that seems to go on forever. I have followed this path since I was six weeks old, when my parents brought me here to see the bronze statue of the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, the animals playing at his feet and the waterbirds on the Serpentine.

I don’t live in London anymore and it must have been years now since I walked past these stone fountains at Lancaster Gate. My parents' ashes are scattered among the horse chestnut trees at the water’s edge and I have come to touch base in a hard winter, when it seems my world has come to a grinding halt. Your parents can give you good reasons for being here, so long as you don’t get waylaid by happy family stories and too much psychology. My father was a lawyer but he dreamed of being a travelling writer, my mother was a secretary and a wife, but dreamed of being an artist and living in a community. I have lived out their dreams.

As a consequence I have also gone contrary to the bourgeois creed in which I was raised, betraying my Kensington Gardens upbringing, my class, education and everything about this city that was once my home. Sometimes you could think I had betrayed my parents too. But at a certain depth - the kind of depth that makes sense of everything, even a hard winter, when you lose the capacity to write and have three bouts of flu back to back - you  know that following the party line is not what you are doing on the planet at this point in time. Walking away from the party and putting down roots in the real earth is what you are doing, living like a creator, even though it condemns you to skirt like a fox on the edges of everything.

I can write this because when I walked down to the statue that day I saw a heron waiting on the dead poplar tree and I heard a mistle thrush singing in the undergrowth. The fishing bird that was my father and the singing bird that was my mother. It was one of those moments where the mystery of life touches you and shakes you to your core. And as I walked across the park I saw there were birds everywhere: parakeets in amongst the London planes, a bevy of swans down by the round pond being fed by children, a crow hopping warily at my feet. And underneath the sweet chestnut trees there were ghosts of wild flowers and long meadow grass that would never have been “allowed” when I was young. This was bird London, wild London. Something coming through the cracks you do not expect.

Afterwards I went to join Lucy at the South Bank for a meeting about the book we are working on called Playing for Time. We stood on Waterloo Bridge and Lucy told me how once she organised a huge pyrotechnic show on the river; how many officials behind those grey stern facades she had to negotiate with to allow this fiery theatre to take place. And then she took me to supper at a little Lebanese restaurant in Covent Garden before I caught my train home. Mezes and a glass of rose wine. I haven’t eaten a meal on white tablecloth for a long, long time. It was a big treat. It was a good day.

Wellbeing

I am not sure about the word wellbeing. I know about treasuring the good days. I understand destiny, living true to your solar core, aligned with the earth that gives you life. I understand honouring your mother and father, and the hard work of creators, what it takes to bring the fire through and hold it in the dark times. I understand walking out this equinox morning to greet the sun down the frosty lane with Mark. I understand about having a warrior attitude and a medicine attention, about finding your material, undertaking the hard inner work, turning the bad karma of empire and the dross of materialism into some kind gold for the future. But wellbeing as a measure of life?

Being at leisure, feeling comfortable, feeling OK about ourselves, like those well-serviced magazine women who do yoga, eat superfoods and find solace in novels? This feels like another kind of consumerism, a convenient barricading out of the hard facts, the reality that nothing we do in this industrialised culture is kind or good. Everything we touch or put in our mouths requires some other being’s suffering: from people, from forests, mountains, animals, fish, children, birds. How can you have wellbeing at the expense of others, without going into denial?

I have experienced a state of happiness, a lightness and ease with the world, which comes sometimes out of the blue, like a butterfly: floating like a starfish in the sea, lying under the goat willow on a spring day and hearing the return of the bees, countless mornings in the desert when I  lived there, a morning in Venezuela when we woke up and found ourselves in a tropical seatown with the whole day in front of us, a long long road in Arizona edged with sunflowers, a long long beach in California, with sealions in the surf and sanderlings running in and out.

So many mornings full of space and light and beauty when I was on the road, when I had money in my pocket and knew nothing about peak oil.

How do you have wellbeing in Transition when the moments of white tablecloths are few and the road is no longer open, and 2013 looks unaccountably harder and colder and poorer than 2012? When it has been grey for months on a damp, crowded island, and you have been in bed for weeks? How can you live well in times of unravelling, your own unravelling and the dear earth’s on which all  happiness depends?

Will you be there?

Here is a moment I had in Transition: One of the most successful meetings in Transition Norwich in fact in the early days when we were setting up the Heart and Soul, Arts, Culture and Wellbeing group. It was the one and only meeting we had on wellbeing.

Among the ten people who came that evening five were working or had worked for the NHS, one was a chemist and two of us knew about medicine plants. Each of us had brought an object to introduce our medicine stories: Mark brought a horse-chestnut tincture, Richard brought a quote from The Glass Bead Game and a small volume on homoeopathy. Alex brought a daisy. He had been at a seminar in the Schumacher Institute when the deep ecologist Arne Naess, then in his eighties, had surprised everyone as he leapt through the window with a daisy in his hands. It was the medicine of vigour, Alex said.

What made this meeting vigorous and deep was the reality we brought with us. Suddenly our discussions, which had been abstract workshop encounters, full of spiritual possibility and solace, had allowed our gritty experience of the world into the room. When some of us exchanged opinions about the modern medical system, Angie, who had been a nurse on intensive care for 19 years, said quietly:

“I hope when I need to be turned some of you will be there to turn me.”

And there was a silence in the small room. As we realised what it would mean for us to take our own health, our lives, into our own hands.

We don’t live in Never-Never land. We live in a place where we are all going to die. And because all living things die on Earth, change is possible. We have physical limits and the reality of time, and against those limits and time, all our greatness and nobility is tested. As modern people we are no longer initiated into the mysteries of life, where this kind of limit has meaning, and so to get to a realisation of our true path, we need to tap into those moments that come out of nowhere. I understand this as making space to honour the ancestors – the ones who went before – our lineage and making time to greet the sun on an equinox day, to light a fire around which we can gather and listen to each other’s stories. The work of the artist and the writer is to remind the people of those moments, so we do not follow the wrong god home and miss our star. So we set our sails in the right direction. The measure we have is not our personal wellbeing, it is an alignment we hold inside us that can help put a crooked thing straight.

We are the ones who carry the fire, even when it looks as if it has gone out. We know how to bury the dead, we know where the medicine plants grow, we know the meaning of dreams, we know how to speak to the officials, so a fiery show can happen on the River Thames, we recognise the bird when it sings, the warrior when he stands by the land. We honour the people who suffer themselves to undergo change, who give their gifts and do not give up. We are in all places, in all rooms. We are in Transition. We live in the towns and cities and down the lane. We are here. We are not going anywhere. Because there is nowhere else to go. This is what we remember. This the moment that matters. Right now, right here.

(Originally written for a week looking at wellbeing on the Transition Network)

Photos: the memory of sweet violets; on the tumulus with daffodils; with Beth on the beach; guerilla garden hellebore; equinox sun.(CDC/Mark Watson)

ARCHIVE: All Hail Great Spring!

I wrote this post two years ago at Spring Equinox at our local hotel (we were off-line in those days). Spring was late that year and may well be in 2013. However when Mark and I made our annual pilgrimage to Dunwich Woods the snowdrops and the lilies were as lovely and vibrant as ever. Even though the day was cold and grey, as it had been all February, the new season was still round the corner. Woodpeckers drumming out the trees, jackdaws eyeing up chimneys, Whatever the weather, the wild flowers are still emerging in their glory. 

Gotta remind ourselves of why we are here I said . . . .
 

It seemed like it would never come. For months the land was hard and sere and all my attention seemed to be focussed on getting from place to place, from day to day. Even Malcolm shook his head about the lateness of it, when we went to collect our vegetables. "There’s just no sun," he said. "Nothing is growing." Then today we got up at sunrise and walked down the lane and realised winter had released us. Spring was finally here. The air was soft and vibrant. The earth felt near, as if every branch had come alive, buds ready to burst. We sat beneath an oak and breathed in the morning – blackbird singing high in the boughs, hazels dripping with golden catkins. Tapping of woodpeckers, mew of a buzzard above our heads.

After five months of watching the temperature gauge hover around freezing, it had suddenly risen six degrees. Six degrees makes a difference when you are living without central heating. Nine degrees means your bones stop aching, you no longer are terminally attached to your hot bottle, living in a cocoon of cardigans, kindling, soup and hot tea. You are no longer focussed inward, you are looking out towards the horizon, the room is full of unexpected light and air. Coming back from Norwich last week after a hard day’s work the sun burst through the clouds that had enclosed us in a grey helmet it seemed for weeks. The alders shone purple along the riverbanks and in the centre of each ploughed field there crouched a familiar form:

"I wonder why are there so many hares", I said to Mark.
"It’s March", he replied sanguinely.

Late Spring, cold spring. Is this climate change or just English weather?


One thing I know, we normally greet the snowdrops in Dunwich Wood at the beginning of February and this year it was the middle of March. We sat as we always do on a fallen trunk and listened to the soft inrolling sea against the cliffs and the birdsong amongst the yew trees, immersed in the quietude of white flowers.

It’s one of those moments you take in with your whole body – eyes, hands, feet, ears. The scent of rain and salt and sweet nectar, the hairiness of bark, the stillness and high vibration of the flowers. Spokesman for the wild places, Edward Abbey once wrote to all the environmentalists who had been inspired by his radical texts (Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang) to take action on behalf of the earth. Take time, he said, to go up in to the mountains and remind yourself why you are putting yourself on the line.

It’s good advice because with all the talking about feeding the world and energy reduction, about social change and behaviour change, all those hundreds of emails and newspaper headlines taking up your attention, you can forget why you are in Transition in the first place and what it means to be alive on the earth. In winter, summer or spring.

Sometimes I dream of a world where we can walk nobly, without shame, on this planet. It’s a future I hold in my heart, ready, like a leaf, to unfurl:

Happily with abundant plants may I walk.
Happily on a road of pollen may I walk
Being as it used to be long ago may I walk.

May it be beautiful before me.
May it be beautiful behind me,
May it be beautiful below me.
May it be beauitful above me.
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty is it finished.
In beauty it is finished.



Words from a traditional Dine (Navajo) Chant; Snowdrops and Mark in Dunwich Wood, purple crocus outside my door

52 FLOWERS: moschatel

When we came to Suffolk ten years ago the first thing we did was to walk the territory. We stepped out of the door to find what plants grew in the fields and marshes, shingle banks and heaths, when they flowered in their wayside and secluded places. And in the years that followed, we would make small pilgrimages to sit amongst them, tune into the season, to the turning of the year. Under the goat willow, beside the angelica, alongside the seakale. 

We still do.

Today we went to witness the first emergence of the year, a band of snowdrops in a small clifftop wood of yews and sycamore. They mark the beginning of the flower year after a winter of semi-hibernation. The following piece was originally written for the Plant Communications section of 52 Flowers That Shook My World, and is about a moment when these visits first began. It may appear a short and seemingly insignificant entry in this decade-long log, but, like the snowdrop, it describes the power of small things at a time of shift . . . 

18
moschatel
marsh lane, suffolk
 

Before we came we imagined this house where we now live. We wrote down what we wished to find waiting for us down a Suffolk lane, the shape of the cottage walls, the colour of the gate, its glasshouse with geraniums and washing line open to the seawind. And then we discovered it amongst apples trees and blackcurrant bushes, jackdaws on the roof, sea in the distance, space all around, a ragged hedge of hawthorn and elm, a wood and marsh beyond, a barn owl flying past at twilight, and paths that lead in all directions. 

I am walking on one of these paths today in March, exploring the first flowers of the season.

Past the reedbeds now faded gold and the silhouettes of silver birch, past a grove of large leaning ash and oak, the footpath leads between pasture and barley fields, a line trodden by cantering horses and walking people, jumping stoats and fleeing rabbits, by the slow stride of pheasants and the small scurry of field voles. There are spikes of bluebell coming up either side of the path and great stands of ground ivy and lesser celandine. As I follow the curve in this circular route, I stop suddenly in my tracks, and look down at my feet. In amongst the arrow-shaped foliage, under a stand of spindly wych elm, I can see another kind of leaf,  curvy and wavy and soft, and a tiny flower I have never seen before but immediately recognise from years of reading wild flower guides.

 

Adoxa moschatellina. The flower is the only one of its kind. A plant that so defied categorisation, botanists had to give it its own house. A five sided cube-shaped green flower, sometimes fragrant, depending on the time of day. Sometimes called the town clock because of its shape. It is a delicate plant and no more than six inches high. The spinney floor is strewn with these tiny green clocks, and its collective vibration is palpable, so strong it has stopped me in my tracks. The flowers are unusual in so many ways. And yet their name means “without glory”.

You are without glory, they say to me, as I stand amongst them on this path.  It is a shock this moment. I realise that no one I have ever known in this life knows I am here. I could disappear in this moment, standing by these small flowers, and no one would notice. Everything that once defined me has vanished: the people who once shared my history, the books that are no longer in print, the by-line that has gone. No longer categorised by property, job or social position, what remains now is what always remains - the mysteriousness of the earth. Myself, Mark.

I am at the beginning of 2003. We are starting again. Our plant communcations, once closely entwined with other people, with teachings and sessions, with our inquiry into medicine flowers, have come to an end. From now on the communications will be with the land, with this solitary path before me.  I am without glory, a nobody in the world, but somehow this realisation fills me with an excitement I can hardly name. I do not have to prove myself to anyone anymore. No one will tell me how I should or shouldn’t be. And in this shocking moment I feel the whole universe open up. 

I am in my own house at last!

It is the beginning of a new territory. After many years of moving, we will grow roots here and make ourselves at home. Mark will grow the collection of seeds from our travels in the glasshouse conservatory. It is a signature year and this small plant is making me aware of its resonance and meaning: how does it feel to be without glory? 

I am walking down a flower track. It is a completely other track than all those I have walked so far, along the green river paths of Oxford, the dusty red trails of the Arizona desert. On either side are the harsh realities of modern country life: gamekeepers, guns, dogs, sulphuric acid, piles of fertiliser, dead foxes, razed flowers, derelict farm buildings, dying trees, a low and hostile frequency. But on the track there is everything you could ever want to feel: lightness, possibility, joy, beauty, freedom, colour, the high and vibrant frequency of the heart.

Time to walk it.

The flower clock faces the four directions, north south east west, with a fifth that looks up at the sky. The flower path of England stretches before me: this is how you walk it. 

You walk in four directions and look all ways, and you look up into the sky. You see the weather moving in the clouds, how the light is always changing and the starry constellations always moving, the moon that waxes and wanes. As you walk you come to know time. The moving time of the earth. You know the time of the fox calling, of the song thrush singing, the time when the red butterfly feeds on the ivy and the goldfinch on the dandelion. You smell snow and mist and rain coming in on the wind, and the scent of sweet violets as the winter turns. You see the spring coming into the hedgerows as they ribbon the land; hazel, cherry plum, blackthorn, crab apple, hawthorn, dogwood, dogrose, elderflower. 

You make a pilgrimage to the tumulus at the time when the daffodils dance, when the alders are dark and tasselled, when the stags roar. You know which berry feeds which bird, and why the clover feeds the bee. You know time from the flower collective that appears and disappears, with the neighbourhood trees in their leaf and fall, seeing how everything connects in time, As you walk, this is the time you keep: with your feet, as you walk, with the rhythm of your heart, as you walk, in time with the rabbit and the stoat, the sun and the star, and the sound of the invisible wren. This is the path of the heart.

I am without glory, but I walk a glorious path. I just have to keep walking. Holding our virtue and grace and intelligence, our own heart frequency, is what the flowers feel from us. Our recognition of beauty, our knowledge of time, our memory of how everything comes and goes and then returns. The moschatel doesn’t care whether you have friends or have succeeded in business, or own a big house. None of these things concern it. The self that walks among these flowers has nothing to do with the self that jostles for fame and glory in the human world. Human glory counts for nothing on the flower path: here your unusual presence is everything, your participation is everything. Your communication is everything.

This is what adoxa is saying on this March day. You are here, you are here, walking by me on this track. It is important you walk this track. Walking it keeps it alive. I am here, I am here, sings the chaffinch.  His song is keeping the world alive. And something extraordinary grows inside your being when you feel this. You realise in this mysterious moment there is another path to walk on this earth, apart from the ones that appear on the map and atlas, and you have just stumbled upon it. A path that goes by the big trees and the golden marsh, a green track, strewn with spring flowers, with lesser celandine and ground ivy and a tiny insignificant plant with curly leaves and five faces.

Adoxa moschatel.

It’s the only path you want to walk.

52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radcial Return to Earth is published by Two Ravens Press

holding the front page

This month a new national newspaper, Transition Free Press was launched, and because I am the editor of the paper and also involved in its funding, distribution and setting up as a social enterprise and workers' coop, blogging for Transition has taken a back seat.

After three years on-line (73 posts alone last year), I find my attention moving back to the printed page and the business of communicating the culture of downshift to a wider audience. We will continue to report here on This Low Carbon Life, but our posts will be more infrequent and perhaps hold a different content and intent. Much of what I have learned about producing a paper for these times, has been tried and tested on this blog with my fellow Transitioners and our guests, so it's a big thanks to them that this paper has its particular collaborative style and focus.

Anyway to get a flavour of our first issue I am publishing our welcome today. You can see an on-line version of the paper here. And hard copies will shortly be on sale in Norwich (£1) at The Greenhouse and also from our distributors, Chris Hull, Simeon Jackson and Lesley Grahame. Contact details are here. I will be teaching a class on Grassroots Media this Saturday at 12noon as part of the Trade School at the Common Room, Do come along if you would like to discuss the role of media in times of Transition. I'll have a stack papers too! Here's that intro:

 “More powerful than armies, more powerful than law, is culture". At the heart of this Spring edition is an interview with author and activist, Mark Boyle. In it is discussed the key story of our times - the shift from an individualistic, growth-at-all-costs culturee to one that values sharing and ccommunity. It is the ‘mission’ of this new newspaper to cover the stories that form this new emergent culture and to show how, if we take matters into our own hands, the ship that looks to be heading for disaster can be steered in a totally new direction: a future we all want to live in. 

For many of us in the Transition movement this means learning to work together --  engaging in social projects, creating community gardens, regenerating our neighbourhoods. It requires a keen awareness of the bigger picture, as well as a personal capacity to downshift and be resourceful in times of economic and environmental collapse.  

In our first issue we look unswervingly at the realities of the forces now squeezing the eco-systems and lives of people everywhere -- from the fossil fuel industry, to land rights to the global food system. We also look at the solutions communities are coming up with -- in the areas of livelihoods, education, energy and food -- the "incredible things people are doing" everywhere, as Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the movement, records in his new book, The Power of Just Doing Stuff.  We started this paper, like all good creative enterprises, on the kitchen table. We rolled up our sleeves, pooled our skills and time, and after successfully publishing a preview issue last summer, decided to launch a 4-edition pilot for 2013. All of us realised that the mainstream media were not reporting the new narrative we saw unfolding. 

So we created a newspaper which could serve in several ways: to reflect the Transition movement to the wider world; to act as a feedback loop for Transition groups, and, perhaps most importantly, to be a communications tool for the people who have yet to hear about the other story happening around the world.  Over 40 UK initiatives have signed up to distribute 10,000 copies and subsidise its printing, and so it's thanks to them you are reading this page today.   We are aware that none of this happens on its own. We are a small and resilient people, and this is a small and resilient paper, but when we connect up --  – contributors, distributors, readers all -- we become a strong and vibrant network. What the new narrative shows us is that our innate ability to face ethical dilemmas and use our imaginations is what makes us stand out and stand together as human beings.   

Can we hold together as the storm advances before us? Can we share our gifts in time? This edition is all about the people who are responding to these questions. It starts with coming home to ourselves and our neighbourhoods; to a place where we no longer feel afraid or alone, but where we can fulfil our task of being alive on this planet of intense beauty and hidden treasure. We're rooted in place and time, connected to millions of others across the world in our hearts and minds. It is our hope, dear reader, that as you hold this paper in your hands, you can join us to meet what has been called the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. 

In solidarity and joy, from all of us on the Transition Free Press: Charlotte, Alexis, Tamzin, Trucie, Marion, Jay, Mark and Mike. 

Low Carbon Cookbook - Update from the Resilient Larder

The Low Carbon Cookbook has been on the back burner for a while. First the Transition Free Press took us away from the stove (now out with great food pages edited by Tamzin Pinkerton). Then I was in bed with flu; then it was the festive season and everything in Transition came to a halt. So in the new year, I planned to report a cook-up with the Community Kitchen crew for our Happy Mondays Goes to Kerala January meal (with lovely squash curry and apple fritters).

But then it SNOWED.

Sometimes the greatest acts of invention come when you are faced with limited resources. As the year turned and the world was held in suspense, I went back to the kitchen and I realised I hadn't done much holiday prep. So, like all cooks when faced with a challenge, I went into the larder to see what I had forgotten, and might just turn into a dish.

on the shelf

Fist I found a bag of local wheat and spelt flour and discovered that flat breads from scratch - pittas and focaccias - are the easiest thing in the world to make. They went down a storm with Mark and Nick after hefty woodcutting, especially with sliced chillies from the conservatory and rosemary sprigs from the garden. Then I found a bag of dried chestnuts. Our foraged pile from local trees were toasted and eaten by the fire weeks ago, but Eloise, who comes from sweet chestnut country in France, said that people in her village boiled them up and made them into thyme-flavoured patties. So I mixed mine with parsnips and made a plate of sweet, rooty rissoles served alongside a sharp and tangy slaw (see below). Later, I bulked up a veg stew, and made a classic seasonal soup with sage, garlic and potatoes.

Another discovery was a packet of tiny chia seeds that Mark had originally sown to grow into massive blue-flowering plants. Chia is one the superfoods finding its way into uptown smoothies and granola. However it is a traditional famine food, and can be soaked in water overnight for a strong and sturdy blue porridge the next morning. I cooked mine up and it was a really tasty and warming breakfast with almond milk, pears and honey - somewhere between tapioca and amaranth.

finger on the pulse

But the new stars of the LC larder this winter are the East Anglian peas and beans produced by Hodmedod's. This month the new shapes of Kabuki peas and whole Victory fava beans have appeared on sale, to be followed in a couple of weeks by the wonderfully named, Black Badger peas, once a traditional street food:

Black badgers have been grown in Britain for at least 500 years – and older similar varieties of marl peas have been cultivated for centuries more. Variously known as maple peas, Carling peas, parched peas, black peas, black badgers and grey badgers, these peas are traditionally associated with the north of England where they are served ‘parched’ (cooked and then oven dried or soaked in vinegar) as a snack on bonfire night and as a Lenten dish eaten on Passion (Carling) Sunday.

Peas and beans have been the British staple food for centuries but since the advent of cheap factory meat and industrial processing, they have fallen from grace and from our supper tables. As we tucked into a great bean and parsnip soup, before editing the Bungay newsletter last week, Mark, Josiah and I talked about the folk stories around beans and peas (as well as the modern news stories in The Guardian and interview on Transition Culture). Josiah, who has taken the original Transition Norwich food project into a national arena, was saying how the fairy story was a parable for our times.

In the tale, the luckless Jack trades a cow for a handful of coloured beans. The milk cow is a symbol of prosperity, and beans one of poverty, so it seems a poor exchange. But this is an old initiation story in which the fool turns out to be wise. Jack takes a gamble and finds his treasure in the giant's kingdom, and the story has a happy ending.

"Maybe we should rename it 'Josiah and the Giant Beanstalk'," I said.

Maybe if will all let go of our addiction to meat and dairy products in favour of beans, we will all find our golden goose.

Beans are the wise staple of the downshift kitchen and its great to know you can buy local varieties when most come from Canada and China. I usually cook up a pot to have with rice or potatoes, and then turn in to soup the next day. You just need to add more stock and a handful of coriander or parsley leaves, finely chopped leek, any left-over veg, a big squeeze of lemon and hey presto! Lunch.

What all these rib-sticking peasant dishes call for however is a little lightness and zing. In summer this is typically a fresh tomato salsa, but in winter The Slaw comes into its own. The favourite side of our Low Carbon Cookbook bring-to-share meals, they are a dish where everyone's imagination can take root. Seasonal grated veg - beetroot, fennel, carrot, white and red cabbage, celery - is creatively and colourfully sprinkled with seeds, berries or currants (dried cranberries and pomegranates were new 2013 additions), livened with fresh citrus, umi plum seasoning, root ginger or perky shredded greens, sweetened with rose hip syrup or apples.

Here is one I put together at the recent Dark Mountain meet up at the Sustainability Centre kitchen in  Petersfield:

Celeriac with Seville Orange and Pears

1 head celeriac (organic if poss - those big football ones are woolly)
1 Conference or other hardish pear
1 large Seville orange, squeezed
Goji berries, sprinkling
Pumpkin seeds, sprinkling
Good dash of hemp oil (or other oil)
Celery leaves (optional)

Grate the celeriac and pear and mix together in a bowl. Add other ingredients. If you can't get hold of a Seville orange, a blood orange and lemon is a good substitute.

Potato seller from Memories of Mr Seel's Garden, Liverpool (lead food pic in Transition Free Press); Maple Farm flours; Hodmedod's Peas and Beans

52 FLOWERS: Morning glory

52 Flowers That Shook My World was originally a longer book. To make it less of a handful 20 of the flowers were left out of the published version - though some of their text was threaded back into the chapter introductions. Last year I decided to post some of the the original flowers as occasional blogs. Here is the cover flower and the first plant in the Bush School section.

8 Morning glory
Cyclades, Greece 1989

The first time I saw the morning glories was in Greece. I was sitting on the threshold of a whitewashed house belonging to an artist. There were remains of a dead rabbit on the steps and something in me instinctively knew it had been put there by one of the women of the island who bore the foreign owners a grudge. Even though I knew that this “evil eye” wasn’t personally directed at me it was unnerving. And so, equally instinctively, I had deliberately sat down in the open to drink a cup of coffee in the blinding morning sunshine.

It was then that I noticed the morning glory flowers spiralling up the old wooden doorway with their heart-shaped leaves. The flowers were a shining midnight blue, starlight was pouring out of their five-pointed magenta cores. In that moment their appearance seemed a kind of miracle in the fierce heat, surrounded by all those white walls, in the emptiness of the square and the feeling of invisible eyes watching. After that I always sat besides the flowers in the morning. The rabbit business ended after that.

At the time of the rabbit things had been shifting and changing in the metropolis where I had always lived. New and unusual messages were arriving in the city marketplace. Small wrinkled “organic” apples sat in my fruitbowl and I began to look at my dining table made of Indonesian teak and feel uncomfortable about a lifestyle I had been documenting all my working life. On the bookshelf native plant teachings were appearing amongst the cookbooks – medicine words from the ayahuasca vegetalistas of the Amazon, the coca-taking Kogi elders of Colombia - and Mayan, Hopi and Aboriginal prophecies concerning the future of the planet were being discussed where once we had only considered our next deadline. The ethno-botonist Terence McKenna had become the Timothy Leary of the day. No one in the city was dropping out exactly but some were taking planes into the rain forest and coming back with insights.

“What are they doing?” I had wondered myself, whilst a year before on a fashion shoot in the Peruvian jungle I watched several canoes push out from the shore of the lake and mysteriously point their prows towards the full moon. “Let’s go swimming,” said the fashion director as we stood with a brew of rainforest herbs in our hands, and began to take off her clothes. Suddenly we were all swimming naked in the limpid water, heedless of alligators, electric eels, piranha, and other kinds of small dangerous fauna. That night, wrapped in a shroud of mosquito netting and the hot frog-croaking night, I found myself writing in a form I had neglected for twenty years. It was a poem:

My circus life unclawed me. Tonight there were no dreams because there were no dreamers.

In the following summer of 1989, the dreams of the city became powered by reality-warping drugs, as LSD and ecstasy replaced cocaine and cocktails as the “in” experience, what you did at the weekend. For a brief and extremely uncharacteristic period everyone was loving everyone, in the dance halls and in each other’s arms. At a party during the Notting Hill Carnival, I absented from my role of the perfect hostess because I was too busy entwined in a loving embrace with a boy called Carl on the window ledge, watching police on horses charging down Westbourne Park Road. I remember laughing in a way I had not done for years.

It was Carl who told me first about hallucinogenics, what to do when you took them, how to remain sane. I remember looking at these small blue spots on white paper in the back of a taxi as we sped by Lancaster Gate. It was a hot July night, his birthday and I said: shall we take these tonight?

Carl said that taking hallucinogenics was like climbing a mountain. You have crampons on your feet that keep a firm grip, he told me, and you head for the summit. But if at any time you find yourself in trouble, remember we are attached, like mountaineers, with a cord. So you can come back to me. I am always here. Don’t forget that. I am always here.

He was there, for that night, in my flat. But afterwards he left. Because the summer of love in 1989, as all summers of love, did not last. It was chemically induced and, like all artificial promises, did not lead out of the dystopia of the city, past the police barricade, into what seemed like a new day. But some of it unravelled the tightly-knit lives we had all been leading at the time and made some of us change course where we might not have done so before.

There is no god. There is no village. I declared prophetically to visiting friends that weekend and told the fishmonger in Notting Hill Gate I could not buy his fish because they were all dead. Something had been shaken up. I had seen my flat on fire with my cats flying through the air, I had watched the walls ripple and crocodiles emerge from the pavements and rather than disturbing me, it liberated something inside. It showed me the world I thought was completely solid could completely change its shape depending on one’s perception of it, and though I knew these were genuine hallucinations (unlike the visions granted by the hallucinogenic plants that were to follow), it was the idea that the world was not fixed according to the dominant hegemony that grabbed my imagination. The existence of villages and gods, I realised,  depend on our agreement to see them in a particular way.

My own “breaking open the head” thus began with a synthetic version of a naturally-occurring chemical found in a plant I would later recognise and always love, the morning glory, whose luminous blue flowers heralded the new day like the star Venus and whose heart-shaped leaves would twine about my life thereafter. Most writers and creative people I knew at that time were open-minded and extremely sceptical about the status quo we were all part of. But not everyone acts on what they know in their hearts, what they see in the small hours of night on the top of a psychedelic mountain, in the deep moments of embrace, in the fleeting summers of love. What makes you act is your own sense of destiny which is a mysterious bargain you hold with life, to which only you have the key.

Tonight there were no dreams because there were no dreamers

iii

When you go down into the underworld part of you never returns. That’s the deal. You eat the six seeds of the pomegranate and that action seals a certain bargain with life thereafter. It’s a deal nobody signs if they think about it, and yet those who do, never regret it. You see if you don’t go into the underworld you never find out what it means to go home. That’s why no one ever regrets initiation, however it comes. It makes your upperworld life very hard thereafter but your inner life becomes immeasurably rich. You have roots in the earth and you have a place to go to when you die. Those things count for everything. They make you bold and free. 

At one time, during the Neolithic times, these connections were an essential part of tribal life, a way of being on the earth that had remained stable for over 10,000 years. Everyone was initiated into them. Then when the first conquering cities appeared, the archaic earth mysteries, those rites of passage, were marginalised and turned into mystery schools. These schools ran alongside civilisations. They ran alongside dictatorships and tyrannies and  state religions and outlived them all. They were making sense of connections that lay outside the city boundaries. The most famous of these took place outside Athens at Eleusis. For a long time, maybe as long as two thousand years, these rites were mostly earth-bound and female, then they became solarised and male. Apollo took command of the Delphic oracle and the half-gods Orpheus and Dionysus took over from Demeter and Persephone. When Dionysus got torn up on the mountain, trampled like his sacred vines, his sacrifice became institutionalised as religion and those mythic transcendental events which kept us in touch with our starry origins, with our ancestors, and made meaning and beauty of our being on the planet, became derided as pagan and superstitious.

No one knew what happened in these initiation schools. It was assumed that secrets were transmitted and terrifying punishments were meted out if you “told”. But anyone who has really worked with plants, with mystery, knows how difficult it is to talk about these so called “secret” encounters. Nobody ever believes you if you do. This is partly because the reason-based educated mind will reject everything you say, thinking you are touched or have become some kind of drugfiend; but mostly because knowledge, what was once known as wisdom, does not exist in daily words or numbers or symbols. Those things can be signs of knowledge but they are not knowledge itself. The only way to know knowledge is to seek it and experience it first hand. That’s what life on earth is about really. First hand knowledge. You can’t hold on to that mystery or possess it or make a system out of it. You can have all kinds of rites and rituals and secrets and powers and priestly robes but as Carl used to say about life, you are either on the bus, or you are not. Only the real thing gets you home.

Most initiatory encounters with plants, especially hallucinogenic plants, call you immediately back to those archaic times when the earth-human connections were still vibrant and meaningful. You seek out ancestral lands where that archaic rhythm still resonates, where the wilderness is still intact. You search for tribal ways, elder wisdom, warrior acts and primal states. Your hands reach out for drums, full moons, caves, firelight. You long for lair-like shelters, river water, wilderness, storm, animal encounters. However sometimes you find there is a gap. Something is missing on the inside. Something that would link this world and our own.

When I went to Greece at the end of the summer of 89, after my brief exchanges with LSD and ecstasy, I slept in the rough stone house belonging to the artist and lived a Spartan life, as I had for several summers before in different places on the island. As I sat on the steps by the morning glory, collected water from a well, walked goat paths, picked figs and branches of oregano, washed my clothes in a spring, slept under stars, I felt myself living according to an ancient rhythm and something in this mythical landscape resonated in my bones, in some deep ancestral part of myself. In this simplicity, this roughness, under these huge starry skies at night, a whole inner world started to open up, I began to dream of birds and mountains and seas, and began to write those dreams down. And as the meltemi, the disturbing wind of October, blew under the door, I felt the first straining against a leash inside myself that would eventually lead to my departure.

The missing piece of the inner jigsaw, the bridge that connects you to your ancestral being, comes with mythology and dreams. This mythology is not from the mesas or rainforests of the Americas but from a Mediterranean culture deeply entwined with our own, a culture that deliberately broke its archaic mindset by fabricating a philosophy of reason that deliberately suppressed female spirituality and drove it underground. You could say all civilisations get their power by subjugating the female mysteries and using the female life-force for their own purposes: Egypt, China, India, Tibet. However the rationale of the Western world is based on ancient Greece - its law, education, science, philosophy, drama, architecture, psychology. Its soldiery may be based on the Northern barbarian and its administration on Rome but all its modern reason and culture, how it justifies all its barbaric acts, stem from the Athenian city-state. The ideals of this state are often depicted in statues - liberty, justice, wisdom, equality, the arts -  and all wear a female face but the living embodiments of these spiritual qualities are rarely seen.

Where you find these female beings are in the myths. And sometimes in your dreams, in the flowers that wind about your door.

It was on the doorsteps of that old Greek house that I remembered the myth of Persephone, at the time of the autumn equinox when her mysteries were originally performed thousands of years ago. This memory was to underpin the whole path of flowers that followed. It came out of the blue, just like the morning glory, reminding me there was something underneath this sparkling, grimy veneer we call civilisation and think is the one and only reality. Later I realised that’s how the ancestral always comes back to us: through dreams, visions, travels, encounters that you cannot explain or have words for, mysteriously.

Tonight I lie in the dark interior of the house as evening comes and I hear the men gather in the kafeneon; invisible voices filter up through the vines outside my window, as the light drains from the sky. I make no move to join them. Some part of me that had always sought out the vibrant day and the company of others is turning inward.

In this life there is a turning point, a time when you go inward, descend into the dark, into the depths, to meet the challenges of the underworld. I am 33, approaching this moment, about to bid farewell to these sunlit islands of my youth, the voyages on the blue caique, the dancing on the mountain to the drum made of goatskin, these rough hermitages of whitewashed stone. If you seek knowledge, to know your destiny in this life, you have at this turning point to journey into the invisible realms. If you want a guide, you can ask the plants to accompany you there. And the plants will take you there, as they have always done through time, all the way down into the caves, into the seedstore, into the realm of the dead, towards the ancestors, through into the sunlight, the starlight that lives in the heart of the earth.

iv

There are several kinds of plant hallucinogens and those containing LSD, or D-Lysergic Acid Amide, form one botanical group. These chemicals are found naturally in morning glory seeds and in the ergot fungus that grows on rye and other grasses. Ergot is believed to be the foundation of the elixir that inspired the sacred rites of the barley goddess Demeter. Morning glory seeds, known as ololuiqui, were sacred to the indigenous Indians of Mexico until ruthless suppression by the invading Spanish conquistadors drove their use underground. The ololuiqui seed comes from the convolvulus vine, rivea corymbosa, known in Nahuatl as coaxihuitl, the snake plant, but its particular hallucinogenic potency wasn’t recognised until four centuries later, when a Swiss chemist called Albert Hoffman, identified LSD from ergot in 1938 and took a dose by accident. It was an initiatory event that would shake the modern world.

When LSD was synthesised in the late fifties it was hailed as a great liberator of mankind and used with astounding success in experimental psychology at the time. Gordon Wasson, the American writer and mycologist who came across the ceremonial use of psylocybe cubensis in the mountains of Oaxaca at the same time, invited Hofmann to Mexico, where they discovered a third sacred hallucinogenic, an unknown sage called diviner’s mint. Later these plant pioneers collaborated on a book called The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Mysteries, in which they concluded that the kykeon imbibed by the initiates of the ancient world contained an entheogen (a word they also invented, meaning a mind-altering plant that inspires a “divine experience”), was most probably the dark ergot that grew on Demeter’s sacred grains.

 

The effect of all entheogens is to transport one from the personal into the transpersonal realms. The price it exacts for this passage is what is known as the death of the ego, a dramatic internal event that is documented throughout the spiritual history of mankind. StanislaV Grof, a psychiatrist from Prague, who conducted over 4000 sessions with LSD in the 1960s noted the initiatory feelings of terror, loss of control and panic often led to encounters with mythical realms and archetypal beings. Many followed the same pattern: a primal state of oceanic bliss and unity, experiences of no-exit, titanic fight and annihilation of all known points of reference and finally a sense of redemption and a rebirth into a world of light, love and liberation. The modern world, he conjectured from this research, was a reflection of this process on a collective level. As a species we could either keep projecting and acting out its destructive phases, or we could internalise them and reach an extraordinary leap of consciousness.

After suffering all kinds of mental and emotional torments, the first explorer of LSD walked through his kitchen door and into the glorious morning outside. “It had been raining in the night,” Hofmann told Grof in an interview at the Esalen Institute in 1984. “I had the feeling that I saw the earth and the beauty of nature as it had been when it had been created, at the first day of creation. It was a beautiful experience. I was reborn, seeing nature in quite a new light.”

For Hofmann his medicine for the soul was “a tool that turns us into what we are supposed to be” and he was deeply dismayed by its recreational use in the huge burst of psychedelic experimentation that shook the Western world in the mid-sixties and seventies. In spite of Grof’s assertion that the human drive for transcendence was stronger than sex, most people didn’t make it through the door and into the morning. The liberation that should have happened never did. A modern “inquisition” on hallucinogenic plants squashed all research on their effect on human consciousness and even morning glory seeds sold in garden centres were reputedly coated to prevent their ingestion. People, unable to cope with the demands of Hofmann’s alchemical tool, awoke to find their psyches warped by their experiences. There were good trips, but there were also very bad ones.

You need a sound mind and a sound body as well as the right “set and setting” to encounter the imaginal realms. This is hard to do without a proper cultural context in which quest, rites of passage and initiation are consciously acknowledged as vital events in our lives. The indigenous tribes traditionally took 13 morning glory seeds, but modern ingestion of the seeds or their chemical equivalent varies between 300-2000. The huge discrepancy in dosage speaks volumes about our density and ”fall into matter”. We have no traditional relationship with either the plant kingdom or the spiritual realms, and “trips” are rarely conducted in a sacred, communal or healing context. Most take place silently inside people’s heads. The kind of mental incoherence and negative darkness that can occur is a direct result of our alienation from the physical and transcendent earth.

“LSD should have been subject to the same taboos and the same reverence the Indians had towards these substances,” said Hofmann of his problem child.

The real problem with LSD however, as with all chemical derivatives, is that they are chemical and derivative and therefore not coherent as a substance. Their internal structure and outer form is fabricated in a laboratory, rather than arising naturally from the crucible of the earth and sun. The blue spot on the paper is not the blue flower. So not only is there a physical lack of connection to nature but also a spiritual one. There are no plant teachers to guide a safe passage through the night, toward the mysteries, towards the door. When I took LSD in the city that summer all I saw were artificial patterns and “cracks in the edifice of materialistic rationality” as Wasson once put it. Something had definitely shifted in the night.

But it was Mexico, land of the ololuiqui, peyote, the diviner’s mint and ceremonial mushroom that really led me out of the door.

v

The second time I saw the morning glories was on another Mediterranean island, in the fields of Deia, Majorca. They grew in profusion, a mass of blue eyes, in the deep dark ditches that surrounded the house of the writer and mythologist, Robert Graves. After travelling for two years in Latin America we had returned to Europe and were looking for somewhere to live. It was a difficult time and finding those morning glories that day suddenly lifted our spirits in an extraordinary way. During the night in the hotel in the town square I felt my body full of strange energies and my dreams full of cosmic shapes and lights. I could hardly sleep. The following afternoon on return to Palma, I went to an exhibition of photographs that documented Graves’ turbulent life with his female muses and the rustic life he spent in the hills of Deia.

At one photograph I was stopped in my tracks. The poet was standing on his rough stone terrace. Our eyes met. Graves was old when the picture had been taken and most of his mind had disappeared, but something in his face arrested my attention. It shocked me to the core. Not because he had aged, but because he looked entirely like a woman. It felt as if an old woman had possessed his face in an act of terrible revenge.

Graves spent years praising the White Goddess, the mythological matriarch of the ancient world whose service he wrote was the basis of all true poetry and life on earth. But this was a life dedicated to a goddess who was, by his own admission, cruel and heartless. Driven underground by the philosophers of the city-state this moon-faced deity, had become, like all suppressed women, furious and vengeful. She sat in her wild mountain nest littered with the bones of poets, and dissolved the minds of men, in spite of their unquestioning loyalty.

I knew however that Persephone loved the poets more than anyone. As she loved Dionysus and Apollo and Hermes, and all those who dared to enter the underworld with only their hearts and imaginations to guide them. She did not require their worship or their sacrifice. When I turned inward, I found myself exploring a territory that is traditionally the preserve of men - nature, spirituality, mythology, mysteries, medicine – and yet is not entirely theirs, for without female wisdom neither love nor liberation nor return is possible. In the lesser known female myths of the underworld, Innana is stripped of all she possesses and left on a hook, Psyche is given six impossible tasks. Inside myself, the lines of my life were tangled into knots. It felt as though they had not been straight for thousands and thousands of years. 

I sat in the darkness, as night came to the island, with my underworld tasks before me. It would take a life-time to untangle these threads, to unhook myself, to sort these seeds. But instinctively, as I had once sat down by the dead rabbit, I knew that the female fury that so cruelly distorted our world could only be abated by the presence of another kind of being. And that I was going to have to be that being, neither goddess, nor harridan, but someone entirely new.

Prepping a reading of 52 Flowers at Bungay Library, August 2012: September morning glory (Mark Watson); cover of The White Goddess (Faber and Faber)