The Stage in the Woods

Just about to set off to Uncivilisation Festival where I'll be giving a talk and workshop called Rewilding the Self - Earth Dreaming Bank on Sunday and also co-curating the Woodland Stage (see below). Looking forward to meeting up with everyone. Hope to see you there!
 

This is one of the stages where it’s all happening this year at Uncivilisation. Made from cob and wood and standing in a beechwood glade, this small theatre is a perfect set and setting for performances with their feet on the earth. When this  photograph was taken it was midwinter and the Sustainability Centre was blanketed in deep snow. In spite of the weather, seven of us had crossed Britain and converged here to organise this last festival. Some of the background to the programme was discussed at the Woodland Stage as we sat around its open fire at night in the fierce cold (helped by a dram or two of island malt!)

By day this space is traditionally the literary stage at Uncivilisation and has hosted all kinds of writers and writing-forms, from poetry readings to small publishing houses (at night it transforms into a music stage). Last year I appeared on its rough boards by happy accident. A workshop was cancelled at the last minute, and I stepped in to talk about my book, 52 Flowers That Shook My World, and share some of its insights. One of these was about a concept called Land Dreaming Capacity, which is an Okanagen word for the human body. The native people of British Columbia saw human beings as the language makers of the planet. They gave the trees and the sky names and sang their praises, connecting everything that took place within the territory as the seasons turned, as generations were born and lived and died. It made sense of their being here. 

My own feeling that writers are people who haven't forgotten that capacity, that we retain a loyalty to the planet and in everything to do we keep naming the world and making our place within it coherent. So this stage in many ways reflects the writers' art of keeping those vital connections alive. In 2013 this is an urgent task. We are writing against great odds. And yet, like the nightingale in the fairy tale who sings more sweetly as he presses his heart against the thorn, that the harder the times, the more intense and beautiful and courageous can be the response: you drop what is unnecessary and get down to what really matters. 

What matters to me in a dark time are the writers who can face reality - intelligently, beautifully, generously - and make you feel that whatever you do in praise of this mysterious earth and your small life here, has meaning and value. In an industrialised world governed by denial and illusion the ability to live - creatively, expansively, wildly - is a possibility I hope this wooden stage will hold for one fleeting weekend in August.

the programme

So this year, as the curators of the Woodland Stage we (Susan Richardson and myself) wanted to showcase a breadth of writing that responded to this planetary crisis, and to show how writing is a key to weathering the storm. It's a programme that ranges from the inner relationship between words and the body (YogaWrite) to the collective drama of climate change (Beacons). We wanted to continue some of the strands that Susan and fellow Dark Mountain poet, Em Strang, developed last year, which means a vibrant mix of poetry, prose (fiction and non-fiction), performance, workshops and discussion and an invitation to the contributors of the new Dark Mountain collection to read from their work. Dark Mountain Books is going to branch out next year, so this session will be hosted by one of the DM editors, Dougald Hine, who as well as introducing the writers, will also discuss the future of the press.

One of the key themes in those collections is the shift from a human-centric world view to an earth-centric one. So another strand we wanted to include was the essential relationship between human beings and other animals. Susan is heading up that section and in Humanimal has invited the writer, Caspar Henderson to talk about and read some of his luminous text in Barely Imagined Beings, to be followed by a talk and workshop, Art in Other Skins, organised by ONCA, the innovative environmental art space in Brighton.

Another driver, discussed in the original manifesto, is the grounding of our words in time and place. In remembering 
the land and the people co-founder of Dark Mountain, Paul Kingsnorth and co-producer of The Telling, Rachel Horne, will both recount their unique ways of recording past events. The Wake is Paul's first novel, written in its own language, a post-apocalyptic story set during and after the Norman invasion of England in 1066, Rachel Horne has dramatised the aftermath of the miners’ strike of 1984, through words, poetry and song and will be sharing ideas how art and action can lead to social change.

sweeping the stage

A performance artist I once knew called Alex Hay told me that the first thing you do in a performance is sweep the stage. You prepare the space and afterwards, when everyone has gone, you sweep up and leave everything as you found it, ready for the next show. That way the space and everything that happens within it has its own hermetic strength and significance. Alex had given up a glittering career as an artist in New York to live out his life humbly in a desert town in Arizona, caretaker broom in hand. That conscious giving up of a city life, with all its dazzling allures, in order to grow down,  is one of the steps the artist and writer make in order to show the way. That strategic step is the shift of Uncivilisation.

Doin Dirt Time is a performance piece about that very move. Based on an interview by Suzi Gablik in her book Conversations Before The End of Time, Rachel Dutton and Rob Olds are about to give away their artworks and possessions and to disappear into the American wilderness. Fern Smith, one of the founders of Volcano Theatre and Emergence, and writers, Phlip Ralph and Sarah Woods will reenact this famous encounter that questions both the role of the artist in society, and what it means to leave that society behind.

Meanwhile I'll be sharing the practices that revolutionised my own life and writing career in Rewilding the Self. In order to write about that shift you have, as I found out, to become a different kind of person and this session will look at how as creative people we can reshape the way we communicate with the planet and its inhabitants. The Earth Dreaming Bank was originally inspired by a talk given by a psychologist called Stephen Eisenstat, based on a meeting with an aboriginal elder in Northern Australia. Once you have a dream, he said, you have to share it. You have to speak it out loud.

Wruters are not silent, strange creatures who live in a small room, tapping away at a machine (though there is quite a lot of that!) The writer is the one who can boldly stand up and speak out, so that the world can hear another language being spoken, far kinder and wilder than the dominant broadcast of Empire, Uncivilisation is a chance to hear those voices that are often drowned out - the voices of the creatures and the trees, the wind and the sea, ourselves - and forge those imaginative connections that make sense of all places, all times, on this earth. Even the hard ones.

Looking forward to meeting you there (I'll be the one with the broom!)

Saturday's Woodland programme
Sunday's Woodland programme.

(First posted on www.uncivilisation.org)

Steve (Rewilding Academy sweeping the stage, January 2013; Dark Mountain 4 cover by Kit Boyd; illustrated of leather-backed turtle from Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson; Green Man from Norwich Cathedral; Sea Kale Project notebook.

ARCHIVE: Dog Days

Happy Lughnasa everyone! I am reposting a blog I wrote last year, just as my book, 52 Flowers That Shook My World was published. What strikes me is how this year (2013) has such a different mood to it. We are enjoying a heatwave (and lots of storms) and in contrast to 2012, growers are enjoying a pretty good harvest. Our lane and garden trees are bursting with fruit (just come back from a major cherry forage). In the next field the peacock butterflies have just arrived and are feasting on the ragwort. So, dear reader, there are reasons to be cheerful. Sometimes life does get better . . .

 Maybe it is because I was born on midsummer’s eve, at the zenith of the year, at the time of the greatest light, that I can now write of what it means to take the irrevocable step, the 52 steps along the downward path that lead us back toward the ancestral land, back down toward the sea. Maybe because the golden English oak stands so firmly behind me that I can embrace the dark holm, his brother, and let everything fall, as I step through the solstice door, as the mood of the great year shifts, as the key slips irrevocably from major to minor, from sweetness into bitterness, from pleasure into duty (Wormwood, 52 Flowers)

This week a book with a dark blue cover emerges into the light, officially published at last! It is, dear Reader, my own book, written during the course of 17 years travelling and exploring the world of medicine plants - the green beings that have shaped our destiny since we first emerged onto the planet.

It also appears, by happenstance, at the time of year the book ends - the beginning of August, the day some call Lughnasa, when people traditionally gathered together and celebrated the harvest. This past two weeks as the sun has finally shone I have taken to going down to the shoreline where the book ends. We have taken a thermos and a rug and gone swimming early in the morning in the calm sparkling sea. And though the sea is beautiful and the sound of it sighing against the shore, and it is lovely to feel all that expanse of sky and summertime, the taste in my mouth is of the bitter plant that now flowers at the sea's edge, wormwood. The plant that heralds the end of a certain world.

Another favourite shoreline plant, the sea holly, is bereft of its usual visitors: the small copper and the small blue. In the garden the huge buddleia now in full flower has yet to see a single painted lady or peacock or tortoiseshell. The apple and greengage trees in the orchard are without fruit. Down the lane I have seen no sloes either, or damsons. It's been a tough and topsy-turvy year for growers - battling with drought, heavy rain, cold, too few pollinators, and way way too many slugs. Abroad a rainless and unprecedented heat, from the grainbelt of America to the ricefields of India, is challenging crops everywhere.

The plants and pollinating insects we depend on for our lives are reflecting back the planetary crisis we now recognise as climate change. 52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth, was written before I had heard about climate change or peak oil. And yet at its core is the key directive of Transition - downshift, relocalise and connect with the living systems. It follows the years as I leave the city and travel abroad with Mark, as I encounter a different way of being on the planet, as we begin what we call the Plant Practice in Oxford, as we work with medicine people in the desert of Arizona, as we return home to a different England.

Another thing history does not tell us: you do not return when you expect to, in the spring with the hawthorn flowers, or at midsummer, with the rose, but when the barley is being cut, the time of the fall, in the heat of the dog days, as the broad haze of sun burnishes the land. You arrive at the seashore, with wild carrot and valerian, when the harebell and the rowan berries shine in the heathlands. When I went down to the shore to greet the sunrise that August day, the day of the losing throw, I repeated to myself a phrase that struck me as I had awoken at dawn: This time it will not be me that loses."

The book is centered around 52 Flowers, each with their own narrative and their own medicine. Each show how physically, energetically, imaginatively, we can break out of a thousand years of conditioning by our "Empire" civilisation. It set in the mood of the dog days, as we realise we are no longer a people in the time of ascent, but of a descent that is unwritten and unknown. 

Descent is hard for our all-conquering, illusion-loving culture. We are still acting as though we still have the world to achieve and a planet to exploit, but the times are not telling us this. The droughts and the butterflies are not telling us this. Techno-fixes and building empires in space are not where we are going. Reconnecting with the planet and coming home to ourselves is where we are. Reality is where we are. There is an ordeal ahead, as Charles Eisenstein has gently pointed out, and a lot of loving to do. 

Descent begins at Lughnasa with the harvest. Descent begins when we wake up to the times we are in and don't look for someone to blame. What are the narratives of descent? What knowledge have we gleaned in all these years? What do we hold dear at the end of the day? 

There is an elegiac beauty in loss (or what we imagine is loss), to coming home, to realising your limits, to deepening your experience, to loving the neighbourhood, the people in the room, a humble dish of new potatoes, the small strip of seashore I go to each day, where once I could roam the world like Alexander. In fact when you look back and see the track you have made, the dance you have made with your fellows, that's when you understand everything, the beauty of it all - even the hard times. We're trying as a people to get back on track against all odds. We're not doing it because the government is telling us to, or any religion, or ideology, we're doing it because our hearts are telling us to, of our own free will. That's why these times taste bitter: bitterness is a quality of all heart medicine. We learn though experience and in this the earth, not our education system, is our great teacher. All her plants are books of knowledge, if we can learn to read them. 

When I was young I ran away to Italy to try and write a novel. I read Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, and I could never understand how someone who had loved Africa so much could bear to go back to the dark and cold of Scandinavia. Now I do. It's going back and treasuring what you have experienced that really matters. That's what writers do and inspire everyone else to. You treasure everything in your store cupboard. It's a certain stage, a time of making sense, a time of giving back. That's what writing my own book of return did later in my life, when I had given up ambition and success. It made sense of my own downshift and the collective downshift that Transition prepares us for, as small groups, in communities and towns everywhere.

I could never write that romantic novel in the beautiful Riviera garden. It wasn't the book I had to write. Many of us are not configured to be romantic heroines, conquerors and achievers, we're here to do another job entirely. It has a different narrative, one that is only just beginning. One we are creating together. I don't know the ending, none of us do. One thing I do know: love always turns the ship around. If you can still love the world, in spite of everything. The people, the places and the plants. 

I am giving two talk and workshops this August: one called The Plant Lexicon at the Wilderness Festival as part of the Dark Mountain event on Sunday August 9 and the other Rewilding the Self: Earth Dreaming Bank at Uncivilisation on Sunday 18 August. Maybe see you there!

If you would like to buy copy of 52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth do get in touch  theseakaleproject@hotmail. co.uk, or you can order directly from Two Ravens website.
 

Poster for Plants for Life; buddleia in the garden; sunflower from 52 Flowers That Shook My World; scythng workshop at Uncivilisation Festival; beside the sea holly, 2011; Lughnasa sunrise, 2011

52 FLOWERS: 12 Hemp

Hemp was originally the last flower in the Bush School section of 52 Flowers That Shook My World. Most of the power plants in this chapter I worked with during my travelling years in Mexico and South America, but this one took me by surprise on a July evening in Norfolk. This was 2007, a year before the finanical crash and before I knew anything about Transition or Dark Mountain or any of the future-looking networks I would later become involved with. I write this because sometimes plants come like a herald in your life; and in your core intelligence, that part of you that recognises destiny in a small moment, you know that something else is at hand . . .

I looked around the garden as twilight came. Small knots of people were still gathered on the lawn. A white-clothed table gleamed beneath the cherry-plum tree. A peacock sat on the high wall, surveying the scene. By a hornbeam hedge, a figure was bending down, showing a group of children how to fill paper bags with sand and small candles. Other small shapes were making a path of flickering lights that wound through the copse of oak and yew. I went and stood at this path of lights by the hedge: they wavered in the half-light and led towards the moat.

I knew no one in this garden, at this party, but in another way I knew them all. Most of the guests were creative people - actors, directors, writers, singers, designers - and they had come from Notting Hill. They had taken magic mushrooms and travelled though America. I wandered from group to group on the lawn. An Oriental girl with waist-long hair in a Sixties dress, mixed me a delicious cocktail. A old Zen Buddhist told me about the days he did zazen in a Japanese monestary and bought a Kachina carving from a Hopi elder. When Mark appeared, we smoked tobacco together and danced, the three of us, to the sound of some very strange music in the house.

Inside the kitchen, around the table, I find myself talking about plants with a man who had just arrived from London. He is a serious voyager into the hallucinogenic realms and an expert on Chinese medicine. He is telling me about his experiences with ayahuasca. I am telling him about a desert bush called red root and how it works with the spleen. We have all kinds of plants in common and places, and yet it feels difficult to find a common ground.

“Would you like to try some pollen from the Himalyas?” he asks and holds up a pipe.

Intrigued I take the small carved pipe into my hands.

“Let me introduce you to the Deva of Cannabis”, he says and lights the bowl. And though mortally resistant to marijuana and even more to devas, I close my eyes, draw a deep breath and inhale the smoke of the burning flowers.

It was as if, in that precise moment, a force came out of the shadows and pushed us irrevocably apart.Without saying a word, we stood up and moved away from one another.

The next thing I knew I was in the garden walking across the lawn. Everything in the shrubbery was shifting all around me, I could feel all the plants and trees breathing, moving closer, as if investigating my presence. I laughed and lost my balance. Behind me in a square of light there was a figure moving around to the “music” - words intoned by presidents and politicians, declaring the end of the planet with a forboding tone, like the drone of large aeroplanes in the background. The sound boomed out into the dark garden.

Before me I could hear the sparks of a fire crackling and the murmerings of invisible guests. It was during that time as I moved  – it seemed to take an aeon - away from the house, toward the fire, that I remembered a young Indian drummer I once knew who had organised a music festival called the Ras Lila. The ras lila is a game organised by the gods for their amusement. Nothing matters in the ras lila, because everything goes round and round and nothing ever changes. It is the game that devas play with humans.



At the fire, a young man with a dark face came and talked to me for one hour. He had not come from Notting Hill. He had appeared as if from nowhere and crouched in the darkness, wielding small joints of marujuana in his practical, intelligent hands.

In the darkness, he talked about the festival at Glastonbury where he had worked for several years. He had an acute intelligence and described in detail the workings of its system, all its fascinating ins and outs. How if you came without a ticket and were endlessly patient, endlessly polite, the gatekeepers would eventually let you through. How thousands of new tents were abandoned at the end of the festival because people were too exhausted to pack them up.

He was equally acute about the monetary systems of the constructed world. How money dictated our every move and kept people in an artificial state of panic and despair, as the financial controls artificially engineered each nation’s rise and fall. Whatever the state of the country, he said, the banks, and the Bank of England most of all, would always benefit.

I followed everything he said during this hour with an intense concentration, following him through the muddy paths of the great music festival, through the global corridors of power. But at one point his account of the corporations and governments of the world endlessly driving the earth and everyone on it into the ground suddenly became meaningless. I lost track of what he was saying.

I let out a breath. He stopped talking.There was a long silence between us. The people carried on sitting quietly around the fire, wrapped up in their own invisible worlds. The night wind blew through the trees.

“Well, that’s enough of conspiracy theory!” he said and laughed.
“Where is it all going?” I asked him.
“The end!” he announced with a sudden surge of power that faded as soon as it was said, leaving a cold abandoned feeling in the conversation.
“Oh!” I laughed, as it seemed quite obvious that neither of us wanted an apocalypse. “What can we do about it?”
“Empathy,” he said. “The system works by keeping us separated.”

The word empathy hovered in the night air, like a translucent moth, over the huge stockpile of nuclear charged missiles bent on the destruction of all life-forms, for no reason it seemed, except perversity.

And then, without saying a word, we both stood up and went our separate ways.


It was the best party I had been to in years. There were all manner of surprises: fireworks and birthday cakes, speeches and poems and a film that celebrated our hostess’s 50 years that flickered against the faded wall of the Elizabethan house. It had been orchestrated by the owner of the house, who had spent a lifetime conjuring photographs, fairs and travelling circuses. Even when it came to the end, it wasn’t really the end, as there was to be a lunch the next day. People who had travelled all over the country to come here were camping under the trees in the garden beyond the fire.

As everything drew to a close I stood in the French windows and breathed in the night air, my bare feet feeling the cold stone of the floor. The sounds of farewell were echoing in the drive. Then I put down my empty glass on the table and left the house, moving through the dark garden towards the car where Mark and I were sleeping under the cherry trees. One by one the little tents in the orchard extinguished their lights, the voices in the house faded away, and there was just the starlight left, as I shifted my position on the car seat, under our coats, under the cherry trees, and heard the cry of peacocks in the dark.



It was around the time of the party that I first noticed the hemp plant growing under the apple tree outside my window. I had found plants growing there before in late summer, as the seeds I put in the tree for the birds found their way into the damp soil and shot up unexpected sunflowers and safflowers, fragile blue flax and a ragged composite flower, known as ambrosia, which I recognised as a medicine plant from the desert. The hemp plant grew fast and huge and burst its way through the gnarly boughs of the tree.

I stood at my window and watched its progress day by day. The room faces three directions: the south window looks towards a field of barley known as Hare Field and the tower of the flinty church, the east toward the blond marshland and a shining strip of the North sea, the north toward a grass meadow and an ancient oak wood. The hemp and the apple tree grew in the north, the direction all the medicine wheels tell us is where the ancestors dwell.

The hemp plant grew taller and bolder each day. My excitement mounted with it. What is it about the tall plants that is so exciting – the foxgloves, great mulleins, the waving silvery mugworts with their blood-red stems? Is it because we can stand next to them and feel a kinship in our proportions? Or is it that they can meet us sternly eye to eye, or in the case of hemp, tower over us, like exacting teachers, so we might learn a thing or two in their presence? Hemp is an intoxicating plant to behold. Everything about it is beautiful- its sturdy ridged stem, its rich-green hand-shaped leaves, its sudden and exhuberant growth, the shape it carves in space. One day as it almost reached the sill of my window my eye was caught by the centre of its leaves.

Light was pouring out of them.

“Oh, they are about to flower,” I said out loud to myself. I had never seen a hemp plant flower in my life, but some part of me knew: that part that faces North, the ancestor part. The ancestor who knows what we need and what we don’t, that money doesn’t buy love and that the ras lila some day will have to come to an end.


“We will have to grow down,” Mark said. There were four us on the mountain, gazing towards the sparkling blue bay of Santa Barbara, at the resort shimmering before us.The glamorous town and the sail boats grabbed all our attention. But the still presence of the ancestral mountain behind us was stronger. It held us in its stern embrace and finally we looked away. On the mountain, it would be easy to grow down, amongst the sage bushes and the hummingbirds. But could we do this when we awoke instead in beautiful Santa Barbara, when we awoke with the sound of peacocks under cherry trees and felt the tug of the ras lila in our veins – oh, the show, the music, the laughter! We talked about that party for days. It hung about us and lingered, like a tune, a fragrance, an ache you cannot bear because it is gone, so you replay it endlessly in your mind.

We go to parties because we love parties, but if parties are the only thing what then, when we are left abandoned in the cold, outside the theatre, in the streets at night? Do we then fasten our coats and hurry home, carrying the intoxication of parties and theatres in our minds, wishing secretly for the next time and the next? Or do we in that moment hold the moth in our hands, turn to face the one we have come with and say: that was good amusement, was it not? Now shall we continue down the mountain path?

We do not like to grow down for that is to forget the games of the gods, to leave the theatres and our sailing boats behind. It is to eat humble pie. It is to wear hempen cloth rather than the silken garb of peacocks, it is to eat the seeds of the plant, rather than smoke its flowers and follow the path of fairy lights through the wood.

I love the hemp plant, but of cannabis I am wary. In the kitchen its smoke was fragrant and sweet on my tongue, but afterwards I found I could not  speak. “That’s the whole point,” the man with the pipe told me.”That’s what I like about it. I don’t care about anything anymore!”

But I do not like my silence. I have listened to too many people at parties talking about conspiracy theories, with paintings undone, books unwritten, dreams unrealised, talking as if they are radical and free, as if this power plant is taking us somewhere. While we whirl in an endless churn of time, amongst the ashes of the god’s cremation ground, while a moth hovers in the dark, above our heads, waiting.

The plant outside the window is male. To be narcotic the plant needs to be female, for only the resinous female flowers provide the smoke that pushes you into a state of intoxication. In the head shops of Norwich I have seen photographs of these female marijuana buds that look like the wrathful deities of the Himalayas. Something makes me shudder when I look at them, so contorted and misshapen are their cultivated forms. The male flowers of this bird-sown plant are quite different: small and sober tassels of creamy white.

Some evenings I make a green tea with these flowers with peppermint, lemon verbena and vervain that grow in the pots around the garden. But mostly I like to see the plant outside the North window, between the boughs of the apple tree. Sometimes I wake in these light warm mornings and feel its presence moving the co-ordinates within my being. It is the presence of the plant that I love. The way it has appeared this summer, out of nowhere.

The way it told me that it was the party to end all parties.

The problem you encounter lies in the plant itself: for hemp is a construction plant and its seeds lie amongst the ruins of civilisation. Its body provides one of the most versitile natural materials in the world and has been cultivated by human beings for 6000 years. In England, before enclosure, there were communal hemp fields all over Suffolk and Norfolk. Hemp provided the essentials of life: clothes, string, rope, canvas, sacking, the nets that caught the shoals of herring off the East Anglian coast. In the modern world its uses are even more manifold: its leaves and stems can form bio-degradable plastic, build houses and automobiles, its oil maintain the cellular structure of our bodies.

Above all it makes good paper – the tough, thin pages of bibles are famously made of hemp. It was made an illegal crop in America not because there was a danger of drug use (the so-called industrial hemp, cannabis sativa, does not in fact contain the narcotic properties of the less robust, cannibis indica) but to enable landowners to make money out of timber. Unlike forests, the plant grows astoundingly quickly in many different terrains, it feeds the soil and needs no artificial fertilisers or pesticides. It is a plant for a solar-based future.

But how can we find this future whilst we are using the plant to wall ourselves in, to construct barricades between ourselves?

We have to face the ancestor. We have to speak with the plant and find a way to proceed. In India hemp belongs to the king of the devas, Shiva, god of destruction. In Japan it is considered a sacred plant of solar forces. When you turn to face the North you realise the talking to yourself has to stop: it’s time to grow down.

Hemp is a power plant, but unlike most other power plants, it is a narcotic, a downer. Narcotics differ from hallucinogenics in that they are not transformers but painkillers. Cannabis is one of the world’s most potent natural sedatives. It also one of its most popular recreational drugs, providing a relief from the harshness of modern industrial life. It does this, in the way of all plant painkillers (though less dramatically than heroin of opium poppies or cocaine of coca leaves) by numbing the emotional body and allowing you to retreat into yourself.

Some people disappear into their own worlds when they smoke cannabis, others start taking over the world and talking like politicians. However you respond, something in you no longer cares about your present circumstances. You are chilled and cool and have no feeling.This lack of emotional depth and warmth means it is impossible to have empathy. We are swirling in strange music, the plants are shifting about us, we feel we are in the thick of the party. But the truth of the matter is we have been pushed far apart from one other. The sound of our stoned voices drone on like aeroplanes.

To get to the future we need to find our common ground and communicate, but this cannot happen with the hemp flowers in our hands. The deva of cannabis waves her wand and provides an escape from the pain of life lived in the system. But she does not get us out of the system. She might give us the power of knowing all systems, so we are cleverer than presidents but she cannot gives us the wit and the will to act on what we know. Like all will o’the wisps, all fairy creatures, she is making promises and luring us unwittingly towards The End.

Why did we not see it so clearly? That the path of lights led to a ha-ha, the butt of the devas’ joke on humans? Because there was suffering in our lives and the marijuana was hiding it up. We could have voiced this suffering, but we wanted, like everyone else, to rise above it. That summer, when the party sailed into the view, like a liner with strings of coloured lights and a band playing, we were facing a complete financial crisis. “Tonight,” I said to Mark, “We will forget everything and just enjoy ourselves.” Miraculously, I had found some money in a coat pocket for the journey. So we put on our best frocks and shirts and jumped into our scarlet car and set off.

At the hardest time she came, the Deva of Cannabis, like a fairy godmother and blunted the pain of that moment. Because we could, for a while, just be as magnificent and as beautiful and successful as everyone else at the party.

The truth of the matter, however, is that our lives under these systems are too hard and make too many demands on our humanity. This is not the toughness of the earthly life, the heat, the cold, the business of being born and growing and dying, not the tilling of soil or mending our coats, the struggle of creators. But the hardness of artificially-constructed lives, of upholding a heartless world in which money is the only object.

Not wanting to see us suffer, the godmother comes with her sparkling favours, her ballgowns, her charming princes, her golden slippers. But she cannot help us, for she cannot help herself, deva such as she is. At the age of 22, the editor of Vogue instructed me to always consider the sufferings of Our Reader - in one hand, a hoover and the other, a gin bottle.
"Tell them there is more to life than that,” she said.

So I did. I told them where they could go, what they could wear, how they might remain forever young, forever beautiful. They might be prisoner of their circumstance, but in their dreams they could travel around the world, own paintings and elegant furniture, eat caviar. Life is just like a party! I said.

One night, aged 33, I held a dinner in Notting Hill and we smoked hemp flowers that had been sent from Canada.Ten of us sat around the table in the falling darkness and became completely silent. A neighbour arrived at midnight and left almost as swiftly she had come.“The lights were on but there was no one at home” she told me. And for the first time in my life, I felt ashamed.

To find your way out of the system, out of the amusement arcade, you do not consult the ones who run the show, you speak with those who are no longer distracted by its fascinating lures. Not because they are pure and innocent but because they know every trick of the trade and will not swerve in their task.

I do not know everything there is to know. But I do know one thing: the devas are not the ancestors.

Perhaps that is why I loved the hemp plant so, as it flourished beneath my window, far into September. How could I hold anything against it? It would be like holding something against myself, who had lived in Nothing Hill, given parties, manufactured illusions, been part of the great ras lila. We were made of the same stuff: in our natures we were practical beings, ones who liked to provide with our physical presence; we held a good medicine in our female flowers.

We had however been foolish: unknown to us these flowers, separated from the whole of us, highly cultivated, had furnished distorted and imaginary worlds in which time went round and round instead of forwards and had so ruined the lifeforms of this earth. It was time to return to the ancestor, to go back, to grow down. It was time to regain the leaf, the stalk, the male counterpart of ourselves. It was time to return to the mountain.

To return means the escapes have to go. It means you love everything that made that hard moment bearable - the glasses of wine, the beautiful dresses, the old scarlet car with its fine chrome lines - and then you let it all go. You allow your suffering to speak to you. You let the lines of life reorganise within your being on a summer’s day and know you are not alone in your task.

Hemp was the last teacher in the bush school.The grandmaster of all illusion who came to say that the party was over. An ancestor of the sun who came to instruct us how to live without the taste of theatres and shows in our veins. Only when you can withstand illusion can the dialogue commence, can the real show begin. A show in which heart-speaking humans and not superior and heartless deities are in command. In this show you do not escape from anything because you are on the earth, at home, with your companion under the apple tree.

And here is the only place you want to be.



Image of hemp leaf (creative commons); industrial hemp fields from the documentary, Bringing It Home,

Where we are now - This Low Carbon Life Summer Update 2013 (Transition Norwich)

Midsummer 2013 and the new vegetable garden is flourishing. By the time the apples are ripe and the potatoes harvested this blog will be four years old. For three years we published posts daily along weekly themes with a crew of 8-12 people. Over time, as Transition Norwich shifted and changed its form, the team has dispersed and this year the blog has become occasional. This doesn't mean we are not still here doing stuff in our communities, living a low carbon life, just that our attention is not on writing blogs. Nor does it mean that you can't dip into our massive store of over a thousand posts, and find great and relevant gems there. Just check out our extensive topic list on the right hand column and have a good browse. It's an inspiring picture of what a downshifted future might look and feel and sound like.

Meanwhile I thought I'd write an update. Where have we gone? Well, Transition Norwich is now mainly focused on three areas, and most of our ex-bloggers can be found there: John Heaser and Erik in Transition Hethersett, one of TN's Transition Circles (mostly active in the west of the city), Chris and Elena busy at Norwich FarmShare, and Helen with organising the Magdalen-Augustine Celebration. Jon Curran meanwhile is writing for the Norwich Escalator programme, and Simeon, who was elected as a Green Party councillor in the recent May elections, is active in the network, Visions for Change; Mark, still tracking wild and medicinal plants, is organising the distribution for Transition Free Press during its pilot year, and putting his attention on Wellbeing (principally with TN's country cousin, Sustainable Bungay).

And me? Well I'm helping edit a book with Lucy Neal about Transition and the collaborative Arts, called Playing for Time - Making Art as if Life Matters. She has been coming down almost every week this summer and we have been working out of her caravan in the garden. Other days I have been editing Transition Free Press (now working on the third edition) and distributing books for the Dark Mountain Project.

After writing 74 blogs last year (!) I found myself stepping back from these keys as the year turned and letting myself go fallow. Recently I emerged from the clover and wrote a post on my own blog inspired by the cover for the new Dark Mountain book. It wasn't about food or community, or transition initiatives. It was about the visionary English artist, Samuel Palmer. It was about belonging.

When Transition Norwich unleashed almost five years ago, I sat down at the Arts, Culture and Wellbeing table and discussed with others how these subjects might influence the way we face a future without abundant resources and finances. It feels, after many explorations within Transition, mostly around communications and community activism, that I have come full circle. You might say I've come home. Maybe we all have.

Rob Hopkins' new book, The Power of Just Doing Stuff, focuses almost entirely on practical projects and the revival of the High Street. It gives a clear simple picture of the Transition movement, as a way for local groups to come together and start community gardens, bakeries, energy projects and local currencies. But, for me, Transition has mostly been about a process, a going through: undergoing a radical restructuring of the self, to become an active agent within the collective, in order to live effectively in the future. To feel at home on the planet amongst my fellows.

As a writer it has meant witnessing and reporting on that process, and the cultural moves we need to make to downshift in our ordinary lives. Intellectually, pragmatically, emotionally, imaginatively. It has meant making meaning and giving value to this low-carbon life, learning to open out and become articulate about subjects that are "outside my skillset" from zero waste to high finance. And most of all it has meant learning to work in a group. This Low Carbon Life began all that for me, and perhaps for all of us on this journey. Looking back, though it worked beautifully as a collaborative project and produced some great posts, I don't think it entirely broke the tyranny of the silo, that position of individual control that is the bane of all social enterprises. Me did not entirely become We, the connected Self, one amongst the Many.

Some of that is due to this form of media, and some to our  strong social conditioning and history. Our fear of letting go and taking charge. Blogging is, by its nature, insular and subjective. And maybe that's why eventually we dispersed. We needed to break out into other areas. However I do feel that a lack of dynamic inner work and group interaction will reduce any initiative to just doing stuff within a conventional set and setting. Digging the garden, putting on community events, marketing ourselves. There is no harm in any of those things. But to see a different world into existence takes other skills: depth, rigour, perception, intuition, courage and light-heartedness. In that territory the artist and the writer is a pioneer. So, right now, that's where I am headed . . . . Have a great summer all! 

Images:tree spinach in the garden; delivering copies of Transition Free Press to May Day Fair in Chapelfield Gardens; cover of new Dark Mountain collection by Kit Boyd: (you can pre-order a copy or subscribe for the year here); community garden in Transtion Portalegre, from The Power of Just Doing Stuff by Rob Hopkins (you can order a copy here)

Holding open a door (early morning)

There is a postcard downstairs from the Ashmolean Museum. It's the cornerstone of a noticeboard with pictures of plants and places I worked amongst over a decade ago. It sits between Dr Bach's garden in a village in Oxfordshire and a saguaro cactus on Saguaro-Juniper covenant land in Arizona. All the pictures tell a story. Each one is a small door into an earth I wish to remember and keep within me, so I don't forget where I am or what I am doing here.

When I was young, I spent many rainy afternoons in the city galleries looking at pictures, and in many ways I learned my craft as a writer, by describing these canvases and becoming fluent in the cultural knowledge they held within their masterly pen and brush strokes. Some of this was about observation, learning how to communicate what I saw and gave value to, but some of it was about the mysterious art of perception, a sensibility that enables you to gaze deep beyond the surface of things. I looked into the gloomy green-tinged faces of Spanish saints, the laughing sun-dappled revellers of Paris, long before I went to these places and saw these people for real. You could say that looking at art trained me to pay attention to the real thing when I stumbled upon it in the streets of Montmartre, or Madrid. For a while the ability to notice the folds in a Florentine angel's dress, or the lace on a Dutch burgher's cloak, made me a good fashion editor when I grew up. But not all art taught me to ply my trade in the Empire, about the seductive nature of possessions and power that has made all Marxist critics despair since Roland Barthes. Not all pictures the artists painted increased the vanity of their patrons. Not all roads lead to Rome.

One of those rainy days I found myself in front of a small painting in an exhibition about English landscape, and something unusual happened. Instead of stepping back and observing, I stepped into its world. It was a painting by Samuel Palmer of a small country scene, set in the Kent I had once glimpsed as a child. Instead of a torrent of words that usually came in these moments, there was a silence. Nothing took place, except a feeling, as if the ground were moving under my feet. As if I were standing in the painting itself and could feel the trees breathing all around me.

In the following room, the same feeling came to me as I stood in front of Paul Nash and his luminescent paintings of Oxfordshire hills. I can't remember the name of the show now, but it taught me something about the presence of land and something about lineage that has subtly influenced the relationships I have had with English art and writing since.

Palmer was influenced by Blake, and Paul Nash was influenced by Palmer. There was a lineage between them there I could see and feel, and even though I was educated to observe landscape as the background to historical events, or as the view from a grand property, these places remained remote from my own experience. Although I could, in the manner of that once-hungry adolescent, discuss Palmer in the context of the School of Ancients and the pastoral, and argue how the Romantics were escapists from a geo-political reality, Palmer acted on another part of my intelligence entirely. His small paintings showed a real place that crossed over into the imagination: bright clouds, large moons, everything in abundance and brimming with harvest, even though this idyll was threatened by the Industrial Revolution then, as much as it is now. They gave a sense there were other things at play, a blueprint within the land itself that, no matter what happened to it, was always there, in the tree moving and changing, in ordinary things. That it would only take a change of sensibility in ourselves to rediscover.

wicker basket

When I was 35 I threw away and burned all the note- books and diaries I had ever written in those city years and went on the road. A few things I kept however in a wicker picnic basket, that I sometimes collected from someone's garage, or a lockup, and looked through when I was passing through London.

Amongst these small possession were two postcards from my gallery-haunting years. One a sepia ink drawing by Samuel Palmer and the other a painting by Paul Nash of Wittenham Clumps. I couldn't tell you what I felt in those worlds, except that it felt like an England, a place that I belonged to and hoped would always be there. A place I could return to. This England was a round, warm, benign place, that was at once mys- terious, intimate and real, its dusk and shadows, full of sunlight and moonlight, a door through to different time. A landscape in which people, sitting, walking or working, had a place.

The new cover for Dark Mountain 4 is a lovely painting inspired by Samuel Palmer, and I realised that I had kept that postcard all these years, in that wicker basket and in the corner of my room, for a reason. Because it was the first painting I came across that made me feel at home in my own country.

Our perception of the world is inherited and honed, as mine was by the landscapes and interiors of the elite classes, by the Gainsborough drawing rooms, by the stables of Stubbs horses - a land and a house and view, always owned by other people. But sometimes you stumble into another room by accident and realise this is not the England you recognised with the part of yourself that used to be called the soul. The feeling, breathing, imaginative relationship with land when you are part of it, as much as it is part of you. Palmer shows you that this world is common and belongs to you and the people who work within it, who take time to pause amongst the corn. You are no longer the lonely observer in a city gallery. You are immersed in another country. The painting did something that none of the landscapes of Turner and Constable ever had: it set up a desire.

This morning I got up before sunrise and sat beneath an oak. Even though East Anglia does not have the rounded contours and hills of Shoreham, everything in the neighbourhood you could find in Palmer's world: the apple tree laden with blossom in a quiet garden, the winding lane, the hare, the sheep, the great harvest moon swinging above the fields of barley. You could see this place through political or historical eyes, as a landowner, or as a dispossessed, deracinated people - a cruel and unfair England. Or you could see it through scientific eyes, the eyes of a disappointed environmentalist, noticing the dead poisoned soil and razed hedgerows, the threatened ash, the disappearing songbird.

Or you can see it as an artist and a writer and notice the round beauty inherent in all its forms. You could hear the blackbird singing and the wren, feel the soft South wind soughing through the leaves, the scent of summer rain. the land that is always here, rooted in deep time.

This evening I walked with ten people along the River Waveney that loops around Bungay common. At one point I jumped into the river and swum amongst the damselflies and yellow lilies, so was behind the rest. As I looked in front of me, I saw the people in a line walking through the long water meadow grass on a midsummer evening and as I went to join them I thought about what I would write for this blog, why I think art matters, and writing matters. Why recognising the link between a line of people in a Palmer painting in 1830 and one that takes place in front your eyes in 2013 matters. Because if the writer can take us out of the city, back to the place where we belong, where we become part of the living, breathing planet, we will have done our best work. Because a people who are connected to the earth, in time, will stand by it and by each other.

When I stumbled upon Dark Mountain, as I had once stumbled upon Samuel Palmer, something sparked inside. I recognised a certain lineage in the England that people were writing about -  painting, scything, making sheep hurdles - artists who sat under trees before sunrise (though now perhaps with their laptops) and why mysteriously it attracts so many people and inspires them to create (so much so that there are two Dark Mountain collections this year). Because we are holding out for an earth we know we belong to, by virtue of being alive in this form. Because somewhere in the place where there are no words, just a feeling, we are holding open a door . . .

Dark Mountain 4 is now available to order or by annual subscription (2 volumes).

Images: Early Morning, Garden in Shoreham, Girl in Cornfield by Samuel Palmer; Landscape of the Vernal Equinox III by Paul Nash; Swimmers in the River Waveney (Wild Swimming); Dark Mountain 4 cover by Kit Boyd

Flight of the Butterflies

As the IEA reports ever-increasing carbon emissions, and Britain's environment minister denies any change in the climate in the last 17 years, what is the response of the truly awake person in the current cultural dissonance? In the summer issue of the radical grassroots magazine,  STIR. I wrote a review of Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behaviour, the latest 'cli-fi' book that look squarely at our present crisis and whose main protagonist is one of the most extraordinary creatures on earth. 

In many ways dystopias are easier to write than a realist fiction that can look at the awesome forces that are out of kilter on the earth. Most books would rather put their imaginative attention on a post-collapse world, than face the gritty problems of a family or community living out the consequences of neo-liberalism and a globalised industrial culture. How can you create a plot when the conventional “bad guys” – those who wield corporate power - have become invisible? How can you find empathy for people who appear as ignorant victims of circumstance and stand in their home territories, witness to weird weather and species extinction. - subjects which seem better handled by the deeper and more metaphysical forms of poetry, or by non-fiction, unconstrained by a linear storyline?

Although the heroine of Flight Behaviour, Dellarobbia Turnbow, is a far cry from Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, this is a classic tale of a trapped woman yearning to transform and break free from a near-impossible situation. What distinguishes it from these works and the thousands of romances built around the same theme is its mighty big subtext: climate change.

Barbara Kingsolver is known to tackle big subjects in her novels — sometimes successfully, sometimes not: women in the Arizona mine strike of 1983 in Holding the Line, sustainable food production in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Native American rights in Pigs in Heaven, Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky and the Mexican revolution in Lacuna, and, most famously, the impact of colonialism in the Congo told through the eyes of a missionary family in The Poisonwood Bible. All these themes, however, belong to the human and political realm.

Climate change is notoriously hard to talk about, belonging to what some call the 'supernarrative', the massive planetary shifts, that even though caused by human civilisation, we have limited capacity to control as individuals. Our sense of agency in our personal and social lives melts with the glaciers. History we can deal with, war, poverty, and even apocalypse, but eco-systems in feedback loops? These are non-human, non-linear realities normally assigned to science and to ecological campaigns. However human beings are not created from facts and figures, we are the creatures of story - the choices we make and the roads we take. Story is what makes meaning and gives value to our lives. 

Role of the Novel

I don’t think it is a coincidence that the novel rose to prominence along with industrial civilisation, when people felt their lives to be largely shaped by human forces and therefore responsive to acts of individual will (Askay Ahuja reviewing the short story collection, I’m with the Bears)

 In Flight Behaviour the central ecological dilemma takes place in a run-down sheep farm, in a run-down town where everyone has strange names, goes to church and every turn of the bad luck or weather is attributed to the Lord’s mysterious ways. The book is told from the point of view and in the language of 28 year-old Dellarobbia, who is stuck in a small house among the Southern Appalacian mountains with two small children and a husband she doesn’t love, dominated by harsh and judgemental in-laws. She has no money, no education and no prospects. Her neighbours’ son has cancer and all their peach trees and tomato plants have dissolved in the endless biblical rains. Small wonder you think she wants to throw it all away on an affair and run heedlessly up a mountain one day in ill-fitting boots.

Somewhere, after many long descriptions, the book takes a small flight of its own: the revelatory lake of fire Dellarobbia discovers on the mountain instead of her lover turns out to be millions of displaced overwintering Monarch butterflies. The hero of the book, a dusky well-mannered scientist, arrives from the Outside World with his assistants to live in a trailer on the Turnbow farm and record their destiny. His passion for these insects, his intelligence and grace, affects the smart but unschooled Dellarobbia and Preston, her son, and their world begins to open up. Will this encounter manifest into a relationship? Will the wooded hillside be logged? Will the butterflies survive the on-coming winter? Will redemption come to Feathertown? Will she herself take flight, like the flame-coloured butterflies in Spring? And then? So the old-fashioned devices of story telling kick in and you have to find out the outcome, though the prose does not get any easier for all that.

Kingsolver was originally a scientist and she applies her scientific eye not just to the insects undergoing numerous tests in Turnbow’s barn-laboratory —she puts their whole world under the microscope. Long drawn-out scenes in the local dollar and thrift stores tag every item on display; an exchange with an activist reveals that their “lifestyle” scores very low on the carbon ratings. Numerous rather creaky conversations between Ovid Byron, the entomologist, and his new assistant spell out the behaviour of this extraordinary butterfly and the ramifications of global warming. It’s a right-on subject and you cannot fault the author on facts, Yet this “left hemisphere” fixation on detail makes for a flat Puritanical prose-style, lacking lyricism or feeling. The beauty of the Appalachian mountains is absent, and even Dellarobia, cast as a red-headed Venus by the local TV company, does not come across as beautiful.

Story of our times

One reason we read, and need fiction is to understand how and why we are living now while imagining our way forward. (Adrian Ayres Fisher reviewing the post-apocalyptic novels, Arcadia and The Dog Stars)

 So this is a personal story and a story about our times. When I left my old city life I stopped reading novels; by the time I returned to England ten years later and joined the Transition movement I had stopped reading books almost completely, unless they were related to work. I realised reading books had become an escape, something that afforded a comfort at the end of the day. Novels belonged to a book club, literary festival culture, the books you took to the beach. They belonged to old ladies at the libraries who checked out ten thrillers at a time to occupy their minds and fill their days. They were not the challenging and inventive works I once studied.

Like many of my contemporaries, when I returned to writing the form I chose was not fiction. We rediscovered the essay, the pamphlet (often in the forms of blogs), creative non-fiction and citizen journalism. In an era where becoming rooted in time and place has become an imperative, many of us sought out the older and vaster forms of myth and fairy tale, radical prose of the commons that challenged the history of the Empire. The impromptu speaker of words on the streets and at festivals took our attention, and fiction receded to a remote drawing room and Sunday newspaper world that seemed increasingly old-fashioned, conformist and slow. Used to squeezing plot into 140 characters or a pithy caption these 437 pages stuck in the Appalachian mud now seemed way too lengthy. Who had the time to read this stuff?

The pursuit of a narrative that can speak of our collapsing times is a mantra of the day, and perhaps it’s worth asking: does this narrative belong to the people who see the future coming, or do we include, as Kingsolver does here, the people who deny it is happening and are most likely to lose out when it does? Who will log their voices and their experience? Can we step in each other’s shoes and imagine what is it like, how it could be different, without the fictive form?

One of the major tensions in Flight Behaviour is the lack of awareness the outsiders (in their designer boots) have about the restrictive and humiliating nature of being dirt poor – of not having the right house, or education. Or indeed shoes. “Most of us have to walk around in our sleep, accepting our underprivileged position,” Dellarobbia tells Ovid:

I’d argue that the teams get picked and then the beliefs get handed-out. Team Camo get the right to bear arms, and John Deere and the canning jars and tough love and taking care of our own. The other side wears I don’t know what, something expensive. They understand recycling and population control and lattes and as many second changes as anybody wants.

 I am not a climate denier and so cannot imagine what the doubters among Kingsolver’s readers might feel about Flight Behaviour. Looking out at equally waterlogged country (in East Anglia) I find myself thinking about that small imaginary house in Tennessee and realise that the book’s strength is linked to its ability to see what is, without any ought to be in the way. And that responding to nature in crisis might just bring things out of us we never thought were there.

When I opened the book I felt I would rather spend two hours watching Jennifer Lawrence in similar bleak conditions in Winter’s Bone. But in the end the novel had greater staying power. Roots, and not screen stars, are what we need right now, wherever we are, if we want to hold ourselves in place on the earth.

Images of monarch butterflies from 2012 documentary The Flight of the Butterflies; STIR is available at selected outlets and by subscription (see their website for details)

ARCHIVE: The Sea Kale Project

Five years ago I began a walk down the Eastern Seaboard. It was called The Sea Kale Project.  

Originally the walk was going to be a springboard for a photographic exhibition and begin in Norfolk. In the end however it was the catalyst that drew me back into writing. First a small piece in a local magazine and then an abundance of journalistic blogs, principally about the Transition movement, during the following three years. Sea Kale also became the subject of the final chapter of 52 Flowers That Shook My World. 
 
Tomorrow, in another time of shift, I will go with Mark to Sizewell beach, as we do each year, to visit the extraordinary community of wild, robust cabbages that flourish strangely and beautifully beside the nuclear power station. Here is a piece I wrote on This Low Carbon Life in 2011 in celebration:
 
 Along the sandy dunes and shingle banks of the eastern seaboard there is a front line of wild plants, the ancestors of our allotments and fields - wild carrot, wild cabbage, sea beet, sea pea, sea kale, sea rocket, oraches, sorrel – and our medicine cabinets - wormwood and eyebright, sea buckthorn, sea holly, scurvy grass. Of all our ancient companions, the sea kale with its abundant flowers and rich detoxifying leaves is the largest and most impressive. Its tap root sinks deep into the shingle and holds fast in a rocky and uncertain time - the kind of plant that can weather a storm.

The plant marks a territory that runs along the shoreline from Norfolk to Kent. It’s a geographical, ecological territory, but also a place you can map in time, in the ways that make meaning of our presence on the planet since our forebears first ate those salty iron-rich leaves.

I came across the sea kale in Dungeness. I had gone there because of Derek Jarman. I had read his journals and noticed the flash of wild flowers in the text, as he struggled with the elements that howled through his shingle garden and to keep own tenuous thread to life. He had come in search of bluebells and found instead the bleak shore and the sea-kale that grew beside the nuclear power station. It was a singular territory that he made his own: wind-broken, austere, at the end of the line.

We had, like the artist, driven out of the city at bluebell time and found the crambe's crinkly purple leaves pushing through the stones. We had been travelling and were looking for a place to live. We walked past the black fisherman’s hut and its now-deserted garden, sat amongst the flowering dwarf blackthorn and crab apple. As we drove away, I looked back and the familiar mosaic of marsh and sky and sea sparked something in me. It was the memory of somewhere I used to know. A certain strand of my life that began when I was a child in Sandwich Bay and Felixstowe.

When we settled in Suffolk Mark and I began an open dialogue with the wild places along the coast, following a practice we had developed working with dreams and medicinal plants – visiting, holding a discourse within the territory, cohering our findings, keeping a creative log. It had become clear that for the future to happen we needed to be realigned with the natural systems and to recover our aboriginal ability to speak with the earth. How could we do this in our native land?

The dialogue began with a question: Who is this self in this territory? How can we communicate in an intelligent and vigorous way? What effect does the land, its moods, rhythms, creatures, weather, have on our imaginations, on our memories, on our realignment?

In 2008 we began a project that mapped the mosaic of eco-systems and their relationship with the human settlements along this shifting coastline. We named the project after the study seakale communities. Having this kind of dialogue means you don’t walk the track you choose. You encounter what is there. going out without a plan, meeting what crosses your path. Not just the beautiful, but also the difficult. We began just as the sea asters were setting seed n the marshes. On November 9 there was a massive storm surge. A powerful northeasterly wind ran against the high tide and the estuaries flooded their banks. We ran out of our houses and stood by the shore as the rivers merged with the sea and swamped the houses down at Blackshore harbour.

After the flood people everywhere began speaking about how to protect the land. Small bands collected together, stacked sandbags against the river wall, spoke out for the birds and the spirit of the place.

“Just a few cows”, we were told by the greysuited men from the Environment Agency in Reydon village hall. The agency were refusing to mend the broken banks of the Blyth as the government announced its retreat back to the metropolis.

"What about the fishermen?" I asked. "Fishing is not economic", he replied.
"What about the tourism?"
"They will go elsewhere".

The cows in the watermeadows didn’t count. The birds didn’t count. The land didn’t count. The people in the coastal seatowns didn’t count. Only the populations in the industrial towns would be secured. The oil prices began to rise. Suddenly I realised I was living in a different time. A time I did not know.

This was the time I found myself talking to Charles Clover, environment editor of the Daily Telegraph, our paths crossing after 25 years. He was telling me about the fish in the ocean he has spent his life defending, and a book he had written called The End of the Line. I told him what was happening down by the sea’s mouth. The agency was abandoning all the defences of the rivers and their harbours along the territory of the sea kale – the Blyth, the Ore, the Alde, the Deben. It was business as usual in the hotels in town, down at the pier, at the fish shop (The show must go on!) but some of us were beginning to ask why.

"They are going to take everything!" he said.

We walked the coast line from the statue of Neptune at Lowestoft, towards the Martello tower of Aldeburgh, from November to the following late summer. We stood on the beaches with 1700 others making a human SOS protest at Walberswick, watched an adder slither by through the sea peas as the police and activists outwitted each other at Sizewell power station, watched the sky burn as the reeds caught fire at Easton Bavents.

We swam in the ocean, with the seals, in the high waves, watched the sea become glass-green, pewter, azure, opal, bruised, mad with foam, tipped with fire. We swam in the wake of Roger Deakin, and walked in the footsteps of WG Sebald. Above us the sky raced with clouds, the wind blew sharp and salt, and warm, scented with heather, hail clattered on our heads. The sands shone silver, the cliffs flashed gold. The land pulsed with light, We pocketed treasures: sea coal, sea peat, a glass bead, a worn kitchen tile, an oyster shell, a deer skull from the tumulus at Dunwich at winter solstice. The sand martins departed their cliff dwellings, the barnacle geese arrived, the starlings rose like spectres over the marshes. Stags roared in the reeds. Seasons came and went. In the mornings standing at my window, I would see the sea like a shining band on the horizon, like a mirror. It’s a good day, I would say to Mark. Let’s go out.

Today is such a day. And I’m writing about this project, about the resilient sea kale, because you notice in a droughted spring, it’s the plants with strong tap roots that flourish. It’s the tap root that keeps us alive. To belong you need a story, and to have a story you need a territory. You need a strong tap root to keep you anchored in a hard time. Sometimes the territory you find yourself in is not the place where you think you belong. It is not the lovely bluebell wood, or the rose garden where you sit alone with your thoughts. It’s not a tropical ocean or an Aegean island cove. It’s a windy English beach with people and houses and oil tankers on the horizon, where you encounter a thousand difficult questions about power and nature and exploitation. And the story you need now is not the story you were born with; it’s a story you have to discover, that you are challenged to go walkabout and find.

Part of me when I began the project wanted to stay on that wild ecstatic shoreline with the flowers, with the birdsfoot trefoil and centaury and harebell, to put all my attention on birds and stones and light, to keep hold of the outsider position of the artist and dreamer, but that shoreline kept taking me to the people, to face those awkward questions: to the protesters at Sizewell, to the campaigners in the village halls. It took me back into journalism as I found myself writing an article on the project for a local community magazine, the first I had published in 2o years. It didn't take me to paradise, it took me straight into the heart of the struggle.

It took me back into society, into Transition, to the place where we all meet, the place at the end of the line, at the edge of the narrow land, England, at a point in time where we need to come to certain decisions about the future. Decisions and meeting places I'll be writing about this week with some of the people who have crossed my path.

Among the seakale on Sizewell Beach, 2011; Derek Jarman in Dungeness, 1992 (by Howard Sooley); Greenpeace protest at Sizewell A, 2003; SOS protest at Walberswick, 2008: Sea Lale Project notebook, 2009; Mark, seakale and Sizewell B, 2011.