A first visit to the Shropshire Hills

 I consider myself to be well-travelled in the UK, but have never spent time in the Shropshire Hills, so a week of nature-writing with Patrick Barkham and Miriam Darlington at the Arvon Foundation’s The Hurst should prove to be exciting. Patrick and Miriam are two of my favourite authors writing about British nature: Patrick’s The Butterfly Isles and Miriam’s Owl Sense make them butterfly and owl whisperers, in my opinion. I’d better get on with some hare whispering… they have been very absent in my life since this last move.

The week is indeed exciting. We do that classic nature writing thing I enjoy so much: going out in the field, then coming back to write about it. The grounds of the The Hurst (once the home of the playwright John Osborne) are over 26 acres, and much of it is scarcely managed woodland, so lots of rampant bramble and ferns and overgrown rhododendron ‘dens’.

Still plenty of native trees though and it’s a joy to hear so many birds, to find fox scat, and to see dozens of wild raspberry bushes, full of tiny fruits. I eat several. I love this way to be ‘wild’ myself, nibbling berries and leaves as I go along… but I’m reminded of the possible dangers later on in our walk.

Miriam’s owl whisperings clearly work: both tawny and barn are frequently seen, and heard. Barn owls are breeding in the Hurst’s 19th century dovecote and in one of their pellets I find a perfect tiny skull. Patrick’s whispering is less successful - butterflies are scarce - but it’s not his fault: because of the cold wet spring, and other factors, numbers are down everywhere in the UK this year. 

Beyond the spring-fed sawmill pond, we visit a circle of Coast Redwoods:

related to the Giant Sequoia, not native here but introduced to Britain in the mid 19th century and now common in some large private estates and formal gardens. Because of how the climate crisis is affecting California’s native Sequoias, those planted here are doing better. Someone in our group remembers as a child calling them ‘punch trees’. She thinks this is because their bark is so thick and soft, you can punch them with impunity. A little light googling reveals this to be the case, though one Reddit contributor suggests that instead of punching the tree, you ask it “why am I such an arsehole?”. Fair enough.

In the beautiful alder tree surrounded pond, there are roots, newts and coots, all moving in their own mysterious ways. Whirligig beetles too who definitely win the coolest mover competition. But my most delicious discovery (NOT!) is the hemlock water dropwort plant. When someone asks me what it is, I cheerily dismiss it as hogweed, or, on closer look, perhaps water celery (there’s plenty of watercress, and water mint in the pond) and am about to nibble a leaf to try. Fortunately imminent death is avoided by a group member who is a professional gardener, and who identifies it correctly. It’s one of the UK’s most deadly plants growing in ponds and streams, and other damp places. I can’t believe it didn’t enter my head. Thankfully, it didn’t enter my mouth either.

During this wonderful week, there was less for me of what I call the nemeton-sense, but that was more about the emphasis on community, and spending most of the time with other folks, rather than me being alone as I usually am. It’s interesting territory though: the Hurst itself, and its vast (mostly) overgrown state; the particular undulating landscape of hill and valley, hill and valley; and indeed its location in the borderlands of England and Wales. A location full of crumbling castles - the famous earthwork Offa’s Dyke too - and much disputed for many hundreds of years. A location where I’d like to spend some more time, and find how its nemeton-sense might live in me.

Engaging the senses for improved wellbeing

More than a week after the Spring Equinox now, and the clocks have changed to BST, giving that wonderful extra evening light. I feel my being stretching out into a new sense of growth, warmth, light… an unfurling from what has seemed to be a prolonged period of winter, of greyness, and of being tightly bundled up against the cold and damp. Or perhaps against living in this world which can often seem so challenging to inhabit. Our current global problems are not going to change with the light, or the season, but this time of year is often the best for implementing personal changes… and the personal is where each of us must start first. And I can only start with me.

So, another phase, another move - this time in deepest darkest winter (note to self: not ever again!) to Harrogate and a 10mins-in-the-car proximity to the lovely RHS Harlow Carr Gardens. Although once again in a flat without a personal garden (albeit a communal one for the block), I am enjoying ‘owning’ the space at Harlow Carr as my new nemeton.

I’ve had several trips there now: a few short reccy ones in cold or rainy weather which ended up being more explorations of the deliciousness on offer in Betty’s Cafe (famous throughout Yorkshire, if not beyond) and in the splendid RHS gift shop where blindfolded I could have picked almost any book or piece of houseware and been happy to own it. But I’ve also had two ‘proper’, longer walks, taking me around the 60 or so acres and spending time sitting, being, and reflecting as well as wandering, looking, and getting to know what’s growing there.

As I wandered, I mused on the past joys of my life when I have been active in a garden in one way or another. I spoke briefly with a young woman digging - with a spade of course, not a mechanical digger - a large bed where, she told me, seasonal vegetables would be planted out. I love it that in this garden (as with all RHS gardens) gardening as food production is as important as gardening for plant preservation, for wildlife, for beauty, and for all the other reasons we might tend our gardens.

I muse too on gardens as nemeta: gardens as sacred, protected, quiet, reflective spaces. They can be - and thankfully are - deliberately set up as that in many places, or, as at Harlow Carr, a set aside part of a larger garden called a ‘peace garden’; ‘garden for reflection’, or simply labelled ‘quiet area’ or something similar. 

But a recent visit was on one of the Easter Bank Holiday days, and the place was very lively with multiple families and coach trips as well as plenty of general dogsbodies - though thankfully no dogs. (I’m not anti-dog, by the way, more anti certain irresponsible dog owners. In any case, a formal visitor garden is not the best place for a dog to run around having fun. Which in my experience, is what many dogs like to do.)

But this busy Bank Holiday did make me reflect on whether a formal visitor garden is indeed the best place, on such a day, for an individual like me seeking some inner peace and wellbeing. I very soon became irritated by hordes of children (ditto dog comment of previous paragraph); by people having loudspeaker-enhanced phone conversations - even shouting to their friend or family member across a large area of garden; by people walking across roped-off areas - even standing in beds to take photographs; by people eating food and dropping the wrappers (I did kindly return the wrapper); and, to be honest, by people full stop. By people being people. 

So… what to do? Easy to utilise the shoulds/must/oughts - or this case, the shouldn’t. People shouldn’t be dropping litter or being unnecessarily noisy or letting their children trample new plants, but given they are, and given that people will be people and I have only a minimum level of agency in relation to others (returning a piece of dropped litter, for example), then I must find my inner peace somehow, somewhere.

So, leaving and finding it elsewhere is an option, but if choosing to stay rather than leave, then it becomes even more pertinent to engage the senses. Focusing on the senses - visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory - is always important when taking time for oneself; when doing any kind of inner work or during times of reflection or meditation. In this case, however, when troubled by what we can see and hear, we need to major on what we can smell and taste, and what we can feel. 

Feel in the tactile sense: the touch of a breeze on skin, or warmth from the sun; the textures of bark,

leaves, petals, even the earth itself; feel how your body is moving through space; feel how your feet touch and lift from the ground… especially in such a place where the ground is protected and worked by those who care for it. 

Feeling in the emotional sense too. I put the grumpy anti-social feelings to one side for now and concentrate on the positives: knowing I’m getting some fresh air and exercise, enjoying the better parts of the visual and the auditory (flower colours, trees coming into leaf, birdsong, water sounds…)

Then there’s smell and taste. How much have we ‘civilised’ folk distanced ourselves from the pleasures of smell? Or don’t ever think to stop a moment, flare our nostrils as we breathe in deeply, or bend down to smell a flower, or rub a leaf between our fingers and inhale the fragrance. I’m amazed how I hardly ever - even in a public park or garden - see people smelling anything, and how often people smile or chuckle when they see me stretching up to smell some just-out-of-reach blossom, or kneeling on the ground for low-lying flowers like bluebells and cowslips.

And taste... taste as an actual eating experience: nothing so wonderful as popping a sun-ripened early autumn blackberry into your mouth, or nibbling some wild garlic as you wander through a woodland in spring. But if it’s a step too far for you to eat something you’ve not bought in a supermarket, then at least open your mouth wide, put out your tongue and consciously savour the air. Maybe not where it’s traffic-busy though.

Focusing consciously on our different senses is one readily available and completely free approach to improving our wellbeing… an approach I use all the time for myself; when working therapeutically with others; and in my wider Nemetona Project work. I’d love to know how it is for you when you try it… 

And yet again...

 Considering the importance to me of creating and living in a ‘sacred space’, I have moved more times than I care to remember since my 50th birthday ‘awakening’, and most of those moves have been in the last 9 years or so: since the move south to Devon in 2015 and then back north to Yorkshire in 2020. 

Some of those moves have had rational explanations, but many seem to have no apparent reason for moving to, or away from, a particular set of four walls. Each time, though, I have had a (reducing) level of hope that here might become ‘home’, rather than simply somewhere to live for now.

This time, however, I’m speaking out and writing about a high level of hope. In part, it’s founded in practicalities most folk would understand: moving is stressful for physical, mental and financial health and my birthdays are going up in number, whilst my savings are going down! 

More importantly, though, is my need to feel I am making a useful contribution, and helping myself, others, and the planet to the extent I am able. Whilst so much practical and psychic energy is taken up with repeated moving, I am not serving as well as I might. Surely, at best, I have a maximum (if very fortunate) of 20 years of useful contribution: I want to feel I’m working from a safe and secure base to give that. When I was 30 something, 20 years seemed a long time. Now, at 70 something, that same period of time feels very different. I believe there is some AFR (actual, factual, rational) explanation of this, but I operate primarily on a feeling level…

Although to credit the AFR, another part of the explanation for having more hope-of-home this time, is that this move has taken me into housing association accommodation, rather than private rented, which gives me security of tenure not available in the private sector, beyond whatever the current contract - usually six months. At least twice in my housing peregrinations have I had to move because the owner wanted their property back. This time, as long as I pay the rent and remain ASBO free, I can live here as long as I want. Perhaps, then, it can be home until that very last home: the return to source. (Of course, it then might all begin again, but that’s beyond the reach of this blog post!)

So, here I am in Harrogate… less of a deep-time geological sense of where I am than I had for my previous two moves (although the Old Norse name likely translates as 'road to the cairn': and cairn might refer to the nearby Brimham Rocks, more than 300 million years old) but more of a recent socio-cultural history - not least the importance to the developing 17th century settlement as somewhere to ‘take the waters’ (ie, hydrothermal bathing). There’ll be more of this in a later post when I’ve taken the waters a few times myself!

For now, still unpacking boxes and arranging my sacred paraphernalia - establishing the nemeton - I’m focusing on my immediate surroundings.

But it’s just been Imbolc - that wonderful ancient Celtic/Gaelic recognition of the beginning of Spring, and I couldn’t resist a visit to Harlow Carr Gardens… a mere ten minutes drive up the road. And a new addition to my personal favourites list of outdoor nemeta. There will be more of this too in later posts.

Equinoctial and Labyrinthine Musings

 So… as we approach the Autumn Equinox, I am on the move again. In search of new work, a new way of being, new sacred space. The ancient limestone of the Yorkshire Wolds is releasing me for the Carboniferous rock formations of Otley Chevin Forest… at around 300 million years old even more ancient than both myself and the limestone I’ve been walking for the last six months, so I wonder what learning, what doing, what being is around the corner?

I have lived in Otley before - a quarter century ago - but "I am not now who then I was" as the saying goes. But then, am I who I was yesterday? This will be a very different kind of living too. On the obvious practical level, it’s a tiny rented flat in a mill conversion on the edge of the Chevin rather than the 2-bed terrace I owned right in the town when I was there before. A different kind of physical and mental geography altogether.

As a retired (as if I ever would!) non-earning, non-property owning individual, on a financial level I’m probably ‘lower’ now on the socio-economic scale than I was then, but with my pension-ettes and occasional donations for the work I offer, I don’t need to earn a living as I did when I was in Otley before, and that has a major energetic difference for how anyone lives. And I have different priorities in other ways too. And… writing this, I have realised something quite remarkable.

I moved to Otley for the first time just after I had my labyrinthian epiphany and received inspiration for Journey to the Centre which was the name I was given for my therapeutic and personal development ‘business’. Setting up JttC, I became officially self-employed and let go of earning any money at all via the educational system, or via any other kind of work as an employee. I did return briefly to employee-hood some ten years or so later, when I did my TESOL training (teaching English to speakers of other languages) in Spain and used those skills to earn a little money there, and when I subsequently returned to the UK with no real idea of what to do next in my life.

Fast forward another 15 or so years and after another epiphany just a week ago I find myself signing up for the Otley flat. This new epiphany, like the previous one, was no doubt ‘brewing’ for some time - and I had recently set a conscious intent for new sacred space - but it initiated fully into my consciousness via a dream.

This time, instead of walking a labyrinth, I was walking the Chevin in a wild, wild wind. So strong was this wind I allowed myself to lean backwards into it and fully relax. I did not fall to the ground. Nothing but wild air supported me for what felt like, in the dream, forever: as if it was a permanent state of being. It was only whilst forming these words I remembered that although I rarely went up the Chevin when I lived in Otley before, on one occasion when I did, I had exactly (yet not) this experience: it was a wild, blustery day and the wind felt so strong that I decided it would support me if I leaned backwards into it and fully relaxed. So I did -  and fell to the ground, bruising both coccyx and dignity.

So, I await developments. And whilst waiting, I’m thinking about the community allotments directly over the road from where I’ll be living, and where I hope to volunteer. I wonder how sacred space will manifest there, as well as in my own personal space, and whilst walking the Chevin, embracing that wild air. And surely, water, earth and the fire of sun and stars too.

As yet, I have no photographs of the Chevin taken by me, but the ones here are taken by Sarah, a many years friend of mine (from when I lived in Otley first time round, in fact) who has herself lived in Otley for almost 300 million years, and who frequently walks the Chevin. Thank you Sarah, for the pics, and for what else you’ve brought into my life.

A geological Nemeton: some personal learning

 I haven’t posted for a while. There are always ‘reasons’ of course for not doing things we feel we need to do, ought to do, should be doing, etc and it’s definitely useful to check out those shoulds-musts-oughts. If you’ve been ill, or stupidly busy (with non-stupid activities) then give yourself a break. You’ll get back round to doing what you ‘should’ be doing. Sometimes deeper exploration is needed: we find that the SMO’s are not always genuinely ‘ours’, but inherited stuff from various earlier authority figures we can let go of now we are big grown-up people. 

But sometimes we truly are not doing something we want to be doing… so then it’s time for the useful question of how come not? For me, not writing when I want to be, can be just laziness - which definitely needs challenging! But this time, writing for the Nemetona blog - or rather not writing for it - no, not laziness: there has been a psychic validity. And a geomorphic validity.

I have been unsettled in my own nemeton: although I love this wonderful geographical and geological area (and indeed the lovely town of Market Weighton itself) the practicalities of the four walls of my current rented place have not turned out how I expected. No need for the boring detail, but I’ve been negotiating with my landlord for some work to be done which is sadly unlikely to happen. I’m now facing a decision about living in what is likely to be a cold (or too expensive to heat) winter place - unsatisfactory in some other ways too - or to move yet again. Those of you who know me might think moving again is hardly an issue for me - I’ve been doing it regularly for a while now.  

Rare habitat: Market Weighton's chalk stream

But this move has been significantly different. I did - still do - feel this new geological landscape is where I want to be: it’s truly a ‘natural’ fit for me. Over and above all the places I’ve lived  - including wonderful time in Scotland which contains some of the most ancient rocks on the planet, as well as most other known geological formations - I am loving the Cretaceous marine limestone of the Yorkshire Wolds. There’s something very wonderful about walking around on all those long dead sea creatures! Or maybe it’s to do with my own crumbling bones… I remember on the day I got my osteoporosis diagnosis wandering on the beach, picking up shells, and wondering about their formation and degradation…

Sand bones

Tree bones

I must chuckle though when I think of finding another place to rent… most letting agents are used to questions about proximity to facilities, or is there somewhere to park… much less so about is there a garden I can work, which way does the house face, and is it built on igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic rock! 

So, that’s the geomorphic validity. As for the psychic, until this moment, I’ve allowed the uncertainty about where is my own personal indoor/outdoor nemeton to be to obstruct my work. I’ve been able to do some reframing around that with help from my daughter, who reminded me how often I’ve been a ‘guardian gardener’ rather than an owner gardener. And also help from a client of mine with whom I’ve worked for many years, and over many house moves, who reminded me about how well I create safe and sacred space wherever I happen to be living. And finally a reminder from myself about agency… that is, I still have some!

When I facilitate others, their work is so often about finding what resources they do have, especially when they feel they are resource-less. If I don’t stay here, I will find somewhere else… I’ve done it many times before. Nemeta can be created anywhere. Though I will still be looking to have those ancient sea creatures crunching under my feet.