So many ways to settle

finding equilibrium at Alban Elfed

Recently, during a course I was part of, we wrote ‘life reviews’. There were lots of ways to approach the prompt — focussing on decades or smaller units of time, key people and relationships, taking a particular thread of development — emotional, sexual, intellectual, roles, career… I wrote my notes as a series of mind maps around key places. The forest, the village at the foot of the Moelwyns in North Wales, the parishes where I was in ministry in Birmingham, Swindon, Rotherhithe, the years in Bristol where I taught and became a mother, the university years in Cambridge and growing up in Redcar and Middlesbrough, where I was born. In all of these places there were other places that constellated significant memories, that anchored me and provided ways of being in the world in this particular body. Childhood trips to Whitby, a friend’s cottage in Manaton, Dartmoor, where we went for family holidays when my children were young, the arboretum at Westonbirt, Avebury stone circle…

Place and equilibrium have always gone hand and in hand along my path. We’re approaching the Autumn Equinox, the Druidic Alban Elfed (light of the water), when for a moment day and night are poised as equals, I’m currently travelling. I’ve spent time visiting friends in Ceredigion in Wales, a place I’ve known for decades, in Bangor for a book launch, familiar from living in North Wales for 20 years, and am now with my daughter and her family in the East Midlands. We have yet to travel to London to visit my oldest daughter and delight in the Tate’s exhibition of Frida Kahlo, Bristol to visit young friends just married and a city I love, and Cornwall, to stay in another friend’s barn conversion, always our last stop before returning home to the forest.

What are your treasure maps of place?

Place winds through at the heart’s farthest edge, which I was delighted to launch alongside Welsh poet Gwen William’s dual-language poetry collection Arriving Barefooted earlier this week, another book with place at its heart.

My childhood home was not romantic or easy, but in the local wood there were owls. Trees and owls have threaded through my sense of the places I’ve loved ever since, no doubt a huge part of the sense of refuge in coming to live in a forest where the tawny owls are vociferous.

Making a home in the forest is a long process of renovation. In the first months here, A. and I camped in a room that my son has now colonised as an exercise space, living out of suitcases while a bedroom was built into the attic. The grenier room covers the whole top floor, has art and music spaces for A. and a corner where I have an occasional desk. When it was ready, we painted the wooden floors blue-grey and laid old rugs in warm autumn oranges and reds from sellers in Morocco. I bought another for my writing room that turned out to be infested with moth larvae. I tried essential oils, a natural insecticide, then anything I could get my hands on — keeping the rug out on the deck. The moths kept coming and finally we sealed the squirming rug in a plastic box, heavily doused, and left it away from the house.

Between the enchantment of the owl and the battle with carpet moths, the first leaks in the roof appeared, though it would take another two years to discover that the tiles were disintegrating — slates turning to mud. Mudstone to slate… the story of Blodeuwedd, the life in North Wales… slate back to mud… a new life in a forest in France…

Will we be flowers or owls?

What are you doing here, Jan?

Wonder and struggle.

And that soul-tingling call — kewick — hoo-hoo kewick — hoo-hoo.

from at the heart’s farthest edge

In The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd writes:

Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered

The spirit of place, genius loci, seems to permeate some places for us more strongly than others, often precisely because this unique encounter between a particular spot and an equally particular embodied mind.

Place can bring us into equilibrium for so many reasons — the memories, the scent, our one-off psychological make-up and the resonances of that piece of land in that moment interacting in extraordinary ways, something that M.R. O’Connor explores in Wayfinding: the science and mystery of how humans navigate the world. She delves deeply into migration and sense of direction (humans seem strange in their propensity for getting lost), looking at how so many non-human creatures, even zooplankton, have sophisticated internal clocks so that sense of time and place wind into one another.

And of course, countless non-human animals also have wonderful ways of mapping geography that seem mysterious to us. There are creatures that navigate by the pole star or other stellar compasses, that calculate distances using light and maths or find their ways using the earth’s geomagnetic field.

We too have a hippocampus that navigates time and space, as O’Conor says:

it builds representations of places based on our point of view, experiences, memories, goals, and desires. It provides the infrastructure for our selfhood. […] Maybe wayfinding is an activity that confronts us with the marvellous fact of being in the world, requiring us to look up and take notice, to cognitively and emotionally interact with our surroundings whether we are in the wilderness or a city, even calling us to renew our species’ love affair with freedom, exploration, and place.

And she writes about how the places we grow up or that have given us the most vivid memories or resemble these formative places that evoke topophilia. We love these places above others and find our harmony there.

Where do you find equilibrium?

Owls and forests turned up in a local scrap of woodland near my childhood home in Redcar and in other places during formative years:

On two occasions L instructed me not to go on school trips. The logistics of keeping insulin cold and managing her diet did not allow L such travel, but she assured me she would never think of going on such awful journeys — forced marches around tourist spots, hearing tired scripts from underpaid guides. Days marred by noisy social events, no doubt compulsory. Girls trying to find local boys to humiliate themselves with. I would hate it and shouldn’t go.

She was not wrong, but I could disappear into my own world whenever overwhelm threatened and I yearned to see beyond Teesside — a woodland retreat in Austria with a trip to Salzburg, a ski-ing trip in central France. On both, I could vanish into my cocoon, but was awed by the architecture of Salzburg, the forest where we got up before dawn and hiked through snow, landscape uneven and startling, owls calling the sun to rise — long-eared owls with their low hoos, tawny owls with their rapid kewicks, the shrill of barn owls and plosive kweeos of little owls.

I soaked in their calls, unaware of my school shoes letting in snow, my coat unequal to the pre-dawn cold. Vision blurred, no scent of ice or taste of wind, only voices thrumming through heart and throat.

from at the heart’s farthest edge

There are so many ways to unsettle.

There are so many ways to settle.

Places that smell, taste and feel like sanctuary ground us, give us a space to stand, moments of much-needed equilibrium in a wild world.

at the heart’s farthest edge

In October 2020, as new lock downs were implemented, I moved from a beloved home of twenty years in North Wales to a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finistère. Isolated during lockdowns, facing major unforeseen house renovations, illness and bereavement, she was also training as a herbalist while juggling work.

Constantly, I asked myself: What are you doing here?

How had a moment gazing at a stained glass window as a four-year-old, a friendship between two girls who role-played their way through seven years as people from 10th century Moorish Spain, a thirty-one year volatile marriage, work-place assaults, a heart-changing encounter with herbalism and a new relationship led to this place in the seventh decade of life?

You can find out more about the book here. If you are ordering in the UK Cinnamon Press really appreciates direct sales from the website, but for those further afield you can find links to other sellers in the UK, Europe, US and worldwide on the link tree.