What are we harvesting?

when urgency falls away

We have reached the season of Lughnasadh, the first harvest, corn being cut. In the fields John Barleycorn, who laid with the Lady in the woods at Beltane, has aged, bearded and head bent. The Sun has transformed him, green to gold, and his time to leave this life of earth has come. He will feed his people at this Lughnasadh festival. It’s a celebration that has passed into other traditions too — the Lammas loaf of Christian faith is both celebration of harvest blessings and a remembrance of sacrifice for others.

In the Irish Celtic tradition the festival is named for Lugh, a god of sun and also associated with Lugh’s foster mother Tailtiu, who brought agriculture to Ireland. In the Irish story of ‘Tochmarc Emire’ (The Wooing of Emer), part of the Ulster Cycle, Cú Chulainn courts Emer and is given a series of several tasks to complete to win her, including not sleeping for a year, which Emer describes as the cycle of lunar festivals, Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain.

It is a time of abundance and reaping what we have sown. It is a time of blessing when life overflows and the Earth’s generosity flows. Harvest is rich with meaning — the nutrition that will feed body and mind, the creative harvest that nourishes heart and soul…

What are you harvesting?

I always think of late summer, when the sun is mellowing, and early autumn as the beginning of the creative year. I love that line in the film, You’ve Got Mail, when Tom Hanks’s character, Joe Fox, writes about loving New York in the fall, seeing it as a beginning, not an end, wishing he could send Meg Ryan’s character (Kathleen Kelly) ‘a bouquet of sharpened pencils’. An image of creative life…

I’ve had the good fortune to begin harvesting early this year. In June, staying at Reagh in Ireland, I had an idea for a project I might begin, and I did start some reading for it, but as often happens when I go on a writing retreat with something specific in mind, something else bubbles up in its place. I write prose in a gushing waterfall – it torrents out and then the long, slow process of honing and editing begins. Poetry, I write like squeezing out drops of blood — hate it one day, love it the next and have no idea the day after.

At Reagh I picked up a poetry project I’d begun and abandoned several times over, and suddenly it flowed. I still had no idea whether I loved or hated it, but something had opened. Perhaps because at the same time I was studying a course in Druid spirituality and the subject of a land that is alive and responsive meshed with poetry exploring the creatureliness of human animals, more-than-human animals and plants overlapped and fed one another. Perhaps because I was in place I find magical, where I could walk through a maze of hawthorn and meet the hazel at the centre, follow the path of a river, sit in a grove of oaks… Perhaps because the writing didn’t flow from what I’d planned but made me get out of my own way and simply immerse in this bubbling stream of images and voices.

When does your creativity find its flow?

I returned to a day when two full moon circles I regularly attend fell on the same day at different times.

What have you outgrown? Yoli asked.

False urgency. I’d ended up in A&E the day we should have travelled to Ireland, and it was good that I went to hospital, but we live in a world where urgency is so often manufactured. At Reagh, for the first time ever, I’d fully kept my promise myself not to respond to work emails while on retreat. I’d let people know I’d be away and there were very few emails, but a couple insisted on urgency even though I knew the sky would not fall. To resist ‘false urgency’ is something I might not have managed since childhood and my harvest of poems was, at least in part, the fruit of this resistance.

What have you outgrown?

I think of the plants, which sense their environment, respond to danger, can trigger stress, warn other plants, but also know how to manage growth and genuine stress responses via a reciprocal regulation of stress-response and growth-control mechanisms.

In the forest I listen to Fern, lush and prolific, a plant of spiral fractals, soft, moist and ancient. They are a plant of memory before memory, who lived on after the dinosaurs were no more. The first to renew after cataclysm, forest fires, dwarfing our human dramas with their resilience, with another way of knowing. There is no room for false urgency in fern-time, only devotion to a long lineage of connection. Devotion as something older and deeper than language, as slowing down, as softness, fluidity, curling and unfurling. Devotion as the ground of intuition and creative practice.

I think of Yoli’s question:

If you trusted life again, what would you devote yourself to?

In Kerri’s circle we wrote of shape-shifting into memories.

Once there was a meadow with a river running through it. You could see the bottom, clear water over stones, steady flow over brown earth. The fragrance of summer grass beneath your body, young and sun-scented and ready for life. You picked strawberries from a bowl, lay your head in a friend’s lap, laughed at your identical dresses — hers in magenta, yours in red. A meadow that you might walk through now. In the deep spaces of memory, all things waiting to be known again.

For each of us a word chosen from Lucy Beckley’s ‘small acts of attention’ cards.

Mine: Bliss.

It’s a word I’ve avoided for decades. A word I associate with someone whose acts of betrayal and harm once rocked my world.

Bliss. The roots in Old English are ‘happiness’ and ‘grace’. In proto-Germanic, blithsjo, carries the sense of gentle and kind. Not a roaring, dizzy ecstasy, but a deep and quiet intensity, a savouring of life.

It occurred to me that this was exactly what I’d felt every day since leaving hospital. And the feeling had remained – writing and walking and living in quiet simplicity for the retreat month, but also since I’d returned to work, even on busy days, even doing French tax accounts, organising appointments and surgery or on days when the pain was not so well-controlled. It wasn’t about the externals, but the sense of having found my internal rhythm (at least for a while), the sense of the world’s beauty and bounty. A bliss that doesn’t lessen life’s griefs, but persists alongside them. Kerri had rehabilitated ‘bliss’ for me and given me the name for how life felt beyond that usual pull towards urgency.

What is the rhythm that sustains your life, that allows for bliss?

My poetry project, miraculously a complete first draft, has gone to a trusted mentor and the project I intended to begin in Reagh is slowly emerging. It will be a companion to At the Heart’s Farthest Edge. It will be slow-growing with a lot of reading to do. It will weave imagined conversations with authors I’ve loved with memoir and meditation and, of course, the herbs and the forest and the tawny owls who share their songs with me.

And an invitation

In the meantime, if you happen to be in range of Bangor (Wales) in September, come and hear me read from At the Heart’s Farthest Edge in September:

Join us in Bangor me reading from At the heart’s Farthest Edge and Gwen Williams, reading from Arriving Barefooted / Glanio’n Droednoeth at the wonderful Kyffin Café with live music from Fiona & Gorwel Owen on Wednesday 16 September, 7 pm. Kyffin serves great vegetarian food, cakes, hot drinks, beer and wine and can be found at 129 High Street, Bangor, Gwynedd, Bangor, LL57 1NT

At the Heart’s Farthest Edge

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 a tiny hamlet in a forest in Finistère in the seventh decade of life?

At the Heart’s farthest Edge unravels a series of cusp moments so slight they might have vanished unnoticed, yet in retrospect make sense of following a call to a forest in a new land and language, exploring herbalism, creativity and the ways in which we might live a small life well in this beautiful, wounded world.

What readers say:

‘…a gorgeous, dazzling, glimmering book’

‘A fascinating memoir, not like any other…’

‘…brings us back changed.’

‘… thank you for writing such an honest, powerful memoir.’

‘I sat for a while after reading the last page, and felt such warmth, and respect, and awe.’

‘Just wanted to say what a fabulous, amazing and beautiful book your memoir is.’

‘it’s a wonder! so brave and clear and truthful and hopeful.’

If you can’t make it to the Bangor launch you can find your copy

at the heart’s farthest edge link tree

Here’s to the harvests of our stories in this Lughnasadh season,