Inverie-Prosen-Medwyn

River Mandala

Sensing meanings

Becoming Animal…

…An April Solo at The Lint Mill

‘…if we wish to renew our solidarity with the sensuous earth, then we shall have to learn to speak in some new ways.  We will have to learn how to speak more in accordance with our animal senses.’ David Abram

In the half-light of dawn, I watch you feed the sheep, clear the horse field of dung and fill the water trough.  Later, two cars pass, the drivers perhaps on their way to work.  Later still, the neighbouring farmer circumnavigates the next field on a quad checking his stock.  I am reminded that this is a working landscape and it feels gentle and domestic.

I think about our Moorit Shetland ewe who delivered twin lambs yesterday in the warm April evening sun.  I cannot see her from where I am sitting.  I can see the horses and the donkey.  The sheep come in and out of view.  I count them, each time adding one for the Moorit who is out of view.  I think about being a horse.  They graze, they stand, they groom each other, occasionally they drink and even more occasionally they play but mainly they graze.  I wonder what it would be like to wake up as my horse, Otto.  In my day there never seem to be enough hours to accomplish my endless ‘to-do’ lists.  I don’t expect Otto wakes and wonders, ‘How am I going to fill my long horse day?’ or ‘How will I fit all my grazing in today?’  I wonder how it must feel to live fully in the present, like an animal.

I see our ducks marching purposefully towards the river in a little line, Monty, the drake, in the lead.  They will spend their day dabbling by the river.  I wonder about their duck day.

It is windy and April lives up to its name by providing plentiful showers.  I am worried about the twin lambs.  Distracted by my anxiety, I walk to find the Moorit ewe.  She is tucked into a hollow by the fence with her lambs.  They are warm and dry, she has kept them well sheltered and I marvel at her skillful mothering.

All our animals, the domesticated creatures that we have chosen to spend our lives with, feel very instructive today.  They reconnect me with a sense of presence.  They remind me of their hierarchy of needs; shelter, warmth, food, play.  I reflect on the needlessness of my many ‘needs’.

I recall a recent student performance work and how I had been asked to imagine what it would be like to be a plant; to stay in one place, to have my food come directly to me; and to photosynthesize.  I sit on a chair in the basement of The Arches in Glasgow, imagining what it is like to be a plant while Leo feeds me basil leaves.

Today, I sit in one place imagining what it is like to be my horse, to be Monty the drake, to be the mother of twin lambs.  I wonder what this tells me about being me.  I let myself think about this for a very long time.

The sheep bleat loudly as daylight recedes.  There is a brooding raincloud on the horizon.  The setting sun illuminates sheets of distant rain.

Basso said ‘wisdom sits in places’.  Today I asked what wisdom sits in this place, my home, my landscape?  I listened for a very long time.  The answer will creep into my consciousness like warmth into my bones…I can wait…there is time.

Groundedness

Red sandstone ground against hard flat rock

River water

Red triangle on pale stone

Vivid green fronds pressed into a spiral

Pigment dries in the spring sun.

RIVER MEDWYN, LANARKSHIRE

11 APRIL 2011

A Minimum of Hope

Without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle.

PAULO FREIRE, Pedagogy of Hope

Solo, Dawn ‘til Noon, February, Glen Prosen

I cross the threshold, a now familiar feeling of beginning, of opening to possibility, a joyous not knowing.

The morning is monochrome, an Ansel Adams and when dawn breaks the colour bleeds back into the landscape slowly, ochre yellow, moss green, burnt heather.

The bleating of the sheep is curiously rowdy and I realise that they mistake me for the farmer as they come running off the hillside at first in twos and threes, then in their tens.  I am confronted now with the expectant stares and tumultuous bleating of over a hundred sheep.  I am an accidental Pied Piper.  I think of where my deep gladness at being on this hillside meets the deep hunger of the sheep and I find myself wanting.  I would swap my flask of hot coffee for a bag of sheep mix now, it’s been a hard winter.  They follow me hopefully but soon give up following this imposter Messiah and continue to wait for the Chosen One!

The sun rises, the colours intensify, baby pink, steel blue, citrus orange but language feels inadequate in the naming of this palette.  I recall a voice from our work earlier in the week and I contemplate the scarification of the landscape.  I am not walking on a track but a tract of burnt heather, a Paul Nash painting in miniature.  Facing forwards, up the hill, the sun is appearing over the horizon and it’s consuming magnificence is a kind of utopia.

Turning back, looking down across the hills of burnt grouse moor and torn up woodland, I see dystopia too.

Forwards/ backwards…inside/out…long-shot/close-up…surface/deep…utopia/dystopia…

So many of the threads of the week unravel and weave again in my mind.

The wind has dropped.

I’m sitting against a post and wire fence that demarks the edge of the spruce plantation and realise I may have found my railings for today.  I wonder how long I will be able to be chained here willingly and with joy.  I realise that I have chained myself willingly to my purpose for the past twenty seven years.  I know what my deep gladness is and I think I understand where it meets the world’s deep hunger.  It begins to dawn on me that if I am to continue with my purpose, I may have to willingly chain myself to the railings of my core beliefs and leave others to the unshackling…at least for a while, for as long as it feels necessary.

A stoat in ermine with a black nose and a black tipped tail scoots across my path and into the plantation.  I remember the rush of joy that an unexpected visitation can bring.

I walk again to warm up.

I have an interesting encounter with a field of bullocks – I’m the Pied Piper again – this time the Messiah arrives on a quad and we are all grateful.

I am so familiar with this place.  I decide to revisit the cottages, the glasshouses, the Douglas fir, the Giant Redwood and I wonder at our human need to re-visit.  Today the pull is very gentle, a quiet curiosity to see how far I’ve travelled since then, what I have carried with me, what I have let go and I am warmed by what I find.  There’s no desperate yearning for the past here, there’s an open-armed embrace of the future.

I find a place for the second ‘long sit’ of my solo.  It’s remarkably close to the site of my earlier solo this week, but there’s a tempting rock to support my back and it’s in the full morning sun.

I think of how different the practices of walking solo and stillness solo are.  Today the walking frustrates a little and I long to be still, to wait, to see what comes up, to revisit my intention.  I organise myself.  Some things flood in from my very first solo, chiefly my love affair with my sleeping bag (I resolve to give it much more use in the future)!

I am very comfortable.  The sun warms my face.  I close my eyes and the red triangle, a personal image that has been so strong this week, is very present here.  I am generating heat.  I am a warm red triangle vibrating outwards, rooted in the earth.  I know what I need to do and I have the resolve to do it.

I am becoming.

Deeds Not Words

Alternative Title #1:  ‘How the Suffragettes Invented Performance Art’[1]

Alternative Title #2:  Railing in the Wind

In advance of our Glen Prosen week we were given a ‘social change’ assignment.  I chose the suffragettes.  I am interested in many aspects of this chapter in our history and it’s legacy but for my research I wanted to consider my personal connection with the topic.

Two aspects became very present for me during this time;

• I was interested in perfomativity and I wanted to examine the connections between the actions of the suffragettes and my own work in teaching performance.  For this aspect I revisit Leslie Hill’s article.

• I was interested in the power of direct action and how some actions become transformed into iconic images, which remain in our collective consciousness long after the event.  For this aspect I consider the women who chained themselves to the railings of the Parliament buildings.

To address the first, I stand on the Hill of Spott in Glen Prosen, beside a tree.  I have tied my WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) scarf to a branch and the green, purple and white flaps in the high wind.  My colleagues sit around the tree.  I tell them about Nic Green’s Trilogy[2] and we hum ‘Jerusalem’ together in memory of the suffragettes and in tribute to Nic’s work.

I hurl my words into the wind,

• The personal IS political
• The body is the site of oppression and resistance
• The power of live presence cannot be underestimated
• The performance of personal truths is more important to me than acting

To consider the second, I begin to photograph railings.

I ask myself some questions;

What would I chain myself to railings for? What are my beliefs? What are my railings?

Some answers are;

I believe in:

• human capacity for growth and change
• radical pedagogy
• my family
• the interconnectedness of all living things
• the idea that we contain within ourselves all we need to live our lives now
• valuing intuition
• taking time
• being hopeful

As I make this list, I realise I will need good strong railings and warm clothes…I may be some time!

[2] http://www.nicgreen.org.uk/

Positive Disintegration[i]

Since returning home, one of the activities that has lived in my head  and has needed some processing, has been our envisioning of our personal utopia and dystopia, which we attempted to capture through making personal visual images.

When asked to physically place myself on the spectrum between the two visions in relation to where we believe the world to be heading, I found myself silently crying and unable to move.  I have  since wondered where this feeling welled up from, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Of course it wasn’t a surprise to be confronting these ideas during this week, indeed it would have been strange if we hadn’t.  But my emotion was overwhelming, and my inability to move  -  my inability to commit to the fear of my dystopia caught me off guard.

In trying to understand this since getting back, I turned to Joanna Macy’s paper ‘Working Through Environmental Despair’[ii] and found much that resonated with where I found myself standing on that day.

I think I was paralysed with fear…fear of pain, fear of provoking disaster, fear of feeling powerless.  In the paper Joanna Macy discusses her ‘despair work’ and the connections between pain and power.  She says,

Through our pain for the world we can open ourselves up to power.  This power is not just our own but belongs to others as well.  It relates to the very evolution of our species.  It is part of a general awakening or shift toward a new level of consciousness.

The necessary but impossibly difficult movement from the macro ‘despair for the world’ to the micro ‘what action can I take?’ is a kind of ‘positive disintegration’ that is helping lead me towards a better understanding of why the the web of human connectedness must be made conscious.

[ii] Roszak, Theodore,  Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner, (ed.),  Ecopsychology, Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995

Solo Time #1b – Animal Husbandry

Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.

Edward Osborn Wilson

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Animal Husbandry

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I found the body as I walked up the track behind Katy’s cottage.

Rigor mortis, eyes wide, mouth gaping, blue tongue lolling.

The attitude seeming to say that the final moments before death were given to a last painful gasp for life.

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Further on another ewe lay dead in the empty field.

I didn’t examine the carcass but it’s vivid paint mark was to suggest it was the same flock.

A third, a fourth the same, blue marked, in the profound stillness of death.

What epidemic of dis-ease or carelessness is this?

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I think of you now as dusk comes, locking the henhouse, feeding the cats, guiding the geese safely home, your diligent and loving animal husbandry.

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A lone ewe, startled, darts across this field of the dead.

Her torn fleece hangs from her back.

She stops and turns.

Her stillness is that of fear.

She fixes me reproachfully with her eyes.

I cannot help.

I walk on.

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Solo Time #1a – The Mystery of Balnaboth

“How hard it is to escape from places.  However carefully one goes they hold you – you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences – like rags and shreds of your very life.”

Katherine Mansfield

Fluttering on the fences during my first solo are the bright memories of my visits over many years to this glen with my husband, sister and my nine year old niece.

The Mystery of Balnaboth

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I set out,

I know where I am going.

The gravitational pull is too strong,

It guides my feet back to this place,

And there you are unwrapping the knife from the clean, checked tea-towel with a flourish, brandishing a salami.

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Here the grey clouds promising rain speed across the sky,

But time has collapsed and I’m there on my back dizzying myself watching snowflakes as they fall,

Climb upwards and fall again.

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Today the mist rolls off the Hill of Strone

And the perception of dusk falling seems impossible.

I wait,

And the memory of her little perfect snow angel comes, bright and white.

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I meet these memories as they rise and burst like tiny bubbles on the smooth surface of my solo time.

I try to greet them, to say ‘hello, see you later’ but they are legion and irrepressible.

You are laughing as you press the salty salami into my mouth, a strange promise of the distant Italian sun on this snowy Perthshire hillside,

The sweet sloe gin that follows seems a kind of perfection.

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She has walked across the sacred boundary of yews and pauses with her hand against the ancient wooden door of the chapel ruins,

Fully knowing what lies on the other side she whispers,

‘The Mystery of Balnaboth!’

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