Come, sit awhile. Here, on this mossy rock, this hunk of granite hewn from the earth and placed here by ancient ice, laced and splotched with lichens and moss in black and chalk and green and grey. Come, sit awhile. Sink your bare toes into squishy, moist mounds of red sphagnum moss beneath the coarse heather that scratches at your ankles. Breathe. Inhale the upland currents humming with the sounds and scents of the landscape: the busy buzzing of bumblebees, hawk’s wing rushing on the wind and stonechats’ chatter, aromatic fragrances of bog myrtle and heather. Allow your gaze to wander, far, over rugged hills of silver-green, olive, deep evergreen and shades of grey—shimmering grasslands and greening heath broken with ridges and crags of shale and quartz—and on to distant, shadowed mountain peaks. Soften. Melt into the landscape, feel the thrumming of the Earth. Let your senses ripple out around you, widen your awareness. Feel the breeze rustling through the grass and through you and go with it, lifting skylark song and grasshopper chirrup and sheep bleat and on and out. Feel the willows by the flax ponds sway, the swallows rise and dive with the rhythm of your breath. Quiet your mind and open your senses and listen to the land…
This land doesn’t want to be tamed. I can feel it. I can feel the wildness running through her fissures and veins, writhing through mycelial hyphae and ericaceous roots that bind peaty soil to clay, transferring nutrients from air to soil and soil to air and blooming into bumblebee food. I feel it gushing from the springs and churning through the flooded wetlands, drifting on fragrant bog myrtle that kisses my breath in the wind, dancing in the sunlight refracted in fritillaries’ wings.
I feel it in the sweat and rain that soaks my aching back. In the beating, shadeless heat of the high summer sun. In the jarring, shovel-breaking, drought-hardened earth. In the summer storm breaking through black cloud overhead, thunderous rain pounding parched soil into roiling floods. I feel it in the weight I haul across rock and bog, day after day through mud and flood to sheep gone wild as the wind they breathe. I feel it in the crackling of my knees.
Soften. Remember the woods. Close your eyes, now, and see a flourishing canopy stretch across the landscape before you, quilting the hills, pillowing the sharp, craggy contours of rock with verdant and voluptuous shades of green. Remember what this soil is made from, black and dense and heavy. Smell the leaf mould and lichen, alive and ancient. Feel the latent thrum of forests lost and longing beneath your feet.
This land grinds us to the bone. Strips us bare and exposed as she to all extremes of the seasons. She has changed us. Changed me. I am not the same woman I was when we came here. She’s put lines in my face and grey in my hair and cracked me wide open, bared all my squishy parts and fed them to the ravens. There is no softness here, no comfort, no ease, only gorse and stone and weather and survival. Farm her? Ha! More like fight her. More like battle the elements ’til we drop with exhaustion. And she wins. Ferociously, stoically, mockingly resisting our puny efforts to shape or control the way she grows or the fruits she bears.
It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be here. No, she invites us, calls us, pulls us into the wild, into the land. But she isn’t going to acquiesce to our ideas. We cannot mould or shape this land. She shapes us. She grinds us down, crushes us to dust and tears and builds us back up out of rock and rain. She hardens us. She challenges. She demands, hurling hail and flood and storm and drought, and we, her feeble minions, have no choice but to obey.
She has taught me what really matters in this life, what is real and true, what is worth my attention, my energy. To stay committed to what matters, grounded, steadfast when things get tough, to weather the storm and trust that it will pass. And also to be supple, flexile, to bend like the willow from my anchorage of earth, let the winds blow through me taking each day as a gift.
Feel into the earth. Follow the roots of the willow and spread, sprawling, searching, beneath the black, peat soil into iron-red clay and feel it scrape and stick, cool and hard and gritty. Taste the minerals, iron and salt, blood of the Earth, seeping through the subsoil, dripping into streams of rust.
It was the wildness that drew me here. This land made no promises of production or profit, or of ease or abundance. No, she offered only the wild. She offered scrambling brambles, wild yellow roses and hot pink thistles, fierce and feral and seductive; honey-rich heaths and thigh-high grasslands thick with thatch belying thin soils and flood pans. She offered a flagrant flush of lavish verdancy on ruined soils telling rich histories; a haven of wilderness revived, intractable, untrammelled. She offered home. All she demands in return is that we don’t tame her, and that we give back what we take and more. She demands reciprocity. No, not reciprocity. She’s not that forgiving. She demands our allegiance, our devotion, our humble servitude, and then, only then, she gives.
Go deeper. Sink between the cracks in the shale, reach into the dark, cold, core of the land. Root here. Anchor your soul into the grit and salt of your corporeal source. Grow now. Be part of the dance. Remember your place, rooted to the earth and made of it with rivers running through your veins. Remember the wild in you, the iron in your blood, the wind in your lungs. You too are made from shale and rain and forests of a thousand years.
It’s a fair exchange: my life, my labour, my soul, for the land.
On a northern island against a cold sea. The sirens call. I spent many years at sea, Ireland seems to call with familiar tones. And after all those days and nights out on the water, in the water, I am always there. As it seems your farm is part of you now.
Your writing is beautiful.
Beautiful words, Carly -- and all the more for coming from honest reflection about the real life you're living in the real world.