Have child, will travel

We’ve done some pretty epic journeys in the last year or so, travelling across the UK by train, and in the child’s case, also a 5 hour car trip (partly due to bad traffic). We all know the stories about travelling with children. The griping, fighting, complaining, the boredom and throwing up… Wendy Arrowsmith sums up rather well in the song “Are we nearly there yet” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WouoV8XfYs0

Increasingly we seem to keep children entertained. There’s not much unstructured time for the modern kid. Travelling is now made ‘easier’ by portable dvd players, hand held computer games and other such distractions. The one thing we don’t mostly teach is how to travel well, and a look around at your typical adult on a train or in a station explains why: We’re mostly rubbish travellers as adults too. Deep in a book, the laptop, staring into the middle distance, the one thing we aren’t is present.

The person who is in the moment, interested, attentive, does not get bored when travelling. There’s a constantly changing scene outside the window. On a train, there are scores of other people. The person who finds things interesting does not struggle to take interest. And so hours of journey become a relishing of landscape, a chance to see something of other people, time spent being alive, alert and present. No, doing it every day doesn’t have to mean boredom, the view changes with the seasons, the weather… I’ve done the regular commute over three years of travelling into college every day. There’s no requirement to be bored.

It’s not about being some ancient and wise life form, either. I say this, because the child has mastered the art of travelling well. He’s interested. None of those huge cross country treks have been difficult, for which I am both very grateful, and a bit smug.
Wherever we are, there is something. Other living things around us even in the most apparently sterile places. Remnants from the past, signs of the future, possibilities, people… there’s a whole world out there. The trick is to get out of the hand held attention absorber and be here for a bit, wherever ‘here’ happens to be…

Living on the land

The school run takes me through the same village every day. Over the few years I’ve been doing this, I’ve got to know a lot of people on sight. The many dog walkers who have their routes and times. Others with routines that put them in certain places at certain moments in the day. I’m on hailing and greeting terms with many, some of them I know by name. There are people who have lived in the village all their lives. People whose families have been there back as far as knowledge goes. Perhaps there are some whose people have always lived on this land. Their bones and flesh are part of the landscape, they belong here, the rhythms of this land are the rhythms of their daily lives.

I’m not good at routines, or at staying still for long. Most of the routine in my life comes from the boy being at school, but as he grows more independent, I shall be less bound by that. I have short periods of habit over where I go, when and where I work… as soon as the patterns settle, I get uncomfortable and something changes. The boat has been great for this, answering my need for change and movement, a bunch of different school runs, different neighbours, a different view… it suits me. I expect I’m going to miss that, when the time comes.

I have ancestral ties to this area. My people come from all over, though. My Nan was from the Forest of Dean. My Grandfather on that side moved to work. I have blood ties to Cornwall, family who came up through Bristol, again seeking employment. I’ve seen family trees, and while there were periods in one place and we’ve been near the Severn a lot, I get the feeling my people move around a fair bit. There’s something restless in me, that chafes against too much routine. A part of my soul that wants to pack no more than I can carry and step onto the path and wander. I feel that even more keenly, living near the Severn with the knowledge of ancient ancestors of place who were nomadic.

Alongside that, I have a keen desire for a place to call home. In the last few years, I’ve come to realise that ‘home’ is the Severn vale, the Cotswolds, and the Forest of Dean. Home is everywhere I could easily walk to if I stepped outside this afternoon and let my feet guide me. Home is a community to belong to and people to be with. For a long time I laboured under the illusion that home meant a roof, and possessing a bit of land. Apparently for me, it doesn’t. Those things never gave me the security I thought they would bring. A boat, a cat, a man who loves me, a child who is glad to be with me – is home enough. The next place, and the one after it… will be home enough too. All of them will connect me to this landscape where I belong.

I can’t imagine settling into a place in the way I see others doing – the same walk with the dog every morning, the same habits of travel and work, all familiar and predictable. I can see that for some, being imbedded in a place and the rhythms of a clearly established life, is a happy way of being. I would always hear the song of the road, calling me out. No matter how much I love these hills and trees, this river, the need to see other places, to go away and come back again, is strong. Shades of Bilbo Baggins, I suppose.

For a while, I’ve been part of a place, and part of the daily rhythm for others, cycling through the village, waving, saying hi. I’ve become a feature of this landscape, and people are already telling me I will be missed when I go. No doubt I will miss things too, and no doubt I will come back sometimes, but there are other paths waiting to be explored, other waterways to follow, and I have not been planted here to root like an oak, as some villagers have.

Ancestors of Land

I talked a bit earlier this week about the relationship between Druidry and the Ancestors and Beyond the Map in terms of experiencing blood family. Ancestors of Land are also a connecting thread. We honour them in ritual, and they are whoever happened to be on the land before us. I have a keen sense of many ancestors in my current location. The canal was built, and there are ancestors of the boating life too. Go back far enough and this landscape would have been marshy. It has yielded evidence of ancient settlement. Listening to the wind in the rushes, kayaking, I have a sense of those first people who lived alongside the Severn, hunted the wild birds, and put some of their own dead in barrows on the hillsides. I’ve become conscious of how walkable the Severn vale is, and how, if there was no motorway, the journey from river to hill would be feasible.

This landscape is full of hints about ancestors. Having read Oliver Rackham’s book on the history of the British landscape, I had some ideas about things to look for, but they were broad and general. Then a thing happened. Tom and I were walking down the towpath to get to one of the places I can download email, and I saw a chap with a map in hand, looking out across the fields. There’s a footpath down towards the river, but it’s not as well signposted as would be ideal. I’ve stopped and talked to walkers many times about where the path goes. So I stopped and asked if he was looking for the aforementioned.
He wasn’t.

He had come down to look at a particularly old landscape feature indicative of former settlement, and explained to me how to read the humps and bumps in the fields. The enclosure around a settlement or farm means lower land levels on the inside as the river dumps soil round the outside. He told me how the New Grounds had been deposited by the river in mediaeval times, leading to court cases about who actually owned the land. An actual, real to goodness land historian, on my towpath, talking about my landscape. He was a tad self-effacing but after enthusing at him we managed to elicit both a name, and the critical information that he writes books. I’ve now got one of them – Gloucestershire 300 Years ago. The author is Alan Pilbeam and he’s written a few. He has an accessible writing style and an eye to the implications, so that the political and power shifts he thinks of in terms of ordinary people, too. So many of our ancestors exist as a silence in the historical record, a reasoned attempt to put some of them back in, is a wonderful thing. There’s a lot of detail about things you can go and observe, including pointers to ancient Pagan sites. It’s wonderful stuff.

To the handful of Gloucestershire Druids and for that matter non-Druids who read my stuff, I can only say hunt out this man’s work, it is brilliant. I don’t know who else is doing this other places, but if you can find any, do. There’s nothing like being able to look at the bumps in the ground and know what they mean and who was there, and why…

The landscape of light

So here we are at the turning of the year, the mistletoe has been cut in various places, Druids have been out and about at Stonehenge, and soon the days will start that slow process of getting longer again, at least round here.
I realise that the impact of the wheel of the year is bound to vary depending on how far you are from the equator. I struggle to imagine living closer to the arctic circles, with the long night of winter and the long day of summer. I rather suspect that would drive me nuts, but evidently plenty of people manage to live with it. I find it equally hard to imagine the stable nature of light and dark nearer the equator. I‘m too involved with the cycle I was born into.
The balance of light and dark across the year, and the shape of the seasons is closely tied to the land we live on – or at least where that land is in relation to the shape of the planet, its tides and climates. Here in the UK, the Gulf Stream keeps us warmer than neighbours to the east at the same latitudes. Where Tom came from a lot of weather tended to come down from the Arctic over the winter months, making for a very different kind of winter. I’m conscious of the warming effect of the River Severn too, not needing to get that far away to notice a temperature difference.

The shape of the hills affects the patterns of light and dark too. For me, down by the river, the coming of first light and the timing of the sunrise is affected by the Cotswolds. The sun has a great big hill line to get over before I’ll see any sign of it. It sets over the Forest of Dean for me, too, that’s another hefty hill range. For a person living in the shadow of even bigger hills, or mountains the patterns of light and dark will be even more influenced by this, and living on an open plain is a whole other experience.

It makes me realise just how local the experience of the shortest day is bound to be, because it’s going to be a lot shorter for those of us with hills, and all those other variables.

Today I am celebrating being where I am, wet and grey though it is. It’s not like anywhere else. Nowhere is.

Where the water flows

Yesterday we were in Stroud, as the tiger sat an exam, the 11+ that may determine which school he’s going to. (For readers beyond the UK, this is a relic of an older school system, you have to pass an exam to apply for a grammar school, these are generally better schools, which benefit from being selective.) I’ll write about selective schools properly sometime. It’s a big, uncomfortable issue for me, but this was what the boy wanted to do, and I respect his choices.

Stroud is where I intend to be living in less than a year’s time. It’s a small enough town that a person can get around it on foot, which is important to me. It has a lot of unique shops, a great weekly market, a thriving arts culture, lots of pagans, greens and other, lovely alternative people. As far as I know, it doesn’t have a steampunk scene… yet. It’s also easy to get out of, making it an ideal base for us as we set off into the wider world to do events. It feels like the right place to be.

However, stood in the street yesterday, looking at the beautiful hills around the town, the woodlands turning towards autumn, I felt an uncomfortable itch. It took me a little while to pin it down, and it goes like this… I don’t know where the water is. The canal runs through Stroud, sort of, although it’s being restored and isn’t currently navigable. Canals don’t flow, as such and are man-made constructions. I have discovered in myself a significant, personal need to know where the water flows.

In my current location, it’s easy, I can get to the river Severn from the canal, and there are a lot of streams heading that way too. I know this landscape, and it’s one in which water is easily found. Logically, as Stroud is surrounded by hills, the water will be at the bottom of the five valleys. But, where landscapes are developed, often the water ends up in culverts, underground and inaccessible.

I know that when I move, one of the first things I will need to do is figure out where the nearest source of freely running water is. I’m anticipating walking a lot – I love to walk – and with a barely familiar landscape to explore, I’m going to have a lot of fun. But, more than trees, more than hills, I need to know where the water is. Of course trees and hills are easy to spot, because of their size, but water is more secretive, more mysterious.

I don’t think, until I moved to the boat, that I was properly conscious of how important free moving water is to me. I need it. I need to be able to look at it, and walk beside it. I need the sound of it, and the healing effect of these things. Some of that is probably just my mammal self wanting to know where the most critical resources can be found, but this is not just a pragmatic how-to-survive-a-zombie-apocalypse thing. It is very much part of my Druidry.

For preference, what I want to find is somewhere water flows between trees. That kind of place always speaks to me, fills me with happiness. We shall see.

Spirits of an unfamiliar place

I’m travelling again, this weekend finds us at The Asylum, the UK’s biggest Steampunk event. And we’re not the only Druid attraction in town, John and Caitlin Matthews are here, talking about their new Steampunk tarot!

I’ve not been to Lincoln before. It’s an old city, certainly dating back to the Romans (and I assume, before them), and with plenty of medieval architecture. We’ve done a lot of wandering around this evening, admiring the buildings, getting used to the incredibly steep hill, gazing at the vast and wonderful views. I love travelling and encountering new places, it fires my imagination and feeds my soul.

I always seek out what I can in a new place, looking for a sense of the land, the ancestors, waterways… I don’t like to feel that I’m just passing through, taking without showing respect in some way. But of course really speaking I am exactly a tourist, even though I’m working, and I am just passing through. In a few days I will get what sense I can of the place, its history, its character, and whatever I can connect with, and I will do with that whatever makes sense. But whatever I think of my own impressions, I’m careful not to lose sight of the fact that I am just passing through.

Some aspects of a place can be grasped in very little time, are taken in with the first impressions and prove true if tested in more depth or at a later date. That’s true anywhere. It takes time to build the deeper knowing, exploring a place through seasons, times of day, seeing its flows and how its mood shifts over time.

I used to go to Bromyard Folk Festival a lot – also happening this weekend. I fell in love with the vibrant energy of the place. Then I went back one time when the festival wasn’t on, and realised this was a whole different town, and a place I did not know at all. As a traveller, I can only hope to see flashes and fragments.

I’m not good at staying in one place all the time. I like knowing places deeply and forming deep bonds with the spirits of a place, but at the same time, I’m a nomad at heart. I have a huge wanderlust in me, and it is good to be out, in a landscape I have never seen before, trying to get a feel for the soil and the wind.

Fencing off the good bits

This is her little bit of heaven. She’s worked hard for it, sacrificed years of living to making the money that would pay for it. Or maybe she’s found it by chance, and it cost nothing at all. What she wants to do now is put a fence round it. A big fence, strong enough to keep anyone out who wants a piece of her lovely place. Perhaps it’s her sacred space. She is afraid that someone will take it from her, or ruin it. She knows that if other people come here, it will be ruined because that’s what people do.

Maybe you’re nodding your head just now. Maybe you have a special place too. One that needs loving and protecting. One you ache to build walls around.

Ownership of the land is all about putting fences around it and dictating who has access, and who does not. 60 odd years ago walkers protested about land owners keeping them off mountains. Public rights of way matter. No one, powerful person or corporation should own natural beauty and deny it to others. Here’s another story that may invite a few nods.

You’ve seen it – perhaps it’s a field, or a hill. A bit of woodland sloping down to the river. No paths go there. The road doesn’t even come close. From a distance, it calls to you, whispering that there is magic. Perhaps there’s an ancient site hidden amongst the leaves, an exquisite view, a hidden grotto. But there is no public right of way, so either you trespass, or you move on, because you do not have the right to be here.

Now where are we? Torn between a range of impulses, some to protect and nurture, some to keep private and secret. We also hanker after the secrets, the magic we are not supposed to have. And then there’s the fear, of what other people are like, and what they will do.

In my own life, the canal has become my home. When I first started boating, more than a year ago, the canal was my refuge, my sanctuary. And then a couple of weeks on, the sun came out and suddenly there were hordes of people, with dogs, children, bicycles, noise and banality all over ‘my’ space. And there were boaters, the sort who have hobby boats and a lot of money. ‘My’ canal wasn’t mine any more. I will confess that I was not best pleased about this. I felt that something precious had been snatched away from me.

But I do not own the canal, or the towpath, or the sun. Everyone else needs these things too. After a while I realised that these other people only come by day. In the evening, the space is mostly mine again, quiet, with only the more peaceful, less intrusive visitors. I came to terms with that. I also spend a lot of time hauling other people’s rubbish out of the water, and the undergrowth. There are people who do all the things you fear having happen to your space. When people bring their noise and the ugliness of their lives onto the towpath, leave their litter and dog mess, I hate it. But at the same time I have to ask, what happens if this space touches them, just a little bit? How much better is their life for being in this lovely space? Are they doing this because they simply do not know how to do anything else? What right have I to want them elsewhere? Am I in fact one of those people who, having found a good thing, wants to build a high fence around it?

Fences are human inventions. Nature does like thick, impenetrable undergrowth, challenging rock formations, swamps, and other things that prevent easy access and a direct route from point A to point B. Humans like fences, and not just around our property, but also around our communities, our beliefs, our relationships. Sometimes we’re so busy keeping the bad stuff out that we fail to notice mostly what we’ve done, is to lock ourselves in.

There are no druid temples, we have to go outside, to where there is no fence, or we feel safe climbing over one. But that desire to own sacred space, to control important sites is also with us. It’s worth pondering what we want to keep in and what we want to exclude, and why, and whether there’s any reality or consistency in the mix at all.

Earth Mother politics

In ‘Women who run with wolves’ the author suggests that how we treat women mirrors how we treat the planet. Look back on the centuries of planet ravaging and the oppression of women, there’s definitely a parallel. Is there a causal link? I think so, and it has a lot to do with priorities.

I’m going to be brutally honest here and say that were it not for Tom, I would very likely have become the kind of radical feminist who is anti-male. There are days when hearing new stories about male violence towards women fills me with rage. But there is also Tom, who is brave, gentle, heroic, and reminds me of all the other good men I have met along the way. Statistically, about one in four men are abusers; that means three quarters aren’t. There are days when I have to remind myself of this.

However, when it comes to raping the earth mother, we’d be self-deluding if we tried to cast that as a gender issue. There are no shortage of men working for the good of the planet, and no shortage of women participating in the great commercial pillage. It would also be fair to say that gender politics are not a simple male/female conflict either. How many women were taught by their mothers to put a brave face on it and be stoical? How many women help coerce their daughters into unwanted marriages, throw out pregnant daughters, defend abusive men, and otherwise add to the problem? More than enough. The new girlfriend is often the person most willing to give that bitch of an ex-girlfriend a hard time. Knowing or not, we participate.

When I’m not raging over some specific injustice, I tend to feel that feminism is inadequate. It supports the ideas of polarisation, division and difference. It also gives the woman-haters out there something very easy to latch onto and attack. The sort of person who views every threat to total male supremacy as a feminist conspiracy to destroy all men. They most certainly exist – read the comments on the Telegraph online sometime. Getting angry and building up the barricades doesn’t help. Reinforcing the gender divide solves nothing.

A few months ago I sat in a room with a woman who was covered in bruises because her boyfriend had beaten her. She was in the process of trying to escape, and it was one of the most heart-breaking things I have ever seen. Of course women who are wounded by other means, driven to depression, to drink, self blame, self hatred, have no such wounds to show the world, but they are just as damaged by male aggression.

There’s a whole culture underpinning this kind of behaviour. It’s laden with beliefs about ownership and rights. How many men think about women, and women’s bodies not unlike how they think about the earth – as a resource to be used for their benefit and pleasure. We exploit, we use, we take, I come back to the idea of entitlement again. And sure, women do it to men as well, although in nothing like the same numbers. But the culture underpinning it, we build together. All of us. Regardless of gender. We do it in every advert that uses a scantily clad woman to sell a product, and every advert that shows woman as house elf and man as mighty leader. We do it in our stereotyping, our willingness to blame the victims, our collective reluctance to take the problem seriously. Sometimes we do it in our religions too, and our politics uphold it.

We won’t fix either earth abuse, or woman abuse, or any other kind of abuse, until we fix the mindsets that allow us to justify them. It’s all too easy to be accidentally complicit, or to be part of the problem just by ignoring it. What we do not speak against, others may assume we condone. Half the problem with abusers, no matter who or what their victim is, is that they believe they are just the same as everyone else. Everyone else is doing what they do, or would, if they were only powerful enough to pull it off. That idea is the real enemy.

Belonging to the land

Talking about druidry on this blog recently, I suggested the idea that what defines druids as distinctly different from other pagans, is that druids belong to the land. There was a lot of affirmative feedback on that, so I wanted to come back and consider what that means.

The land is the source of all life, and the basis of most ecosystems (oceans aside). So by focusing on the land we are called to take a longer perspective over living things, ourselves included. The long term wellbeing of the land is essential for all life. You cannot mistreat the land and hope to have life continue unchanged. Mistreating the land is something humans do continually, with no eye to the long term and little sign of any enlightened self-interest even. To be a druid is to speak for the wellbeing of the land, to act with that in mind, to see the deeper connections and the longer time scales.

Belonging to the land also places us specifically in the land we inhabit, along with all of its flora, fauna, history and human activity. Wherever we are, we belong, and it doesn’t matter how often or how far we move, while we are living on the land, we have the relationship and we can hold it consciously. It gives us a starting place from which to explore all the relationships we can have with other inhabitants of the land, and with its history, and future. Belonging grounds us – literally. We have a place to stand – literally again. It is the kind of knowing that gives strength and the ability to endure.

I think the idea of belonging to the land also leads us to relationship with much more immediate manifestations of deity rather than big, distant concepts. We’re more likely to take an animist approach, seeing spirit in all things, to look for the spirits and deities of our places, and to honour deities connected to the land we know. The sacredness of our land and the spirit of it is present to us, however we choose to understand it, and this immediacy feeds into a sense of direct involvement. God is not distant and inaccessible. The gods, the spirits, the divine is here, present, now. It can speak to us with the voices of wind and stream, from the roots of trees and the soil itself. We can glimpse it in the running hare or the soaring bird. These too belong to the land and are part of the same magical relationship that builds reality from one moment to the next.

If we belong first and foremost to the land, then we do not belong to our human communities above all else. We are not the property of the state, or owned by our employers. This affects how we perceive ourselves and our human relationships. We are not owned by the job, or by the demands of human expectations. We belong instead to the land, and consciousness of that allows us not to be ruled so easily by misguided cultural norms, or social pressures. We are also less inclined to see the land itself or anything that lives upon it as property to be owned by humans. We belong to it, it does not belong to us.

You can build a whole ethical framework from the principle of belonging to the land, and have that shape everything that you do. Equally, it is a viable basis for belief. The land does not require our belief, but the idea of its sacredness does, especially when we’re surrounded by people who see only resources to exploit and potential for profit and economic growth. A man on radio 4 this morning described the creation of jobs and wealth as a moral imperative. To me, that’s an absolute nonsense. Making sure there is sufficiency and sustainability are my moral imperatives. That we should have enough, and take no more than constitutes enough, and be careful to properly understand what ‘enough’ means is an ethos far more in line with belonging to the land, than imagining we own it.

I’m barely scraping the surface here but the more I look at it, the more I feel able to define my druidry in this way.

Natural Habitat

Natural Habitat

Any conversation about preserving wild creatures or plants inevitably includes thoughts about habitat. Nothing exists in isolation, and if the ecosystem, the landscape and the relationships are not preserved, the ‘special’ creature of interest will not thrive. Nothing thrives.

Somehow in the midst of this, we’ve taken to thinking of habitat as something other. Somewhere else. Where the birds and creatures live. We forget that we too are creatures. We are not separate from the ecosystems.

We’ve been creating our own habitats for so long, that the idea of a natural habitat for humans, at first glance, seems weird, if not irrelevant. By our very natures, we do not have natural habitats, right? Wrong. All the things that harm creatures, harm us because we are creatures too. Pollution, excess of noise, too much light at night, loss of green spaces, loss of freedom. We do not thrive in depressing, grimy, polluted places. Mental and physical health are improved by time outside, time with trees.

We’re so used to our nests and caves that we don’t think enough about the habitat we need for human wellbeing. It has open water in it. So many people love streams, rivers, canals and the sea. We gravitate towards lakes. We need water that we can walk or sit beside. We need grass to sit upon and trees to sit under. We depend on the land for food, even if most of us don’t see that on a daily basis.

If we created our urban spaces with an eye not for immediate profit and commercial intent, but to make good habitats for humans, life would be so different. I’ve seen spaces that made me feel it could be done – the beautiful, vibrant space that is The Custard Factory in Birmingham, or the area there around Gas Street Basin. Public spaces, people, trees, buildings, no two things identical.

We shouldn’t be talking about preserving the habitats of this or that creature, as though we are doing them a favour. This is our habitat too. Even if we can’t find the empathy to care about anything else, we ought to care enough about ourselves to maintain spaces we can thrive in, rather than places that engender depression, starve our souls, and make our bodies ill.