BurnedThumb

Where I’ll mostly be from now on.

The buzzword for this week is ‘unprecedented times’. And yes, we’ve never had a lockdown before. And we haven’t had a totally new virus, as far as we know, since medicine became a science. And it’s all a bit weird. There are people out in the streets – not too many today – giving each other a very wide berth, and we’re smiling and grateful. Our village has teddy bears in the windows so that small children on their daily exercise can go on a bear hunt. Over the river, the windows are full of rainbows, painted by the children who aren’t in school. The pharmacy has barrier strips up to stop us breathing over the staff on the other side of the counter, and sticky barrier strips on the floor to tell us how far apart to stand. If you believe social media there is a lot of baking, gardening, sewing and DIY going on, and we’re all learning new kinds of software so we can talk to families and friends.

I have never known churches to be closed, or an Easter without prospect of the Triduum (three days of special services on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil). But there are folk memories of the Penal Times when Catholics weren’t allowed to worship (or be educated, or own property for that matter), and Masses were held in secret, when a priest could take the risk of being in the country. I was at Primary school in Liverpool when the canonisation process of the 40 English Martyrs was begun, and several of them had local connections. Their story became part of school life – classes and Houses were named after them, and the children of Polish immigrants added their awareness of how practising your faith in a time of persecution went.

It isn’t the same now. We are doing this voluntarily, as an act of solidarity with the people in our society who are most vulnerable to illness, and in support of NHS workers who are going to be under enormous strain looking after them. Plus you can follow the Mass on social media, which turns out to be a very prayerful experience. And the comfort of being able to celebrate funerals and last rites is still considered essential, though not baptisms and weddings. (Another characteristic of our upbringing was that we were all taught how to baptise a person, it’s perfectly legitimate in an emergency, which I mention in case anyone in lockdown finds themselves worrying about it). But the feeling is oddly familiar.

I recognise ‘lockdown’ too. When I was much younger we lived in Sri Lanka for a while, in a village purpose built for engineers working on the Mahaweli Dam and their families. We had two children under two, the village was still under construction and I couldn’t drive, so we couldn’t go anywhere except on an occasional bus into Kandy. The monsoon failed, the reservoirs were running dry, which meant that the hydroelectric power was cut for hours at a time – and when the power was off, so was the water. And then there was a cholera epidemic. ‘We thought we’d better get round to chlorinating the water,’ said our parish priest. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

I feel like I just made all that up. How could all that happen to one person? But it did, and we survived, and some of it was very interesting. But we were glad to come home!

It’s very odd to be accessing my history just now. Although I know in my head that these things happened, I mostly don’t. But what I’m taking away from it is that these times are not quite without precedent. There is experience we can channel, memories we can share, skills we can pass on.

The birds have come back to the garden,
second brood starlings and sparrows
lined up along hedges, combing the lawn’s thatch
for spilt grass seeds, emerging ants. Blue tits
cling to whippy branches, dunnocks pry into cracks
in the bark, goldfinches pick apart seed heads
of nettle and marigold. A willow warbler slips
furtive between the stiff dulling birch leaves
and blackbirds plunder the ripening currants.
The last swifts scythe the hot air, quilted
with sulk and threat of storm. The cormorant’s
black crossbow looms above, heavy with hunger
and this year’s wren sings on a high branch
claiming in summer his winter territory.
El Niño has exhaled a great hot sigh.
The ice is melting, sliding off Greenland’s cliffs
into seas blooming with plankton. There are storms
and flash floods, blight and failure of crops.
There is drought in Africa and famine and war.
But the wren is on his high perch singing.
The druid’s bird, the bard’s bird, shaman’s bird,
Brigid’s chicken, the mouse’s brother,
sits on his high perch and cries out, so loud
a voice in his small breast ‘Now! Now! Now!’

Y’all know that I wrote Haggards for just this kind of crisis, no? All that about healing and social and environmental collapse and the need for compassion and insight? This isn’t just an opportunist plug, by the way – no, this is the kind of post I never thought I’d ever write. Let me tell you how I came to write this book.

Forty-five years ago, we had an energy crisis, with miners’ strikes, power workers srikes, rolling power cuts, a three day week, fears that oil would run out, preparations for rationing and military rule, I kid you not. I was in a vulnerable and unstable state at the time, my mental health collapsed and for about six months I was in a state of morbid obsession about the end of civilisation, which was poorly treated with a short course of heavy duty tranquilisers and a philosophy of ignore it and it will go away.

Since then we’ve had the winter of discontent, Thatcherism, miners’ strikes, wars, famines, the Black Monday financial crisis of the nineties, 9/11, the crash of 2008, global warming and Brexit. When I’m stressed, I go straight back to the cycle of obsessive thoughts, nightmares and despair, but here’s the thing. The way people are feeling now is the way I have lived all my adult life, so let me tell you what I’ve learned.

• worry does help, if it makes you get informed. Unfocussed anxiety just makes things worse
• we have to make peace with the fact that we are all going to die sometime, whatever we do, so the problem is not how to not die, but how to live best
• this applies twice to the people we love. We can’t save them or prevent bad things from happening to them, but we can help, comfort, and mostly not leave them to thole bad times alone
• it helps to distinguish between what you can control, and what you can’t. How does a crisis actually affect you? and your beloved people? You might find you already have more resources to meet this crisis than you thought.
• It’s good to know what you actually need to get through this Don’t let anyone trivialise your need for books, chocolate and bubble bath!
• No-one needs a bunker and an A-Team stash of machine guns and explosives. I could do the survivalist mentality fine, right up to this! We don’t get through tough times by defending ourselves from each other, but by supporting each other
• people often behave badly in a crisis, but also, they often behave really well
• there is no point not feeling what you’re feeling. Don’t try to be strong for the others. We need to grieve, worry, rage and lament together. It’s how we’ll create lasting solutions. Yes, we can’t hug so much at the moment, but it’s fascinating to see people concoct new social rituals to comfort each other. I never thought I’d see the curtsey come back in my lifetime!
• People are really ingenious. There will be solutions we never could have imagined
• it helps to connect with your core values. If the world is going to hell in a handbasket, what actually matters? What can you actually do? At a real low point I came across a quote from the life of St Cuthbert – a novice came up to him while he was sweeping a floor and asked him what he would do if he knew the world was about to end, and St Cuthbert answered ‘Keep on sweeping this floor’. I’m writing. I’ll stop writing to help if my family gets sick or I need to take to the streets, but mostly the thing I can do best is to write
• an end comes. It’s already clear we won’t all see it, but if we’ve loved our lost ones all we can, they won’t be gone from us. They will be part of us as we make things better.

Clearly, I am not a wise woman, I am a flake, a headless chicken, barely holding things together. But this is how I do it. I thought that by writing Haggards I might put it all to bed, and come out the other side – but here we are. If anyone finds anything here helpful, I’ll be glad.

Having a place means that you know what a place means… what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense… Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness.

Gary Snyder

I picked this quotation up on Twitter this week and I’ve been trying to track down exactly where it appears. Not as easy as you would think, because although it is one of his most cited quotations, very few of those citations include the text. Looking it up is like going round and round on Tumblr, where everybody is just reposting everything with no discernible point of origin. It looks as if it belongs in The Practice of the Wild, but that is as far as I’ve got so far!

Irish poet Moya Cannon, whom I heard reading last night, talked about a poet’s ‘unmet mentors’ and Gary Snyder is definitely one of mine. If you’ve been reading this blog since I started, you’ll know about my Walking the Territory practice, and you’ll know that this is the road out of the village where in live, and the haggard I wrote about in the last book is a little further up the road, to the left. My ‘place’ has informed a lot of my poetry in the past, and it’s going to inform a little bit of the next book too, because having ‘one’s own place’, no matter how temporarily is an important part of what it means to understand yourself as ‘a person’. I wrote a bit about this here.

But it’s also important to have a ‘family’ – a sense of connections with ‘your own’ group of people, who may or may not be blood-relatives, who may or may not be professional colleagues, friends, neighbours, co-religionists, countrymen or fellow-hobbyists, and I’ve realised that this, too, demands that you know ‘what a family means’ – both ecologically – who are they, how are you connected, how does your family relate to each other and to the outside world, and in the ‘storied sense of myth, presence and character’. Part of being in a family is knowing not just your genealogy, like a hobbit, but also understanding your history, and the culture you carry forward. How crucial this is was brought home to me this morning, when I opened Moya Cannon’s book, and read this poem One of the Most Foolish Questions.

Who we are is where we are, but also who we love, who we remember, whose songs we carry, whose myths we tell. I once had the frightening (but very short-lived) experience of losing all that, and for maybe twenty seconds I might as well have been a dead woman walking. It was too short-lived to be able to describe, but I do remember how it felt to come back from it, and feel my whole self washing into me like a tide into a dry harbour. Our individuality is a curious and wonderful thing, but it is only experienced in our connectedness.

I am not going to do a ‘state of the nation’ piece, because the state of the whole world, frankly, is ‘hell mend ye’, and I am so grateful to the millions of people I know who are saying loudly and forcefully, ‘we will not allow this to go on’. You are, literally, holding me together.

I realise that we are heading into a new decade, and it occurred to me that this is the last full decade I can reasonably look forward to, because it will bring me comfortably past the allotted span. Not that I can be too dogmatic about it – my mother is still alive at 95, and my great-great-great-grandmother, one Hanora Foley of Waterford, lived until she was 113, through Penal Times, the Famine, the first world war and the Irish wars of Independence. I can’t verify this on-line, by the way, I saw this in a press cutting in the Waterford Library. I don’t think I want to beat her record!

It has been a roller-coaster of a decade, though I think we have finished in a better place than when we started. In 2009 I was beginning to be published, and I met someone who read my poetry and told me I was ready to submit a collection, which I did. Now I have three collections out with Red Squirrel Press, edited 8 full collections, 2 pamphlets and 2 anthologies, given workshops based on my herb poems and I’m about to write a column for the InterlitQ blog. My family have grown up, married (2) and divorced (1), and have added three grandchildren to our number. My husband retired, everyone got ill in complicated ways and mostly got better (not all at once, except for one memorable week when there were three of us in A&E in different hospitals at the same time). One of us moved 8 times, 1 of us moved three times and one of us moved twice, while we kept thinking about moving and not doing it. And there was politics. So much politics and so much of it awful.

That’s enough of that! It seems to me that there is an inverse relationship between poetry and politics, in that the worse the politics, the better the poetry. Here are my highlights – in no particular order:

You will see that they are not all books that came out this year – some of them are books I was very late to discover, and I bought more that I haven’t got round to yet. There are also books, pamphlets or even individual poems that impressed me at the time, and which have got away since. I can imagine myself waking up at night and going, ‘I forgot x!’ and having to add it surreptitiously to the list. But this is my top ten, anyway, and it should be enough to go on. If there’s anything here you haven’t yet read, go to it! You will be in for a treat!

So here we are on the brink of a 2020, a whole decade with no mistakes in it yet. I hope it brings us health, wisdom, peace and friendship enough to build a hope stronger than the wiles of politicians. Happy New Year!