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David Abrams is a magician as well as an anthropologist and critic, so has a really interesting take on the concept of ‘spell’. It comes down to the fact that when a person knows somethng intimately and practices a craft to the point where it becomes second nature, it looks like ‘magic’ to an observer. But it isn’t – it’s knowledge and skill.

But this combination of knowledge and skill isn’t somthing our culture is good at. We are very good at learning vast quantities of information; we are pretty good at organising and storing and accessing information, and astonishingly good at communicating it (less good at evaluating it, however!).

What Abrams points out is not only that information is different from knowledge – it’s static, verifiable, presumed to be universal when verified, and requires intellectual detachment – but the pursuit of information rather than knowledge changes our relationship to the world in which we live – greatly to our detriment. Not only do we lose access to the skills and knowledge acquired by the ‘magician’, but we become increasingly isolated from the earth, and ignorant about the way we need to treat it. In primitive societies people lived in dialogue to all the living creatures, and even the earth itself. Once we became literate, or more accurately, privileged the kinds of knowledge conferred by literacy over the rest, we tallked only to other humans, or perhaps only literate humans, and since the internet gives us access to so many people that we must be selective, only to those humans who reflect our own world vision.

It’s a compelling argument, and backed up by a lot of interesting and convincing research. I have reservations however. I don’t think those skills and that kind of knowledge arequite so lost as Abrams imagines. Anyone who practises a craft, works with animals with any dedication, tends a garden or tries to observe wildlife; anyone who looks after small children or provides care for the sick or for people in difficulty, is learning other ways of knowing and relating to the world around us. Many of the experiences Abrams has to go to indigenous tribes to discover are a regular part of life for urban western people who aren’t confined to a university or a bank. But it is true, and dangerously true, that this kind of knowledge and skill, that implies relationship rather than detachment, experience rather than validation, and is fluid, adaptive and relative rather than static and verifiable, is despised in certain quarters. And those are the quarters who have the money and the power and where decisions are made.

Also I must admit that I have a soft spot for the static, verifiable, scientific kind of knowledge. I am by nature impulsive, emotional and adaptive. I do the relational sort of response all the time. It’s not always the right thing to do. Often it makes decision-making incredibly difficult and it leaves you fairly vulnerable to bullying and manipulation. An ability to sort things out, get organised,detach yourself from the whirlwind or the bog of the immediate situation, make comparisons and evaluate your information can be pretty damn’ valuable now and then.

Anyway, if we stopped being literate, who would read this book?

Here’s a poem I wrote for the dyer and eco-alchemist India Flint. I hope to include it in the poetry collection which is due to come out in August.
India’s Alchemy
For India Flint
How she simmers mashed leaves,
shredded roots, pounded bark and berries
until the colour flows, and bleeds
into kettles, and stains her hands,

how the mordant bonds and brightens,
and how the air transforms
the white to rust and umber,
green indigo to bright blue,

and how some stains are welcome.
Silk drinks up the sap of leaf and flower,
colours different every time, and shapes
a ghostly faded permanence, like memory,
like what our hearts are steeped in.

India has a new post on her blog Not All Who Wander Are Lost about a project she did called The Colours of Home. It’s not only an inspiring concept, it produced some wonderful fabrics. You can see them here

The theme for this Sunday in our church was light, or vision. It’s a theme that matters a lot to me.

The ‘gleam of light on water’ is an ancient Celtic metaphor for a moment of delight, or enlightenment – a glimpse of the ‘otherworld’. It’s the metaphor I used to underpin Lúcháir, though I don’t think the enlightened world is so very ‘other’. As Christians we’re supposed to believe in the resurrection of the body, not some disembodied etherial blissed out state of mind, which means there’s a definite place in our spirituality for a deep love and commitment to the world we’re in.

But we have to see it differently. See it as it is, not as we want it to be (or are afraid it might be). See it as a masterpiece of creation, not a snare or a delusion. And see every fact we can establish about it as a gift from God (so there’s no room for pretending evolution didn’t happen). It has been a tradition in my family, which is heavily biassed in favour of the sciences, that all truth leads to God. If you think there’s a contradiction between faith and science, then you probably don’t understand one or the other (and possibly both).

I was going to go on about this, but frankly the whole thing makes me cross. I know that people on both sides are just lining up along the party lines because they hate the other lot. I’ve heard Catholics sneer at the Big Bang theory, and I can see that if they realised that one of the leading scientists involved in discovering it was a Catholic, they’d change sides without breaking step. And some Protestant fundamentalists talking about the earth being 6000 years old, who would drop it like a hot potato if they knew that this calculation was made by a bishop (and well after the Bible was written!). And there are some atheists who find it hard to accept that any Christian can be a scientist at all.

Seeing with the eyes of faith doesn’t involve switching your brain off. It involves switching your heart on. Then maybe we can hear the insights of people we don’t agree with, and learn from them, without sacrificing our own integrity. And that would be a whole other world!

The rain got here! the garden definitely needed it, but I am so glad I took the chance to garden yesterday. I cleared the bit around the pond, to give a bit of breathing space to the yellow flag irises I grew from seed

and the woodland bed under the birch tree, getting rid of excessive aquilegias (it would break your heart to do it, as they are so lovely, but everything else needs room too! I also planted out some sweet violets here in the hope that they will produce more of the intensely purple – almost liquid in its depth – flowers and less leaves.

I forked over the herb patch and added some more sage and thymes, some st john’s wort and some wood violets

and planted out a seedling fennel in the rose bed. I sowed three sorts of tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, carrots and beetroot, calabrese, courgettes, and rosemary seeds as an insurance, because my new bush that I planted this year looks as if it got walloped by the frost and it’s struggling some. Finally I planted five root cuttings of comfrey. I could regret this – comfrey plants spread like mint – but they are so useful for providing liquid feeds for all those tomatoes, that it’s worth it.

Oh, and I picked the first rhubarb, too.

This is Brantwood, the setting for our Geopoetics conference “Going Outward” this weekend. It is a beautiful house, set in 250 acresof lovely Lakeland countryside and overlooking Coniston Water. It was the home of John Ruskin, and the setting for some of his experiments in farming and gardening, and where he spent years studying and drawingand encouraging local crafts and industries.

I hadn’t known much about Ruskin apart from his art criticism, which established the reputation of Turner and inspired the Pre-Raphaelites, but it turned out there was a lot more to him than that. He was interested in education and social welfareand the environment, and the place of art and creativity in the lives of ordinary working people, not just a cultured elite. He was a competent but not a great artist, (which gave him a perceptive insight into the process of painting) and a serious geologist, not to mention a prolific writer.

The Brantwood Trust who own and manage the property now, continue his aims by managing the estate with a view to sustainable farming and conservation of habitat as well as making it pleasant and accessible for visitors. There is a gallery for local artists and they run courses in gardening, and drawing, and a very pleasant and comfortable venue for conferences like ours.

We learned about Ruskin and visited the garden – many of us took a walk around the estate, but I didn’t, being defeated by the distances and the steep hills involved. I looked around the herb garden full of plants useful for dyeing and medicine and food and cosmetics, and watched the ducks on the lake and visited the house, which is kept very much as Ruskin left it.

We talked about the connections between Ruskin and geo-poetics, and between geo-poetics (and poetry in general) and film-making and watched some very stunning films. We had a social evening with poetry and singing and stories, and were introduced to the work of Mariusz Wilks (particularly his Journals of a White Sea-Wolf) a Polish Writer who practices geo-poetics in Russia, and heard poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, Poland and Venezuala. All in all, it was a great weekend – even the weather was lovely!

You can find out more about geopoetics here

The theme of readings for the 3rd week in Lent is water, which seems quite timely as I have been

noting World Water Day last Wednesday.
We are heading for a serious water crisis, not because there isn’t going to be enough water, but because it’s going to be
in the wrong places
polluted
salty
in short supply where we need it

We are draining the ground water very fast (60% of European cities are using up groundwater resources faster than they can be replenished – I got this figure off the New Civil Engineer, so you can bet that if they are worried, we should be).

We are creating deserts where fertile ground used to be by cutting down trees

We are creating serious floods by paving over ground which used to store water and release it into rivers gradually, or by building on flood plains

and of course,

We are melting the ice caps by excessive carbon emissions. It was also Climate Change week last week, and Earth Hour on Saturday.

Learning about the rock formations in my territory

and finding that a lot of my home landscape was created by water – the action of glaciers carving out valleys and depositing sedimentary rocks, and the inundation of the sea, which at one time used to come in as far as Aberfoyle.

Watching Richard Ashrowan’s beautiful film ‘Lament’

which features eddies in the River Tweed, at a geo-poetics Weekend at Brantwood House in the Lake District. This lead us to reflect on the transitory nature of human lives—

and
remembering as a counter-balance the passage in Psalm 1
where the man who ponders the law of the Lord is compared to
a tree that is planted
beside the flowing waters
that yields its fruit in due season
and whose leaves shall never fail

On Saturday I went to St Andrews for the StAnza festival. Every year I say I should book early, and I should plan to stay over so I can get to the late night things, but always I forget, and I missed the Sorley Maclean events and seeing Billy Letford and so many more—

But St andrews is always fun. their idea of civil disobedience appears to be five pensioners tutting because the garden centre isn’t open, and the Tesco express seems to think that students live on sprouting broccoli and organic pasta (not a sausage roll insight!). I think there were more lederhosen and grey floppy felt hats (a bit like Gandalf, only with blue and white cords around them) than I personally need to feel at home in a place, but the fish supper was the best I’ve ever had, much improved by the sight of the guy behind the counter prepping a lobster while I waited for my salt and vinegar on it!

I did get to the Anne Clarke reading, and Philip Gross and Selima Hill, and they were excellent events, but the really nice thing is to wander about and meet people and find out who has interesting things happening, and discover new things about poetry. Judy Williams (who was, just by chance in the seat next to me for the Selima Hill night) introduced me to the concept of the ‘glosa’ – a poetic form which expands and comments on already existing writing. It doesn’t have to be another poem (at least not in my head; the classic version probably does) and I can see endless possibilities.

On Sunday I was at the Tower Mill in Hawick for an event organised by Eildon Tree, which was held over from the bad weather last December. It’s a long haul to Hawick from here, but those Ettrick hills are the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. I kid you not, and I am married to a guy who is nuts about hills, so I’ve seen a fair few. It was much quieter than St Andrews, but there were some cracking readings (mostly short stories), and excellent music from four girls who called themselves Fiddling Chiks. Eildon Tree is a magazine which promotes new writing ‘in the borders and beyond’, and like Northwords Now it’s free, but it’s harder to come by as there isn’t a web-site. I found it in the Scottish Poetry Library – well worth a look.

This distant mountain is Ben Ledi, the highest I can see from where I live. It’s the motif for the second Sunday in Lent, because in our church we always read about the Transfiguration today.

Last year I think I talked about those moments of vision which sustain us when life gets bleak (which it did, as I remember, and still does). This year I want to move beyond the private and personal, into my life as a poet and as someone trying to live an environmentally responsible life.

Poetry – like religion, it seems to me – often gets stuck in a concern for private moments of illumination, as if they are the only things worth writing about – or worse, the only things worth living for. But this is to say that poetry, or religion is no more than self-indulgence. St Peter (who often gets put down for being impatient or overly self-assertive with his excited ‘let’s build three tents’ outburst), is perhaps on the right track. The privileged moments aren’t just to be savoured. They demand a response, a commitment. If we are lucky enough to live in a beautiful part of the world, then it isn’t enough to be grateful and appreciate it. We must also cherish it, and be responsible for it. If we write poetry it isn’t just about how lucky we are – it’s also to share our vision with people, and enable them to cherish and share and speak up for their own visions.

As an environmentally conscious person, this last point is most important. It’s easy for me, living in a fairly rural setting, to get excited about skylarks and buzzards and whooper swans, and as a person who isn’t on the breadline, to ponder about where the most ethical food is going to come from – and I’m not going to apologise for it; those issues are important.

But some people don’t have that luxury. Some people live in inner cities. Some people live alongside polluted rivers, depleted soil, or toxic emissions, or have to deal with failing monsoons, or catastrophhic weather systems. I get the feeling that a lot of green aspirations are romantic and nostalgic, or a fairly desperate longing for a new start. We can’t do that. We have to say with Peter, “It is good for us to be here “.

I have become very enthusiastic about permaculture theory lately for many reasons – it is pro-diversity (including human, social and philosphical diversity), it is positive and hopeful, and it seems well grounded in understanding the earth and the way we are likely to behave. But one of the big things going for it is the way it is being used to revive degraded environments in the third world, after over-development or environmental disaster.

Here’s a link to the Permaculture Portal, where you can read all about some of the good things that are happening all over the world. But best of all, ways to start here, where we are.

Christianity gets a bad rep for being insensitive to the environment. It gets blamed for a dualistic soul/body, earth/heaven dichotomy in our thinking, which privileges the spirtual and the heavenly over the material and the here and now. That isn’t Christianity, it’s neoplatonism, but quite often you do find Christians who fit that stereotype, and I’d like to spend this Lent thinking about it.

The traditional Ash Wednesday injunction ‘remember man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return’ seems to have gone by the board these days – we just can’t handle inclusive language in English and I do remember a priest saying he thought calling a woman ‘woman’ was quite rude (says it all, really) so he wouldn’t do it. It’s a shame, because it does highlight the fact that we are of the earth and have a responsibility to it.

I might talk about places where Christianity is a more rural phenomenon and redress a balance or two later on in Lent, but this week I want to consider something a bit more immediate. In this country Christianity (and especially Catholicism) has been a very urban experience – apart from in the Highlands and Islands, anyway. And with the exception of eg the Duke of Norfolk, it has been a poor people’s experience. It’s less so now, but we do keep what we call the preferential option for the poor, and this goes part way to explaining the lack of environmental awareness.

The poor don’t own land. The poor don’t have big gardens, can’t buy smallholdings, or holiday cottages, and are finding it hard even to rent homes in the country. There’s even competition for allotments.

What’s worse, the poor have been removed from the land by industrialisation, high prices, war, emigration and several different kinds of chicanery from the enclosure of the common land to compulsory purchase. And there isn’t much anyone can do about that now.

The Christian religion grew up among people who had been forcibly removed from the land. It was important that they developed a belief system which granted them dignity even without a home or a nation. They had to build new communities inspired by a God who cared for them even in the most radically deprived circumstances. It isn’t surprising that some people began to feel that the land doesn’t matter.

But this leaves people vulnerable. There are people who will use this attitude to justify stealing the land from under the feet of those who live there. Donald Trump, for instance, seems to feel that money can compensate for the loss of home and community any time he wants some. We only have to remember the outcry about the sale of forests in England to realise that this is a live issue. Land does matter. It has to be guarded, cherished. While we live, we are dependant on the land, and responsible for it.

But there is another point, and we have to make this clear too. There was a time when only landowners had the vote. They owned the land, they took care of it, they got to decide what was done with it, never mind what their tenants thought and felt about it. And this attitude hasn’t gone away. Now the owners may not be wicked squires and landed gentry; they might be agri-businesses or insurance companies or even conservation groups. But they can’t be allowed to behave as if the landless don’t matter. The environmental shake-up that is on its way has got to work as much for the urban landless working classes as for the suburban gardeners and allotment-holders, the farmers and landed gentry.

The Living Landscape:How to Read and Understand It By Patrick Whitefield

This is a fascinating book, which pretty much does what it says on the jacket. Patrick Whitefield is a man who knows his own territory intimately and understands the changes that have made it what it is today. In this book he looks at all sorts of landscape, mostly, but not exclusively, rural, and deals with everything from geology to land use and wildlife. It is easy to read, but very densely packed with information, maps, diagrams and colour photographs. It is published by Permanent Publications in conjunction with The Permaculture Association (Britain).

I read this last summer excited to discover how much it is possible to learn from observing the trees and plants and climate of a place, and this year I am reading it again, more slowly, and using it as a focus for my territory walks. By this time next year I hope I will have built up a good picture of the area I live in.

Area Profile
Location
A landscape shaped by the flows and falls and resting places of water, my territory is the flat land along the valley of the Forth.

It is surrounded by the Trossachs (highest Ben Vorlich 987m and Ben Ledi 879m) to the north,

the Ochils (highest Dumyat 418m) to the north and east, to the south west the Touch and Gargunnock Hills (highest Black Craig, 485m), and to the west, Flanders Moss.

The Valley opens out between the hills to the Carse of Stirling, once very wet and boggy, now drained for farming. The rock is red sandstone and the soil in our valley is silty gley, though largely fertile because the village has been cultivated so long, and some patches of very sticky clay.

The village itself grew up around the Abbey, which was famous for its orchards – only one of which survives. The River Teith flows into the Forth at Craigforth, to the north of the area.

The Forth itself winds and meanders and is tidal as far up as the old Stirling Bridge.