1.
Pamela & The Oaks
There are certain landscapes I walk through where I know I’m little more than a very brief visitor. You’re not meant to stay here, the hills and mosses tell me, and I respect them, making my footsteps lighter, my strides slightly quicker.
The landscape does not need me here, want me here, I know.
There are other places I pass through, buildings I see, stories I hear, and I feel an instant kinship. A part of my body knows, recognizes, and calls out, I’m so glad to see you again, it’s been ages. I’ve missed you. Despite the fact we’ve never met before.
We hear a lot of talk about the stories we make up, the stories that define us, the stories that limit us. But we don’t often talk of the stories we arrived with.
And I wonder , what stories are held in the earth of our bodies? What stories breathed us into being? What stories looked out through our eyes before we knew what we were seeing in an effort to be known in this form, in this life, in this time?
Stories looking to find their ending or be continued on.
When I walked through the Oak forest on a patch of land in Scotland, like Alice, falling down the rabbit hole, my body remembered.
Hi, it called out, smiling, we’re so glad to see you again. I wasn’t sure which part of me was talking, or what part of me heard them answer back.
I only knew that it was.
It was the same with Pamela. I already knew her. A deeper knowing than the more superficial workings of my mind could hope to understand.
In the 1930’s this patch of Scottish ground of which I speak- the one that holds the Oaks- belonged to a 25 year old woman called Pamela. Or more specifically, Pamela’s husband.
The estate had been lost in a gambling bet the generation prior, and Pamela’s money- an heiress to a not insubstantial sum- was wanted to buy it back. And so, the story goes, Pamela married a man looking to make good on a deal gone bad, and her money used to buy back the estate.
At this point, it would be easy to colour Pamela with a quick swipe of your mental paintbrush, to relegate her to a scene of Downton Abbey and to hold her in your mind as nothing more than another wealthy woman. I lament the amount of women throughout history who have been cast aside,dismissed for reasons various; whose fierceness, brilliance and intelligence were never given the same opportunities or platforms as their male counterparts. We can be grateful that at least in Pamela’s case, she had money to protect her.
But let’s continue on.
In predictable fashion, Pamela was soon surrounded by men in grey suits advising her on how to make good on her purchase. After all, if her money had been used to buy the estate, then it needed to somehow make it back. As though the land itself was responsible for reimbursing the price tag human’s attached to its head.
Conversation soon fell to the Oaks. We should cut them down, they said. Use the wood. Fetch a price. Cut them down.
It’s funny, isn’t it? That we can stand next to something of beauty and not see it. Not feel it.
But Pamela said no.
No. You will not cut the Oaks.
Pamela said no.
In the 1930’s a 25-year-old woman called Pamela stood in the Oak forest and said no. And since I heard that story, I’ve thought about Pamela every day since. I even feel, within the colourful depths of my imagination, that we’ve become friends.
I often think of what it took, as a woman of that time who by default had little power, autonomy, or voice, to say no to those men in grey suits. To say yes to those beautiful trees.
I’m filled with admiration and wonder at her feist, her determination, her strength. I’m filled with awe at the stately Oaks.
I’ve thought about the concept of legacy, and what it means to create one. What could be more beautiful, if nothing else was left to whisper your name, than to have the spirit of a hundred oaks to stand for you.
As I stood in that forest I looked up and said thank you to Pamela. You will never know me but my heart thanks you.
I saw your oaks, and I understand.
Pamela loved the Oaks, and the Oaks loved her back.
2.
Picking flowers
Yesterday, I dreamed of lying in long grass, covered in petals, so I could watch flowers undisturbed in their process of becoming.
Does beauty only exist if it is witnessed?
The answer slingshots back.
Of course not, she replies. Beauty exists for the purpose of existing only. The least you can do is pay attention.
The answer given generously, the tone kind and yet direct.
It felt normal, in my dream, to want to feel my plant-ness. To get closer to the answers un-thinkable and only all-feelable.
I look down to check my hands. Are they now tendrils, shoots looking for support, to reach towards the sun?
I hold them out, above me, arboreal. Still hands, I lament, my human-ness an expected disappointment.
I crawl closer to one flower: I have a question.
I take out my leaf paper, my stick pen, write down in soil-ey ink:
I’ve always felt conflicted about picking flowers.
I’ve wondered what right I have to do that?
Do I break the spell they cast the minute I break their stem?
My dream-state petalled self in the quietness of the green which speaks of dew and moss and tiny fern shoots hidden under logs, resting for an answer.
And it comes, my answer, matter of fact:
All you have to do is ask.
A pause.
With the intention, they add, of hearing the reply.
Why is it I’d never thought to ask?
Of course. All I had to do was ask.
A botanical lesson on how to be human.
3.
When the land remembered how to be a meadow
A ripped off cardboard sign hanging on an old farm gate. A number scrawled across in permanent pen. For sale, it said. We rang it, ended up in conversation with a man in a pair of shorts too tight for his legs sitting on the high seat of a tractor. The owner of the land.
We walked around, murmured, dodged the unintended graves of the dead, left to graze a patch of soil who had nothing left to feed them in return. I tried not to be appalled. Kicked the rubble with my feet.
Tomb size rabbit holes, the carcasses of a trapped top-heavy sheep. I imagine them back to life, launch a sheep rebellion. The farmer’s house fills with sheep and shit and grit. Held to ransom by a wooly flock of bandits asking only for fair dues.
I look around, scrape back the top layer of soil in my mind. Underneath, I see seeds, waiting in patient readiness for their turn.
We’ll take it, we say out loud. Hands are shaken.
Give it to me, I say more urgently in my mind. I send out a thin layer of hug across the land.
It was the thyme that came back first. Then the tussock, the oats, and the wheat grass.
Once, when walking, a hawk took off in flight, a swift acceleration upward into empty air. At my feet, eggs, a nest. I retreat, apologetic in my haste to get away.
Please come back now; I speak in the direction of the vertical migration. I didn’t know you were there. I’m sorry, I add, for disturbing you.
Ground now safe enough to nest on.
Later, in conversation, we turn and look. The once barren patch of land a velvet rug of cashmere and mohair grass.
We turn and look at the land, busy remembering how to meadow.
4.
Tracing the outline of mountains with my eyes
I don’t know how it began. I message my friend, Jack, the person I thought taught me.
Remember, I said, the practice of tracing the horizon with your eyes? I do it all the time, I told him. A landscape meditation.
I start on the left, beginning at the furthest point. I trace the mountains and the trees, the buildings, whatever I can see.
Up and down, up and down, up and down, mapping the heartbeat of the land.
I think, Jack tells me, it relates to a musical tune, in Maori called the rangi (which is the sky). It was said in the old day the rangi of each tribe’s song or chant was uniquely described by the ups and downs of the landscape against the sky.
The land and the sky together in a song I hear with my eyes.
Thank you, I tell him. I love that.
5.
Things to carry into October
A heart-shaped rock I found, and placed in my pocket
Longer daylight days
A new friend made this week
Bulbs to plant, in the hope it’s not too late
A bird’s nest, soft with moss and wool
Beautiful letters I’m learning to write, traced in ink
My home after many months of travel
My pillow, awaiting my return
The luminous oak coming back to leaf
This writing was inspired by the incredible Robin Wall Kimmerer and her question asking in her book, Braiding Sweet Grass.
