Falling into place

We often feel the climate crisis as a sort of abstraction because we have fallen out of place. Love for one’s land has come to be seen as a form of nationalism and those of us who grew up in cities simply don’t know what it feels like to love a land. The idea sounds trite if you have never truly loved a little corner of land, loved it like you love a person, who you fell in love with, who makes you feel safe, who is home as they gather you up into their arms. Love like you love your favourite book, your favourite poem that reflects you back to you, that makes you feel at home in the world. There have been times when I have loved a stretch of land more than I have loved any living person within 100 miles and that love has held and sustained me.

More than a decade before I was born my parents bought a little cottage in the Burgundian countryside. It is the only place I have always known and the only land I have ever loved. The only place that I have intimate knowledge of, its mossy median strip-lined lanes form a kind of mythic landscape in my mind. I know every tree, every twist, the secret stretches along the side of the road where the wild strawberries grow that you would never know… if you hadn’t already known… where to look.

Having this place to go every year saved me from the snarling hungry city which eats sensitive types for breakfast with all its gleaming glass industry and po-faced bureaucracy. The city nearly did and certainly would have killed me if it wasn’t for summers in this place, this little corner of the earth that was oh! the rarest of things… underpopulated.

The funny thing about underpopulated places is that they are absolutely teeming with life. In any given moment you can hear life in its triumphant manifold expressions, a relentless hum, but individuated if you listen. Listen, can you hear? 1,2,3 6 flies, a mouse, two wood pigeons, a songbird, a mosquito, another 7 flies and then… wonder of wonders… the cry of the elusive golden oriole. It is so so so alive. We are not used to this kind of aliveness. Spectacular but ordinary, or rather it should be, had we not grown used to the death boxes we live in and glass cages we roam around in like rat runs for entertainment and recreation. Why would we choose this dead sterility? It makes no sense to me. In a world where we think of single tree plantations as forests and mono crop sown fields as nature, maybe most people have never experienced the intoxicating life-addled opera playing out around them and how at peace a human is amongst the noise. The low hum of the fridge, honking of horns as sirens in the distance are an ersatz poor imitation.

It is not enough. How can we want to save ourselves for this glorious living earth if we have ensconced ourselves into hermetically sealed silos and forgotten what life sounds like.

Go out and listen. Then want to stay alive for it.

Rumi says: ‘The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you’.

He means you personally. Particular secrets meant for your ears only. When you bed down into place and it becomes used to you, eventually it will spill its secrets to you in a devastating act of trust. You must be ready to be a true friend.

Martin Shaw in his Courting the Wild Twin talks of ‘Amor’ in regards to place. He says, “ Some places claim us, some don’t. Like people. Just as sex without love eventually exhausts us, transmogrification through landscape after landscape can become thin…openness to all can be the end to loyalty to anything in particular.”

We have to love a particular place in order to extrapolate out, in order to deeply understand love of land. And we protect that which we love. We come into relationship with that which we love. Places like people can be soulmates and I have loved only one, maybe two, places. Perhaps we only get one great love. I hope I will get at least one more for I am feeling a longing to bed down into place again.

My partner and I had planned a big trip for this year. We were to travel halfway across the world to see mountains and temples and glorious white sand beaches but by chance on the very same average day we turned to one another to say, I don’t want it. It’s not what I want. I want Welsh and English hedge-rows and the cold, and muddy boots and icky stick-to-your-leg rain trousers. The gods are alive in England, you don’t need to travel so far to meet them. And this land, though subtly at times, is beautiful too.

And so now, as the sale of my first (place) love is being finalised and I have not yet found my next love, I feel an ache and a fear. Will I have this feeling of home again? Will anywhere else ever mean this much? When this little stretch of land is sold I will once again fall out of place. I will be orphaned from land and once again have no natural place that is home.

I do know I will never bring up my children divorced from land. Place orphans. You must know your mother In an intimate way. It is not enough to say I love my mother if you have never met her. It is not enough to say I love my god if you have never shaken their hand. I will be a place orphan for a while in my flat in the city until I once again find my place. My stretch of land. My mother in her intimate, Immanent form, clothed in her ‘woodland dress’, and I will gift her to my children so that they will know her. So that they will feel at home in the world. In one particular green corner of this green island and hopefully together with the land we will all become kin and all together… fall into place.