Year

I wrote this to go with a video of nature footage I’d taken, and found art outdoors, as a way to reflect back on my year of counselling training, growing, and being in nature and amongst other humans.

THE WILD

I am wild
The animal part of me
Grows stronger daily.
It hides amongst bracken and under old tree roots.
It sees the small things in fabulous detail
and is gentle with them.
It loves to hold and be held,
To show you the treasures it has found,
To follow you on your own wild wanderings,
To feel rooted in its feeling of itself.

It is not always graceful,
It makes mistakes and stumbles over bracken in puppyish excitement.
It can crash through your teddybear’s picnic.

Perhaps because of this
I’ve mistrusted my animal self.
Feared showing it to others,
Kept it hidden away in the woods,
In seaside caves,
Under heavy rocks.

Now I see it,
I feel how well it knows the core of me,
How sensitive its feeling for others,
How hard it tries to connect.

It is the feeling part of me
I tried to tame for safety
While my thoughts and reasoning swirled and looped
Unthethered and ungrounded.

Now
I feel and see more and more
Through my animal self.
I am learning to show that part of me,
Let it be seen.

It is the light on the lake
And the rushing of the waters
The salt on my cheek
when I can taste how I’m feeling
Your warm safety and cold terror,
Shared for me to resonate in tune.

I realise: this is all of me, and it’s okay.
And I think: and so must be all of you.

-

In my mind there is a map of the land through time:
How the sun felt when garlic mustard grew here
How cold my hands were when I held my
first angry young staphylinid
(and my startled joy when he bit me)
How the earth smelt before the mushrooms emerge

But also held in the land there is a map of myself:
Where I willed the grass to grow over me in my despair
Where the beach holds my past
forever scored in the sand but always washing out to sea -
an out-breath when I need it
Where I saw my forest afresh through loving connection

In my mind there is a map of the land through time
And in the land there is a map of me

WINTER

My year is a journey
It’s one I’m getting to know quite well
The familiar winter dark
Like the day is too tired from cold
to really get going

In winter I keep to the coasts
Perhaps in the hopes
that the tides will wash the light back in.

The crimson skies bracket each brief day
As if to say:
‘I may be short, but my colour is a promise for the summer to come.
(And really, do you ever get up early enough to see a sunrise in June?)’

Early this year I remember thinking:
‘When it’s dark and cold again
I will have done so much.
I wonder if I will be warmed by the new rings of growth around me?
How much better will I know this journey,
And the geography of myself?’

-

On the beach,
Beginnings, endings
overlap
Cycles merge and separate.

I cast my net and pull meanings from the moment:
this tide line
this seaweed
this vacated shell

They wash over my memories of this coastline,
Stirring them
Filling the pools afresh.

I learn to trust
that in this stirring
My body knows what it needs to recall
and what it wants to say.

-

Moss and bright fungi deck drab wood and stone,
Their sudden brightness a reminder
Of when I realised that there is always life and a thirst for growth
even in winter
And how before I learnt to look
I didn’t know to see

Sometimes everything can change
when I stop looking for summer life in winter

Then I see:
Trametes versicolour each bracket banded in unique and secret chemistry
Scarlet elfcup in lush red defiance on frozen moss
Oakmoss to coat the trees when leaves are out of style
Sporophytes reaching up from every crevice

SPRING

This winter and spring I thought about the naming of things
How much less overwhelming it is
when there is less to differentiate
When the noise of everything coming into being
Makes it hard to see,
well,
the wood for the trees.

And how in myself
In the deep woods of my being
I’ve needed a winter quiet
And early spring greening
To start to learn and name my feelings

And how in naming them,
More emerge,
That were hidden in plain sight.
Just as the early yellow flowers:

aconite, coltsfoot, celandine

Were all to me just
yellow flowers
But now that I have met them and found their names
each possesses their own meaning and beauty
And each is also tied to my own memory and sense-making:

Aconite: strange sadness

Coltsfoot: early hope

Celandine: deep joy

I hold on to the moments,
arrange them in my mind as if in a jar,
holding on to something of their essence:
The briefness of spring and a new shoot’s
tiny, delicate intensity;
The fleetingness of feeling after feeling,
despite their momentary brightness.

My arrangements simplify and reduce,
their vitality will fade
But perhaps by holding them close
just a little longer
I might know them better
when new buds bloom again.

SUMMER

Summer is loud with life.

It is so loud that now in autumn,
I find it hard to recall its quiet losses.

This summer I carried my own losses,
and some of others’,
Under dappled tree-light
as young birds watched, curious,
Round and new to life.

I wondered how their sense of me might shape them:

‘This large being is curious but quiet
They look up at us
but cannot fly.
Large beings that don’t fly don’t scare us.’

I think about the beings I learnt from.
I think about how my losses now echo,
tug on past feeling.
The shape of me formed
through so many summers
So many different dappled woods.

-

Within me there is a nest
made from old newspapers,
dried tea leaves,
recycled string and old stamps.

I found my way back to it by accident one day,
out in the woods.

Its walls are still soft and warm,
Familiar in a way
that I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten
it was home.

We are made up of stability and chaos,
storms and warm sun,
and everything in between.
But it can be hard sometimes
to see safe harbour
When we haven’t navigated the storm.

I think about how the shape of me
is formed by all of that.

AUTUMN

These are my autumn woods.
In winter and spring they recede
almost like I forget they exist
for half the year

So much life and feeling,
So much of myself I’ve entangled
into its September richness.
Perhaps I can’t bear to see it quiet and cold.

In these woods,
I feel an almost mycelial connection

The chanterelles sweep their secret golden paths
Yearly across the moss

Hedgehog mushrooms,
delicate white spines hanging down
like wonderful weird porcelain

Cortinarius semisanguineus,
Their drab caps hiding
Gills bright as blood.

And this year in these woods
I think long and hard about connection.

I wrestle with disconnect.

This is the first time I have done a foray:
Collecting some of every kind of mushroom
Irrespective of human value.

Groups are very much like individuals
And individuals are very much like forests.
Every part of them needs to be ‘seen’,
or be connected,
In order to coexist.

Saprophytes decay deadwood
Which feeds the living trees
Which feed the other life of the woods.

I feel so much a part of the ecosystem of this wood.

What is my part in the messy, confusing, painful, warm,
ecosystem of other humans?

-

This week, I thought I saw the geese depart.
I used to find their long trailing goodbyes
Difficult to see,
As if they are taking what’s left of the year away with them.

Today I learnt that they have always been arriving,
Not leaving.
Our mild winters an oasis
From icelandic chill or Canadian blizzards.

Perhaps in goose-world,
There are no hellos or goodbyes.
Just the winter warmth of Aberlady
And breeding grounds of Spitsbergen.

I wonder how differently I’ll feel
The next time I see them arrive.

—

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