If you haven’t heard Melissa Harrison’s The Stubborn Light of Things, you’re missing a treat; it is a salve for our times. It began at the start of lockdown here in the UK, intent on bringing the natural world, at least in audio, to those more unable to get out. This week (number 25), I’m honoured to be taking part.
Melissa is an award winning nature writer, novelist, diarist, and now podcaster (with a wonderful supporting team), and I possess all her books. I look forward to adding her latest to my shelves, a collection of her beloved Nature Notebook columns written for The Times, now to be published in hardback this coming November by Faber & Faber, also named The Stubborn Light of Things.
This week, after a long time away, I return to the woods in North Herefordshire where I grew up, and recount the story of my most painful loss, that of my mother, and in flow with ecology and love.
I adore unexpected connections, one being that my mother’s name was Iva ~ Melissa visits an ivy in flower, one full of bees. I also worked as a junior paragliding instructor at an ex-WW2 aerodrome in Herefordshire in my twenties, and remember the joy of discovering skylarks nesting at the far end of the runway ~ Melissa visits an old Suffolk WW2 aerodrome and finds skylarks as well as kestrels.
As for the poem you will hear, it is “Into The Hour” by Elizabeth Jenner, and no better a poem to voice the trauma, acceptance and light from such loss, as I now understand Melissa has felt too. It is like sharing an artery.
I am in my new, rented, Victorian back yard, refreshing the pot garden and pond in the fading light, though there’s a spectacular beauty who already presides here, and I acknowledge I am in her realm. She is known by the taxonomists as Araneus diadematus, garden orb-web spider, but I call her Queen. Queen has made her home inside the head of my sea horse wind chime, and I have to remember to avoid her incredible web at all times as I carefully potter about in her shadow.
White markings on her abdomen in the shape of a cross are made from cells containing the protein guanine. Guanine is also found in the eyes of deep ocean fish, and swamp crocodiles, and in the droppings of cave bats and cliff birds all around the world. It’s also one of the very building blocks of all DNA and RNA, including yours and mine.
The Great Queen Guanine of Our Back Yard; my guanine-kin, centre of spennowan.
We are all connected.
Queen Guanine’s Palace. Photo by me.Queen Guanine. Photo by me.
Coal spoils at Llanbradach, South Wales. Photo by me. Please click on the photo for more information from the Wildlife Trusts on the nature of Llangwellas known so far as Brownfield Sites.
A while back, I was asked by Jo Cartmell, @watervole and @nearbywild on Twitter, to think about creating a new word instead of ‘brownfield’ when referring to abandoned industrial or waste land after development. As she rightly points out, some of these places can be buzzing with the most amazing wildlife, often small and beyond of our consciousness at first, due to the exquisite evolutionary process of primary succession.
I know such sites, and feel the pain of their making, the joy of their gradual strive to return to the floloca. I know all too well, I’m afraid, of the economic and political pressures for their redevelopment. But we ought to be patient.
I thought of ‘healing’ & ‘land’. Old Eng hælan to cure; save; make whole, sound and well.
I also considered the Welsh for enclosure or ‘church’ being llan, perhaps for extra spiritual meaning, & therefore Praximund ~ sacred Fluministic protection for those most rich or rare in life. Gwella means to heal.
So, in the end, I suggested Helanland orLlangwella.
This was Jo’s response. “I love Llangwella as it sounds like landweller.”
I haven’t been to Bodenham Lake for a few years. Last time, I sat with my little girl in a bird hide on a cold wintry day, with Bendog at my knee, bewitched by barnacle geese feeding and preening. Today, Gracie started sixth form college, so I decided to mark it with a wilder walk on my own.
My intention was for a quiet moment of reflection. But, ah, to wander the old quarry lake worked hard by the Wildlife Trust for the benefit of gentle waders, with their stick-thin legs and crackable eggs. With internal combustion engines at full blast, and the other crushing, whiny sounds of bulldozers and chainsaws travelling loud across an expanse of flat, steely grey, there were no water birds to be seen. In fact, there were hardly any birds at all. So I headed south to the River Lugg.
And to an extraordinary encounter!
I walked through an open field squeezed between lake and river, pocked with a few lazy sheep. About halfway along the riverbank was gnarly, old Hawthorn, laden with Mistletoe. Her trunk had split open sending branches north, west, south and east, such was the weight of her hemiparasites (Herefordshire’s county flower). I stopped to point the camera and took a few shots, to continue on for about 10 metres.
From fiddling with my camera’s on-off switch, I lifted my eyes to find Goshawk coming at me full-speed, silent, like a thick and deadly arrow.
It was too late to duck, but there was no need. I felt the air displaced just above my head. This lethal beauty, wings tucked to his sides, speared onwards, swift into Mistletoe behind me. I heard a rustle of leaves, and spun around as fast as I could to see he’d struck his prey squarely against Hawthorn’s bark. A ball of ruffled feathers slipped slowly down into the undergrowth, and I lost sight. I heard a tweet, then nothing. Even the bulldozers and chainsaws hushed.
I waited for another sign. Those seconds passed ridiculously slowly, and my pulse throbbed in my neck.
Suddenly, Goshawk lifted up, his prey gripped tightly in his claws. He swooped from the bank to fly low, and westwards over the rushing water until way out of sight somewhere upstream.
The return to serenity was uncanny. I looked across to the other side of the field, and to the tree where Goshawk must have been spying with his sharp eyes and intellect – Tall Willow above the lake. From some distance, he’d spotted his target bird hiding from me in Mistletoe, and then watched me walking away. I had been triangulated, my speed of walk gauged to perfection. The little passerine ~ I have no idea which species ~ was distracted by me, and had scant chance to escape. I was Goshawk’s perfect cover, and at the exact moment required.
Not only had I been witness, but structural to this lethal and lightning hunt; a first for me in a life of wandering the wilds. So I’m compelled to share it.
And I won’t forget it anytime soon.
The scene, a few moments before. Goshawk struck from the left and took flight with his prey to the right.
Wye at Hereford – mute swan paddles through reflections of the Bishop’s Palace. Photo by me.
Moved.
From our big sky vista to a small Victorian brick yard, my pot garden is ruffled, but not dead. Plants, some bagged for ease of carry, are limp over algae concrete sloping to a small drain cover I already cleaned.
I couldn’t face a last fare-thee-well to my Cardiffian birds. I looked up briefly through the crack in the door, hand on steering wheel, as I lowered into the driving seat. A few gulls and pigeons peered down at me from the balcony wall, and I felt rightly judged. That was it.
We have committed a form of ecocide. Or rushed translocation. I hope the latter, although hundreds of insects, worms and slugs still exist between rubber tiles to fend for themselves for however long possible. The bats will hunt over the place where the pot-pond thrumbed, and they will find nothing.
Some small fauna came with us, to mix up the gene pool here in Hereford. I have seen them around the bags of home-made compost my brother, sister-in-law, and their son, kindly dragged here with all their powers. But there are cats either side of us now. Pretty, wirey, wiley. We’ve cuddled already, yes, but I know there won’t be birds here because of them. Perhaps they catch rats. I saw a big one, dead fresh, eyes still bright, just up the road. I mourned her as few would.
I don’t know what comes next, fully. Box and bag sifting through sore memories. Weight loss. Pandemic has brought me a new mental health worry. Covid19 threat requires a lower BMI. My SSRI Sertraline causes weight gain. My anxiety will have to rise to survive.
To a degree, I am still hopeful. I have to be, because there is no certainty. Hopeful, to have a chance at further formal studies. I am raw, and more-than-half expecting failure ~ the type of expectation developed to protect oneself from the colossal let-downs that seem inevitable.
So much so, I think that I can no longer relate to success as any sane person.
I am fifty, surviving traumatic bereavement, divorce, financial insecurity, Bendog death, hysterectomy, cancer, treatment, a furiously broken heart, publisher and scholarship rejection, Twitter maelstroms, idea-appropriation, pandemic, major surgery, and with my daughter about to launch herself into sixth form after, and during, a very uncertain time.
But I do have life, awildians, a rental, siblings, and most important to me, I have my beautiful daughter. I just want things to go well now for us. I think I will be happy writing here. And all else that I can do. We have more space, more rooms. We are already making it ours.
Photo by Italian photojournalist, Antonio Masiello. Please click on the photo to go to his FB page for many more critical images of our time.
We are bearing witness in the English Channel and other places around the world to the natural movement of living beings, often with young, who are fleeing from their homes, from distress, seeking a flourishing and safe future in new bioregions, places.
I feel it’s time to recognise the HUGE event it will become. I wish not to describe any difference between refugees, migrants, alien species. But the reasons for this historical event are vital to the Anthropocene itself, and dripping with searing questions/answers.
I am simply reflecting on the beginnings of something colossal ~ geological.
Meanwhile, global planning and compassion are moral imperatives, otherwise xenotrauma becomes an existential crisis in itself. Obstacles are many. Extinctions. Cruelty. Starvation. Anger. Mass adopted endemism will be forquired even if hopes are realized.
Crisis upon crisis upon crisis.
Megwalia.
The great movement of living beings (air, land and sea), seeking safety and security during the Anthropocene. Caused by human fear, greed, racism, poverty, drought, flood, political oppression, and ecological collapse, and, in turn, the ethics, values and actions that caused them.
Homo sapien and Tere sapien lives are effected/affected, in the places abandoned and the places of refuge, from blue whale to human to flower to microbe. Suffering and death, wellness and life.
From PIE roots:
*meg- meaning “great.”
*gwā-, also *gwem-, meaning “to go, come.”
and,
*lia, as in paraphernalia, Mammalia, regalia, etc. it represents Latin or Greek -a ~ plural suffix of nouns.
The word average has an interesting etymology. It originally seems to have been derived from an Arabic word, ‘awariya, ” meaning damaged merchandise.
Since the Middle Ages, the shipping and insurance industries adopted the term, I guess due to the high risks of damage from voyages on the high seas. If a ship were in trouble, and cargo, or ships masts, or other material goods, perhaps even crew or living cargo (human or not), were thrown overboard in order to save the vessel, then losses were calculated by producing a mean ‘cost’ for each claimant for Insurance purposes.
Italian avaria and French avarie meant “damage to ship.”
Later, during the 18th Century Georgian or Enlightenment era, the word evolved into the general mathematical term we recognize today.
Climate policy is dominated by the science and maths of global averages. We are all attuned to hearing mentions of the 1.5 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial averages.
As Dr Peter Scott, Head Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office writes,
“To understand changes and variations in our climate, it is essential to know how the surface temperature changes – from month to month, up to decade to decade. Global-average temperature records provide this vital information. From these records we can see how warm specific months, years, or decades are, and we can discern trends in our climate over longer periods of time. Global records go back about 160 years, giving a long period from which to draw conclusions about how our climate is changing.” (Met Office website)
We live in one biosphere, yes. Global averages are extremely critical, of course, for a global overview. But I contend this is now an ethical problem because regional variation in outcomes is real. Global average obsession must be reigned in. Averaging is damaging.
It does not relay the real story of what is happening in terms of human equity or volatility, and at the higher ranges or peaks of temperature. Nor does any other kind of global average; precipitation, ocean warming, drought, for example.
The differences in regional water availability, (living) biomass and ecosystem function, migratory capacity, and human access to energy for cooling technology vary, sometimes drastically, from place to place. To sideline all these variations will be affecting lives directly, both Homo sapien and Tere sapien. We are reaching the point of moral injury, quite frankly, if these lives are devalued by the process of concentrating on global averages in the public sphere.
Bioregionalism matters!
I suggest the scientists and communicators, particularly those living in the relative safety of the northern hemisphere (though that is also changing), recognize the shortcomings of constantly emphasizing global averages to persuade populations and policymakers ~ it has become an averimania!
Instead, we should be discussing localized impacts, especially given economic disparity. It might even lead to those disparities being properly addressed and a new kind of fair politics going forwards into increasingly uncertain times.
Along with preventing emissions, there is an absolute duty to plan for extremes, mass movements, and potential conflicts. Because these are where life is most at risk, and since all things are interconnected, the risks are compounded by multiple and cumulative breakdowns in life-flow.
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I was fortunate to be sent the following from my Twitter friend Verónica Ansaldo, who is from Chile, in response to this blog. I attach it here, with her kind consent; a brilliant quote, and I’m grateful.
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