Remembering Ophelia

Today, 38 years too late, I understood, at last. I seem to be living on some sort of a different planet. I am here in body (more or less, depending) but somewhere else, in my soul.

I am on holiday, at home, but away. The sun rose and shone and fell and rose and shone again, for days. Apricots and raspberries blushed under its gaze, and were eaten. I burned my neck, and tanned my nose. I am luxuriating now, in plentiful summer rain.

All day it has rained, quietly. When I woke in the night, it was drumming on the roof and the porch and everywhere, like a beating heart. Instead of dust, parched grass, leaves hanging like limp rags, there is new growth on the trees, dew in the morning, and silence, respite, from the killing wind that every other year has blown the solstice in and out.

Rain.

Rhythm and rhyme in the morning. I blink and the pussycats doze, in the sun and fresh air on the porch. I wander out, pyjama-clad, to feed the chooks and pluck a handful of sun-warmed raspberries. I try a little Yin Yoga: my favourite practice, this, of all that I have tried — not onward, to the next pose. Staying for a while, in this one.

Later, breakfast. A scalding mug of excellent coffee, thick yoghurt, the raspberries.

Part of the day is gone. It does not matter. It has been undemanding, and simple, and quiet. I am very still inside.

It is the ultimate luxury of enough — enough money, food, space, time, gentle weather, physical health, solid ground under one’s feet — the important things, with which so few are blessed and even fewer seem to want.

I can think, in this space. I have slept, I have stretched, I am feeding myself. The night it rained, I’d dined on freshly dug boiled potatoes, butter, white pepper, salt. That is all, but I had dined.

I notice I am breathing, slow and regular, right to the bottom of my lungs. It feels good, but unaccustomed. Taking shallow breaths, am I only living half a life?

The day after, I am in the bath. I have finally ironed out the knot in my shoulder-blades, which only yoga and a week like this can fix. I close my eyes and when I open them again, I am crying. I am not unhappy, I am just crying, and not for the first time in my life I think: we carry it with us physically, all this stuff.

On a whim, because I could, I spent Christmas at Pahaoa. I was alone, but less lonely than I ever feel in a crowd. I had skylarks for company, an empty beach upon which to walk barefoot, and I did, all afternoon. I wore no watch; I followed my heart and my feet where they led. Then I came home again.

That day was a gift. I was happier than I have ever been — at Christmas time certainly, but also, I was free, in a wild and beautiful place, the sun shone, and I did find joy and peace, goodwill, all that stuff, but not under the wilting Douglas fir.

The television is off. It would shout in the silence. There is not silence: there are birds, and Mary-Ann (the chook) complaining about stolen eggs out the back, and I live in town; it is peaceful though, all the same. I am rested. I am reading.

Alexander McCall Smith — ex-philosopher and lawyer, whose stock in trade is morals and values — writes simple, slightly silly stories, which are always about one thing, one single bottom line. Everyone is civil in them. Everyone has or makes time to think before they act, to think of others, and perform small acts of kindness and care, with their meals, and in life.

Oedipus Snark MP, the “only nasty Liberal Democrat”, is arrogant and lazy, with an irritating habit of saying “Ha!”. He finds himself in the CERN Large Hadron Collider, having his atoms accidentally but satisfactorily rearranged.

After, instead of selfishly using others, he thinks of their feelings.

This could never happen, in real life.

I am Tweeting poetry: one a day, for my former English teacher who, rather than trying to “teach” us poetry, would read us one at the start of each class. That was more than 20 years ago, and I do not know if he is still alive, but I remember him, often, and always will — smiling, in front of the overhead projector — and so, here is a poem.

“Remembering Ophelia,” it is called. It is an odd, shy, awkward poem, but if you sit with it a while, it grows on you, until, like Ophelia, it is “almost ready to say hello”.

2011. A tumultuous year, in many ways. I learned some things, about people and myself, about what I want in my life and what I do not.

I learned that I cannot abide selfishness. It makes me as angry as cruelty.

Spontaneous gestures of kindness and friendship and acknowledgement left me touched. They were small things, but they mattered, so much. I opened my heart. I took risks. I let myself be hugged, and something imperceptible changed.

So, in 2012, in whom and what will I invest?

1.    In simplicity, but quality, of life.

2.    Beauty — mostly, taking the time to notice it, for there is plenty of it about.

3.    More poetry in life — metaphorically, probably, but the real thing is also good.

4.    The contentment of good plain fresh food, that just tastes of itself.

5.    Well-written prose. That is to say: good journalism, less tele.

6.    Less noise, more tranquillity. If the silence must be broken, let it be by birds.

7.    More hugs?

I will defend freedom, and wildness. I will follow the kindness, and try to practise it, imperfectly, myself.

And I know already that among the biggest challenges I will face in 2012 will be trying to hold on to any part of this, in 10 days’ time, and not see it broken and trampled all over by what the rest of the world calls life.

So this is my question now. When did simplicity become a luxury? Has it been ever thus, that you had to go away, and not be part of the world — the yogi on the mountain top, the cloistered nun — to grasp the truth of it?

1 January 2012

My mother emailed me about the Forest & Bird ‘Bird of the Year’ competition. “I voted for the Fairy Tern,” it said.

“Was that the little lady so cleverly disguised as shells?”

“Yes,” came back her reply, “and she didn’t have many votes”.

A short correspondence, in which my mother explains, in a handful of words, why she is a conservationist.

Accounting is her job; she has a leafy shady garden, through which a weka wanders, from the kiwi reserve at the back. In winter, she feeds the birds. We have never discussed this, she and I. But in her bones, and in her heart, I think she is a conservationist.

I felt, instantly, that I was not a conservationist; I was a fraud. I myself had treated the Forest & Bird ‘Bird of the Year’ competition like a cheap vox pop.

I voted for the morepork, because one had woken me up. I remember that I smiled, before I went back to sleep. Moonlit, my garden looked pretty enough, my sycamore trees impressive enough, for a small owl to stop and say hello, and I gave it my vote of thanks.

I am a gardener. I like to grow food. Better, I like to eat quite a lot of food, having grown it first. There is no more delicious kind. I do not like to mow the lawn. Big trees fill me with every good feeling: awe, and peace, and joy. I think I would live in a forest, if I could. I live in a town garden, that is shaggy round the edges.

Impractically — I am often this — I would like to be buried under a wild apple tree, beside a running stream. The tree would blossom in spring time, fruit in autumn, feed birds in the winter.

Until then, I want to make a garden that is pretty, and fruitful, and alive.

Kereru come to my plum trees in spring, fantails in the winter. Today, writing this at home, I am being kept company by a collective noun — a flirt? — of silvereyes. I am a friend of hedgehogs. Ever since I moved into this house, there has been one or other of them living beneath it; the last one I pricked my fingers on was tucked up inside a bale of barley straw. They snuffle round on summer nights, minding their business, and my own: hedgehogs eat snails, in my garden, what else they may do in the bush I do not care. The bush is far from here. There are herbs for the bees — bog sage and thyme — and butterfly food: buddleia and, prosaically, stinging nettles.

I want soil full of worms, and carbon. And trees, breathing.

This is conservation, too.

Not infrequently I am asked, by people making gardening conversation, whether I grow natives here. For the most part, I do not. Well, I told you, I am a fraud. But here is my defence.

Conservation, in the end, in many ways, is about treading more lightly, leaving more space. I know my food’s footprint, when I grew it. It is the same size as mine. My garden will be a food forest, and somewhere else, another piece of forest survives.

This is probably the first and last time I will twitter on about my garden, here at Forest & Bird. But I wanted to start by telling you why I do, why I find it imperative that every one should have a garden, that feeds them, body and soul.

Because that’s where it started for me, with one small, liberating idea. I had bought a house. I thought, “I can make a compost heap”. I could have made a compost heap anywhere. I wanted to do it here.

And so it goes, from micro to macro level, from local to global. A garden, for the ages, needs a climate in which it can grow.

A new climate needs new economics: it is growth that must stop, for conservation, of which emissions are only one part.

It makes no sense to be kind to nature, at home in your back yard, and not to people too, out in the real world.

In the end, what makes a productive healthy garden makes a productive healthy world.

An environmentalist is just a gardener, on a global scale.

16 August 2011

In an early episode of Eat Pray Love (about “one woman’s search for everything” at the age of … 35) the author takes her question (only one question is allowed) to a Balinese medicine man. He draws her a picture:

“It was an androgynous human figure, standing up, hands clasped in prayer. But this figure had four legs, and no head. Where the head should have been, there was only a wild foliage of ferns and flowers. There was a small, smiling face drawn over the heart.”

Stay grounded, he tells her, think less, and look at the world through your heart.

Liz Gilbert is trying to fix her life, not design a garden. But the advice, I’m beginning to think, is the same.

Stay grounded. The germ of this garden was earthy enough, a single idea. “I can make a compost heap.”

Lists followed. Herbs, vegetables, fruit — food, sustenance — sustainability. Rules. Perennials with an average height of 80cm. “I can plant trees.” A thicket of them filled my head.

Aspirations, above all, nothing ordinary.

It was intellect-driven. Think less. But, as anyone who has ever practised yoga knows, sometimes the best — the only — way to shut the mind up is to distract it, give it something else to do, something focused and repetitive, like a mantra or the yoga postures.

I have tried and tried, and tried again, and failed, to master yoga.

But time and again, I take my tiredness and my troubles out into the garden, fill my head with flowers and foliage, and watch them fall away.

Look at the world through your heart. Last weekend, I stood at vantage points and realised: this is working. One day, in the not too distant future, each of these bits of the garden will be a flower-strewn room. And, dreamed and felt, this is how the world would be, smiling through my heart …

Readers might be forgiven for thinking that I spend my leisure hours wandering round in a grubby-fingered sunlit haze.

The fingers part is true.

The truth is, I spend many hours wondering WHY it has to be so hard, goddammit, every day and ALL THE TIME? This greedy garden. Weekly, or thereabouts, I trundle home with an empty wallet and a carload of saplings, hedge plants, old roses, perennials, mushroom compost, sheep pellets, pea straw, warratahs, wire, etcetera, ad infinitum.

I know their fate: swallowed by the space and then, later, the weeds, battered by the weather.

And yet … when, in some such hour, battling to salvage rocky weed-choked ground, I turn on my spade to find thousands upon thousands of pink-cheeked crabapple blossom faces nodding at me happily, or late afternoon sunlight, shafting across a tangle of sweet peas and summer meals in the vegetable garden, or tame young Mrs Blackbird, who is raising her babies in the sycamore tree, hopping down to forage right beside and between my feet — that is all the answer I am likely to get, or need.

2008