The complexity, the complexity
The nuance and the difficulties of life. Sometimes, regardless of the plans you have made and the promises you have half-granted yourself, these all conspire to come against you. It has been a long time since I stepped into this virtual space; I am reaching up to brush down the old cobwebs (the new can stay), to lift the dust covers off the furniture, to throw the shutters open to the light. We are past Midsummer, into the Buck Moon and Lughnasadh is only a week away.
This is the mother season of the year, the wheel has turned from the fertility of spring to the abundance of summer. Mothering comes in all different forms: you can mother a garden, a pet, a friend, a lover, a child that’s yours or no, a parent and yourself. For the last seven months, I have had to mother the latter. I am now the other side of a diagnosis, knowing what I’m dealing with, how to deal with it and with the right medications to bring the condition under control. It won’t ever be gone, but it will no longer restrict my days, my movement, my life, in quite the way it has.
It feels like a blessing! A rebirth! A relief of the utmost kind!
Wonky pots, made with one hand and a substantial amount of cursing.
Which you can probably see from the pots above: lots of new life with the leaves, lots of springing green. I had a brief brush with pottery several years ago, so taking up clay again was like greeting an old friend. My condition prevents me from throwing pots at the moment, but I love the way clay comes to life, dictates its own shape and form, even as you are just playing with it. And, while needlefelting was off the cards (completely, so far off the cards, it had fallen off the table), I could pinch pot and shape and coil and form this soggy sticky medium with one hand to my heart’s content.
To have found another creative outlet has been a real treat. The house is rapidly filling with strange beasts, little worlds and pots with no purpose other than to make me smile.
The apple tree tunnel at Morville Dower House garden
I have also, with careful pain management, been able to continue volunteering at the Dower House in Morville. If you have never heard of this, I heartily recommend reading The Morville Hours, a jewel of a book combining history, gardening, geology, memoir and social connections. I read it first fifteen years ago, and have reread it faithfully every year since, my copy is battered and dog eared and well loved, marked with time and use. The author, Katherine Swift, divides the year into the hours of a medieval day, based on those glorious illuminated books of hours that you see in places like the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Given my love of the book, it was not surprising that I leapt at the chance to volunteer in the garden I had read so much about.
There is a particular aura to this place, everyone remarks on it, and that’s not just down to its location in a quiet corner of Shropshire. Something comes over you in that garden, a peace that settles your mind, that comforts. A lot of this is down to Katherine’s attention to detail and careful planting. The apple tunnel you can see above (my photos do not do it justice) has been planted with species that blossom in sequence so that, for the whole of spring, the tunnel is in blossom. It is all kinds of wonderful.
Castlerigg stone circle, the Lake District
In June, we visited the Lake District, one of my favourite places in the whole world. I haven’t been for so many years now: the grandparents we stayed with are long passed and I can no longer remember the name of the farm we stayed at, where the Highland cattle were gently looming bulks in the mist and the fresh eggs had orange yolks from hens that freely pucked around our ankles. My husband had never been, so this was a proper treat for him. He was as taken with the scenery as I’d hoped.
My audio book at the time of the holiday, in a moment of serendipity, was Rural by Rebecca Smith, a writer who grew up in Cumbria with her parents in a tied cottage on a country estate. This is a fascinating exploration of what it means to be ‘local’ in a rural context, the industries that have shaped the countryside, the challenges and the particular freedoms that come from being a child in the wild. What it means to be poor, to be reliant on tourism, to see your village dwindle to a handful of habitants in a sea of second homes as the shops, the schools and the farms close down around you. Although I grew up rurally, and brought my son up in the tiny village, things have changed considerable since then, and this was a fascinating ready. It added a new level of seeing and experiencing to the holiday.
Wordsworth’s Cottage, Grasmere. Beautiful, thoughtfully put together, loved it.
So what now for Dragons Make A Landscape? Now I am on the Good Drugs from rheumatology and the pain is receding, I am needle felting once again; this time a commission for dragon eggs! This is such a lovely project, creating three eggs in a ceramic nest. I love the mutli-media aspect of it, bringing together my two creative ‘arms’ and can’t wait to put the images up here when they are done.
I will sign off for now. The heat is blessed down and rain is predicted this weekend. It’s been so dry here - no decent rain since April - and the allotment is suffering for it. The rain will enliven everything, refresh the earth and properly nourish what has been struggling along this summer.
Whatever this weekend brings for you, I hope it contains at least one thing that brings you quiet joy. Happy Lughnasadh.
