Mycorrhiza

Memoirs of a disconnected banshee

The season is turning, like a speeding car hitting the median strip and flipping across four lanes of on-coming traffic. This week alone, the sun has fought the cold air to burn my cheek one day and the next, I’ve been forced in to sit by the fire, while the waves have raged against the sea wall across the road. This is when I start to feel the treacle in my muscles. The height of my shoulders. The need to stare endlessly into space. The leaves are starting to fall to the ground and as slow as things might appear to anyone looking in on my life, time is bending in on itself for me. It’s not yet October and there are Christmas goods in the Co-op. People are starting to say “where has the year gone?” As if there has been something especially breakneck about the last nine months.

I’ve been flirting with meditation. I listen to the soothing voice of Tara Brach, an advocate of radical acceptance. “Can I be with this?” She urges me to ask myself. “Can I say ‘yes’ to this?” Can I say ‘yes’ to this feeling of needing the world to stop while it birls around me? Can I say ‘yes’ to the resistance I feel in my shoulders, who are prone to hunching? “What is it that needs tending?” She asks. All I know is that there is stiffness and tightness where I long for ease and levity. I should do yoga, I think, coming up with another solution to a problem, instead of just sitting with it and letting it move through me. And I won’t do any yoga. I know that about myself just now.

You are here with me this week, Herbie and Pete. My boys, my boys. I have been carrying about your little box of ashes in its velvet bag with the for-get-me-nots embroidered on it. Right now, it’s sitting on the side table just to my right. I have been holding it against me as I soak tv into my eyes. I am thinking about the little knitted blankets that I have in your memory box and how I held them against my body for weeks after you died. I held them against my face. I carried them in the pockets of my dressing gown. I can’t take you with me into most places like this. Filled to the brim with sorrow and fury. It takes up too much space in me and I can’t get anything else done. This needs tended to now, it would seem. This sorrow and this fury. It’s busting at my seams.

I can’t be doing with intrusions from the made up world that pretends to be the real one. Things. Being asked of me. Demands and burdens, scraping around at the bottom of my empty tank. A curious paradox to be at the same time empty and full up. Like, if you brush against me, I might just burst. But if you ask me for something, I’ll turn my pockets inside out.

And so, I’m having a much needed week off work and have spent much of it reading The Ghost Lake by Wendy Pratt. It’s been at the side of my bed, in poll position on top of a pile of books that sits on a slightly squashed cardboard box that functions as my ersatz bedside table. Every morning, for some weeks now, I’ve been balancing my cup of tea on it. I’ve even carried it with me with good intentions that didn’t materialise. This is a common feature of my life. Wanting to get round to things and just not doing them. Please celebrate with me, then, that I have read a book.

I am a middle aged woman who likes to write about nature. I live in a rural village where inequalities are exacerbated - if not driven - by the impacts of tourism and land ownership. I walk an old dog. My only children died on the day they were born. Every where I go, I see them and I search for myself. In many ways, this book feels like it was written specifically for me. This is a precious rarity, though I’m glad to say there is now a growing body of writing in which I can see some of my own stories’ reflections. Even if none of these things is true for you, you should read this book to hear a universal human story about our need for belonging and how connecting with the land and all the creatures it sustains, past and present, can bring us to somewhere that feels like home.

It was mostly bright but cold today. I walked along the woodland path, past the hawthorns and the brambles, alongside the airstrip and over the golf course to Stravanan Bay. I haven’t been there in a long time, now that this is too far for my very old dog and my other getting on dog to walk with me and I haven’t devoted much time to walking by myself, if any. I popped the little box of ashes in my bag, wrapped up warm and found some padded insoles for my too-big wellies. Off I scuffed, through the first of the crispy fallen leaves, looking out at the yellow fields of stubble and across the bay where the tide was half-way out. There are some new gates and signage along the way. Warnings to keep dogs on leads in the airstrip and liability waivers should you get struck by a golf ball. New way markers to keep walkers from straggling across the greens. It made me wonder if there had indeed been an incident, which made me think of my Uncle Peter who was hit in the chest by a golf ball and, at first, mistook this as the cause of the chest pains he was feeling due to asbestosis.

I sat on a little tussock in the dunes for half an hour or so, looking out at Arran’s dark and looming body of the Sleeping Warrior. The island’s profile is magnificent from Stravanan on a clear day like today. Back-lit by the sun and draped with a light layer of fluffy cotton wool cloud, just along the highest of its peaks. I took this photo seven years ago, before Jessie developed the limp in her back leg and she could have walked with me to the moon and back and still demanded more. Nonetheless, these hills have a different perspective on time and seven years will be nothing to them. They remain in place, having watched sixty million years come and go. We are but a blink of their eyes. There is something comforting to me about that, when I am dizzy with the world spinning around me. I am stilled just by sitting under the gaze of their endurance.

I would like to thank Wendy Pratt for writing her book. For naming so many of the feelings that have also passed through me and for reminding me that I am nourished by walking to places like Stravanan Bay and by putting my observations about doing that into words on a page. This is the way that the mycorrhiza grows, leaving us all feeling more connected.