Point purple fingers right at you.

Trace your shoulders. Deepening tan

Played by sunlight’s dappled dance.

In December, the woods were empty.

Gutted by cold. Nothing but obvious routes:

Through. Just get through. In July,

It’s crowded, secret doors behind

Each twist of vine. Hidden worlds.

The quiet breath of a shaded pool.

Time has no brakes. The lilac blooms

For weeks. Her fragrance asks you things.

Beyond all the floundering green,

It’s brighter and brighter still with heat.

Soak your salted body in water.

Confront the lilac, breathe her deep.

Leave your shoes on a warm stone.

Pick the unseen path with bare feet.

In a few weeks, when your soles have hardened,

Tell me everything you’ve seen.

Solstice passes. We sail through the remnants of July and into August on a pulse of Solar energy. As it does every year around this time, life feels intensified. Days of sustained focus and desk-based challenge shift into extended social evenings lit by long dusks. Each weekend asks to be made the most of.

I take the scraps of my endurance each Friday and put it into text messages, pack it in bags, and load it onto trains. I walk it along coast paths and dive it into salt water. Take what you can of the Sun, whilst you can; that’s the MO. Yes comes easy. The chance of burnout feels lower with increased levels of solar radiation.

In the last week of July, I stay with friends I’ve known for most of my life, in a creamy yellow, breezeblock imitation castle in the Northeast of Sicily. I’m pouring Aperol. It’s my turn to bring drinks to the pool.

‘Scusate, signorina?’

A male voice behind me makes me spin. The shrieks and giggles that have bounced through our villa all week are entirely female. Momentarily bewildered, I take in the sun-browned face; bright eyes and aquiline nose. Curls poke out of a black chef’s skull cap - it’s the chef we’ve hired for our last meal together on the island. But it’s his his sous chef, Bruna, who gets all of my admiration.

Her bright red lipstick. Her neat black apron and dress combination. The way that both remain inerrant as she works, despite the relentless heat within our rental villa (read: crenellated clay oven). She’s unflappable, cool, despite us martyring her to the ancient air con system. These days, I glamorise female expertise. And I hold my friends responsible for that.

They can do anything they want. They try on different timelines like sundresses, dwelling on their dreams until they can dwell in them. We sit by the pool, smoke Vogues and spend hours turning over recent developments for each individual. It’s all unfolding quickly. New partners, jobs, cities, visa application approvals. They’re striking out alone, either holding freshly broken hearts together with bare hands, or holding back proposals from devoted boyfriends whilst they embark on career shifts and travel plans.

Summer’s a liminal space; the veil is thin around Solstice. Psychic boundaries can be expanded. Waysigns are easier to spot. The name for Solstice - Litha - means “gentle” or “navigable.” It was first seen in De Temporum Ratione, written by the monk Bede. It’s believed the name comes from the calm mid-July breezes that smoothed the sea. Maybe it’s these conditions that lend themselves to my friends’ deft, necessary navigation manoeuvres.

Maybe it’s just us, reaching 30, becoming increasingly sovereign; able to explore, define and assert the core of of ourselves. Our teenage years were fuelled by the astonishingly self-corrupting force of our collective girlhood. There were parties, boys and drugs. It was a years-long crusade of play and confusion. On the various journeys undertaken during our twenties, together and solo by turns, most of the territories of our hearts were reclaimed. Here, now, together, finally, we’ve arrived at adult womanhood; real, hard-earned and rewarding. It’s something to celebrate.

For all our sovereignty, though, we are composite pictures. And the frame isn’t just populated by friends and loves. Others say that the name “Litha” is of Xhosa origin, and means “to illuminate” or “to shine brightly,” keeping with themes of sun worship and fire. Fire’s a big theme of the 2026 season, and we’re implicated.

The reason I spun so wildly when I heard chef Guiseppe behind me is because my pulse was already clanging in my ears. I was standing at the back window of the villa, and had smelled the acridity of windblown smoke through the flyscreen. Alarms were going off in my brain, which had its most tender years of development in a country that was marked by fire. Decades later, the mark is spreading across the world.

The sun’s at it’s zenith and my friends are casting increasingly impressive shadows. But I have the sense that the solar torch beaming on us is also illuminating our responsibility. Recognising the mark that you leave is part of what it means to be mature.

My friends have always, lovingly and eye-rollingly, known me to be the eco-crusader of the group. Miss Environmental Justice, MRes. It’s no surprise to them that when one of the girls describes her ‘two weeks on, two weeks off’ work situation on a Western Australian mine, I am still sensing the smoke’s acridity in my nose. ‘Sold your soul to the Devil, then,’ I murmur, attempting to keep it light, teasing.

Her dark blue eyes have a glitter that is mostly all hilarity, and at times, is terrifyingly hard. But using a working holiday visa to administrate some Bauxite mine out in Pilbara is more cursed than the usual rite of passage; working in a Perth boozer, handing old bar flies cold bottles of Cooper’s Pales with pretty shellacked nails and collecting the tips. I can see why she wouldn't want to do the latter, but can't help myself from reminding her about of the environmental cost. No matter how good the mullets and grease-smudged biceps are on the mining site. I wish I could.

She takes it well.

‘Ha.’ Lights her Vogue slim and takes a worldly drag. ‘Babe, I’ve met the Devil on multiple occasions. We used to fuck.’

There are knowing cackles. Her appalling taste and quick, self-deprecating humour have brought the group endless entertainment over the years.

‘This is much more sensible.’ She looks over her sunglasses at me, lying down on the poolside tiles by her feet. ‘He’s paying me this time. Very. Well.’

Approving grins are followed by a unanimous return to poolside reading. Abashed, I turn back to face the sky, which is fading from blue into a steamy white. Pyrocumulus clouds are forming above us. Heat is rising from the distant - or nearby, I don’t know - wildfire, lifting water vapour from the air and the olive groves or pine forests it’s scorching. As it ascends, the vapour cools and condenses. I watch the wisps converge like dancers.

We have exciting ideas about how we want to spend our next handful of our childfree, young, independent years. The 21st Century paradox is that we know these self-fulfilling pursuits usually cost the Earth.

We all flew out to Sicily and will fly home again. The lack of potable tap water here, combined with heatwave temperatures, sees endless empty plastic bottles spilling over from our recycling bin. Our huge turquoise pool - the water sun-warmed past a refreshing temperature - is a graveyard for hoverflies, wasps and bees. The wisteria that tumbles from the balcony down towards the pool’s rim seems to deposit them into the water, to be asphyxiated by chlorine. And when I go inside to check my phone for the latest updates to wildfire satellite maps, my shoulder nudges against a huge, hundreds-of-years-old oil painting of the castillo’s family tree. The painting wobbles. The ancestors seem unsettled by our presence amidst the unfolding ecological dramas on their land.

To live well is to live in honour of our agreement with the Earth: we’re here, in these bodies, as a result of Hers. Numbing ourselves to the reality of our world’s challenges, our accountability for them, is a denial of that agreement. But I have no idea how to reconcile my long, potentially harmful shadow with the achy, hungry desire to travel, live widely, and know all of Her landscapes as well as I can.

Later, on the phone on a Sicilian beach, with horribly intermittent signal, I’m offered a new job that will start in the Autumn. So I guess I can count myself amongst the ranks of my dauntless, endlessly re-invented friends. The role will be teaching Regenerative Horticulture at a small, rural college dedicated to education for sustainable futures. I’ll put travel plans on pause for it, but it’ll be it’s own kind of adventure.

The maps we use to find ourselves needs regularly updating; all maps go quickly out of date. My map will scale down. It’ll be familiar soil under my fingernails for a while. That’ll be a challenge, but it’s alright. The wind is both the enabler of movement and the messenger. It carries warnings and invitations; word from distant shores, heat rising from a changing landscape, laughter and voices of the people we love. Even just by facing the wind and remaining still, you can be changed by what it tells you.

My current read contains a quote: ‘to feel safe, a Falcon must always have her face to the wind.’ I think I understand her, feeling safest when she’s able to pick up on signals sent back towards her from unknown territory. They might be sent as smoke on a southerly breeze, or the scent of lilac. I’ll keep turning to face it, inhaling deeply.

But it’s still deep summer, and I’m not done with all the easy motion just yet. I want to take the wind’s navigational cues and move towards the biggest version of my life possible, whilst honouring the Earth and all she enables. Traveller, not tourist. I dont know which mode of travel will get me there, though I have a feeling that walking is a good place to begin.

The terrain is increasingly dried-out and my feet are heat-cracked. They’re toughened for the path. There are still ripe berries on the briars, but I’ll leave them for the birds.

The more you seek me, the more I sustain you.

What am I?

As soon as I got home from the cinema, I curled up on my bed and wept.

No particular girls’ night catastrophe had incited the emotional breakdown. And it wasn’t my disappointment that a certain sequel to a girlhood classic was objectively terrible. Beyond the bad dialogue, weird editing and pointless romance, I’d hated the movie’s central assumption: that I, the viewer, believe in a culture of pointless materialist pursuit.

Three Diet Coke product placements in, I was gripped by the urge to run out of the cinema, away from the endless backlit ads of the city centre and all the incessant selling, and not stop until my body was submerged naked in the dark mumble of a stream somewhere in the hills.

The door I want to kick down and run past, however, feels dead-bolted by the monetisation of our human search instinct. We're presented with impossible future visions of ourselves: better dressed, prettier and thinner all the time. I want to stop buying in, very badly, but it's in my nature to resource myself and these lies are presented as necessary resources. Even if the search is a depleting one, which starves everything except the companies who’s names are on the labels and tags I should aspire to decorate body and home with.

Days after the tears, and still desperate for respite from this system and its visual stimuli - all its screens and ads - we drove to some sea cliffs a couple of hours away. The coastline we chose was special. Its laminated sediment layers contain fossils of the marine reptiles that swam in Jurassic seas 145 million years ago. We traversed mud-slicked, sea-lapped limestone pavements and pebbled shoreline. Our hands quickly became filthy. We were caked with sludgy dark clay up to our knees. Our pockets filled with treasures from another world - another version of the planet - where Coca Cola and botox didn’t exist.

Even in the windswept outdoors, away from digital or physical shopfronts, it seemed like the human dopamine-driven reward system was still in command. By 10am, the beach was dotted with people in high-kneed welly boots with backpacks and small spades, all searching with a marketplace frenzy. Or that’s what it looked like.

In reality, as we combed the clay, wonder, imagination, intrigue and excitement all re-inflated what had been depleted in my psyche by prescriptive, algorithm-fuelled marketing. We collected fossilised ammonite shells that glinted with iron pyrite, belemnites (squid-like creatures) and beach pebbles with a jumble of crinoids inside (ancestors of the starfish), which looked like constellations encased in stone. Geologic time was collapsing. In our hands, the rich picture of life on the planet took ribbed and spiralled shape.

We were like sculptural artists searching in clay or bronze for a hidden form, or writers who seeking meaning in a string of words. The matter in our hands was coming to life as the story revealed itself. It was participatory, uncertain, creative searching. It required focus and full body engagement in the present. It nourished our spirits as it encouraged us on.

The constant drive to find and obtain is an undeniable part of human cognitive architecture. Joshua Schrei of the Emerald podcast once posited that our unsettled urge to seek began with fire. That in the Greek myth, Prometheus is the one responsible for bringing fire to humans, cursing us to think ahead of ourselves. Our minds forever resist stillness, thanks to the endlessly restless urge to gather more fuel for our fires, lest they burn out. It’s in Prometheus’ name, which ‘next thought.’

This forethought has also been an undeniable gift - it enabled our survival until now. Preparedness, gathering resources and moving around in order to do so precipitated meeting other groups and expanding as a species. And, even when it comes to modern ways to engage the survival instinct of foraging and gathering, good and bad are fuzzy and subjective. Marketplaces aren’t evil all the way through - nor even, is the fashion industry - and shopping isn’t always vacuous. However, modernity has imposed inane quarry on our hominid tendencies, like anti-aging skincare and labubus. Some of these gathering efforts feel more sane than others. Fossil-hunting is one of those.

It came with the thrill of narrowly avoiding being caught out by the tide. It prompted interactions with strangers, like the three men with a spliff between them, who I joined in admiring an ammonite shell as big as a hubcap cemented in stone. Or the other, better equipped folks who showed us their finds and gave us expert-level advice on where to look for similar treasures, and how. It brought a sense of co-operation rather than competition. Of playing together. Of being amongst children and adults as we uncovered the products of millennia of interaction between organic life and geologic process, dedicating time and effort towards finding something to marvel at for marvelling’s sake and little else.

Back in the car, footwells filling with clods of steel-grey clay, I found myself equipped to return to the city with a simple criteria that might guide the hominid forager’s impulse towards this - the right kind of searching:

• Will this thing I seek bring me wonder?

• Will I be able to share it with others?

• Am I retrieving it out of a sense of competition, or co-operation with those around me?

It’s not a vow to resist all purchasing instinct from here on out. One of the myriad forces acting on my animal body is capitalism, and it’s powerful. But these fossil-hunting prerequisites might help circumvent any more materialist burnout.

It might help me to focus my search on what gives life meaning and form, and to search in a way that sustains, rather than starves.

April has ended and people are out remembering what they are.

In the long grass, bare legs and handlebars.

In the allotment, blossom drops, Spring hands itself in;

Summer comes in on the hoverfly’s wing.

Sunlit logs and hidden benches speak

Of gardeners at pause, who’s need

After digging and planting and soaking new seed

Is to stop. To rest and watch

From bough-shaded seats,

The clover humming their feet.

Each hand-sawn log and pallet

Waits for them.

Purposefully placed

To watch sunlight and sugar,

Sweetly exchanged.

May dances on, and

the soil-dusted hands,

Brushed against weary legs

Are also life. Hungry for itself again.

“You can age a new housing development based on how dead its trees are.”

I’m walking around a community garden with a group of trainee orchard managers and an entomologist. I’ve handed over teaching to the bug and biodiversity scientist for the afternoon, and he points out a couple of dying fruit trees. The group is asked to diagnose the issue and decides that they were likely planted at a bad time of year and not watered enough.

The bare limbs glare from a surrounding sea of rustling greens and creamy fruit blossom. Overall, the evidence of good care in this space is impressive, but this group of trainees needs to know about malpractice. And, to orchardists, abandoning a newly planted tree to fend for itself in the first couple of years after planting is malpractice.

New fruit trees need about 20–30 litres of water per tree, once or twice a week during the first two spring and summer seasons after planting, to help them establish their roots. In hot, dry weather or poor soil conditions, this need increases to every few days.

He invented the personal idiom about new-builds and their often badly-managed quota of greenery because, in his surveying work, he’s seeing well-intended nature policies mandated for planners and developers. A 10% increase in habitat value for construction developments, for example. But he's seeing them fail, because they don’t mandate care.

I feel a lurch as understanding and guilt collide in my stomach - I usually work in the environmental science policy sector. And from within it, I’m seeing major research and development programmes underway to create inventories of England’s natural assets and provide evidence on how they support our society and economy. Their aim is to boost investment in nature recovery initiatives - like urban planting on new developments. This is good, obviously. But they quantify costs and prescribe such investments by assessing the contribution of England's ecosystems, focusing on water security, food security, and health.

The focus of this approach is squarely on what nature does for people, not the other way around.

Regularly used terms within this space, like ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services,’ are all part of a rhetoric of nature as critical infrastructure. And this ignores is the fact that human hands are also critical for rebuilding functioning ecologies in a landscape that has long-since asked for care.

Take woodlands. Woodland management began in this country in the Neolithic period. People used the forests for timber, and to ensure perpetual harvests of timber products, they lived in and participated deeply in their woodland ecosystems. In medieval times, forests were highly managed, too. Often by local communities via communal ‘wood-pasture’ systems, which likely encouraged fruit tree growth and saw the first orchards emerge at our woodland edges.

For hundreds of years, having people live within woodland areas, and maintain them as resources, often prevented the encroachment of agricultural land and larger scale clearing of forests.

Fast forward over hundreds of years of enclosure - land privatisation and the disconnection of communities from land-based skills, knowledge and practice - and the United Kingdom is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. We rank in the bottom 10% globally. Most of our ecosystems are classed from ‘vulnerable’ to ‘critically endangered.’

The general public has been disenfranchised from our environments. Only 8% of England remains as open access land, and landwork has become a wildly under-resourced industry. There aren’t nearly enough people with the knowledge, time and financial resources or even the access to look after and recover a depleted landscape that desperately needs stewards.

In fact, the scale of ignorance about nature in this countryy is staggering. We have over 70,000 species, but most adults can name and recognise just a few dozen. And the average person's familiarity with local biodiversity is decreasing as wildlife abundance declines.

If policy-level nature recovery solutions are ever going to work, we need a population that is equipped with the education and tools to look after their environment, not just continue to expect that it should provide them with benefits.

The natural capital approach is well-intended. It sets out the evidence on what nature does for us and the extent to which we depend on it for a reason - to turn the heads of MPs who think in terms of investment and risk, speaking in a language that they understand in order to prompt some kind of action to protect what we still have, and encourage recovery of depleted natural assets.

But if we speak solely in this language, we perpetuate one of the biggest causes of the crisis; disconnection from an earthly education.

The group moves on through the orchard to find its tiniest managers. I stare into a glass tube stoppered with tissue. With a hand lens over one eye, I admire the batman hoverfly inside. It buzzes and scuttles inside the tube, desperate for the lilac blossoms beyond the glass that entice its looping hover this time of year. The entomologist goes on.

He talks about John Little, a horticulturalist and campaigner who is crusading for investment in biodiverse gardening and up-skilling the gardeners who can realise the ecological potential of public spaces. Little’s campaign, Care not Capital is creating noise for good jobs in public spaces, to boost biodiversity using public money.

I let the hoverfly go and consider the fact that I’d be out educating community growers and managing orchards every day if I knew how to make a living from it. But for my teaching with the group in the orchard that day, I’d receive £20. So, instead, I’ve been days for volunteering here and there, with the odd paid session. It’s less and less feasible to do this work in the face of an economic crises, which is ironic - the ‘natural capital’ that buffers communities against food insecurity and other risks depends on this work.

Our way of getting thriving nature back into communities is not resilient. It depends on the goodwill, motivation and determination of individuals to keep showing up even when financial pressures are mounting and they have other things to do. And I know that initiatives exist, but they need to be better supported and more systematic. Ad hoc council or lottery or charity-led funding for projects here and there isn’t enough.

None of this is an argument against re-wilding, but for embedding an earthly education and investment in land care industries - particularly in urban settings - and for raising awareness of our role and responsibility in the co-creation of healthy nature. Allotments and community gardens are the most biodiverse land use type in this country, and people made them that way.

How? By asking a a question of themselves every time they enter: ‘what is my work here?’

This is the question May requires us to ask, as it begins in a green eruption of life. To walk outside on the first weekend of May is to walk into an embrace. Everything is alive, inviting us to sense and taste and witness and hold it.

It is a time of eros; life recognising and desiring itself. How will we participate in the dance?

In that urban garden that day, and in the allotments nearer to my home in the day's following, my eye is drawn to something I'd never given much thought to in the past, and I feel a little imbalanced for it. It's the chairs.

I must be used to the crazed cognitive dissonance that comes with knowing how insane and unsurviveable our human lifeways are, and still living in the city - a hotbed of consumption and disconnection. When I see something so simple and sane as chairs set out by gardeners, I'm rocked.

I’m moved because what I see is a pledge: a commitment to work, set out in the furniture awaiting rest that will be willingly earnt. I see pride in the responsibility and a will to enjoy the work. I see people promising to hold the human side of life’s embrace.

A long way away, on the Pacific North Coast of the United States, Indigenous communities have a phrase - ‘low on the totem pole’ - which has been more widely adopted and used as an idiom when people are indicating something or someone of low significance. What they are misappropriating from the Salish tribes, to whom Totems are sacred, is that the most important carving at the bottom of a Totem pole supports the rest of the Totems.

The responsibility and weight it bears gives it significance.

This is the ideology I want us to re-adopt in British society. That we earn our significance as a species by supporting all the others. But we don’t need to take it from Salish tribal thought. We have our own stories on the importance of responsibility, and funnily enough, they emerge this time of year.

On May Day weekend: Beltane.

The story I’m thinking of is one about an ancient ritual, which carries with it an understanding of the responsibility for tending to life, trust in ourselves to do so, and trust in a community that is mutually supportive of the endeavour. This is the ritual of extinguishing of the hearth fire in each home.

Families would do this before gathering around a new, large communal fire for Beltane celebrations. At the end of the night, they would each take a small ember from the communal fire, and carry it carefully home to relight their own hearths.

By relighting every hearth from one central, sacred source, households were symbolically connected and mutually protected. The ritual ensured all families were united under the same fire.

Only as a result of this shared flame would each individual home be kept warm and bright for the coming year.

I think about the flame-bearers, walking through a landscape that is has been made newly and strangely dark with just one blaze behind them. A small, precious thing burning in their hands.

I see the big, “bright fire” of Beltane as the ultimate symbol of eros. Fire’s alchemy represents the immense life-giving, energetic exchange playing out in nature at this time of year. The fire bearers must trust that just one small part of that burning - the part that they can nurture - will warm their families for months to come.

They have a role to play in the perpetuation of life’s exchange. So they must trust that by their hand, they can keep the flame going. That they won’t lose their footing in the dark - the greater communal burn behind them provides a little guidance.

The practice of hearth re-lighting might have ceased. But I see the great eruption of lilac and fruit blossom, of lurid beech and lime leaves and drifts of wildflowers, of birdsong and sunbeams and scented breezes as our communal Beltane fires. They provide reassurance of life’s relentless blaze, despite the darkened hills around us.

And the ritual of nurturing just one small ember represents our obligation to steward the life that we can manage to with our hands.

As summers green tendrils brush over our shoulders, I hope we feel it as an invitation. I hope that we remember that participating in the exchange is both the task and the reward. I hope that we trust ourselves to know how to dance.

Question: Is this the work of an angry deity?

Every other tree seemed to be falling, or was about to go down. I stepped outside and walked round the back of the house to look out over the poplar plantation two fields away. Stiff giants were crashing down in slow motion. The clouds behind them were still soft with morning.

Four acacia trees that had risen proud of the bank above the road which cuts past our house were collapsed in an explosion of newly-blossomed golden wattle. They had severed the electricity line that hung between our house and the nearest telegraph pole as they went down. We were power-less, us and 1000 other houses in the region.

Judging by the weary-eyed young men driving the blue vans of the national energy company, who passed every half an hour or so, we’d be without it for a while. They had nodded at us with a grim, respectful compassion, eyeing our chainsaws, hand saws and rope and the rain dripping off our jackets.

We hadn’t slept for the noise of the storm the night before, but their set jaws and darkened eyes told of mornings that came round quicker than ours.

The wind had woken us up about an hour after we went up to bed on the first night of my visit to my parents. Their house is made from old, thick torchis (clay, lime and sand) held by a skeleton of heavy wooden posts and beams, reinforced by concrete in more recent decades. It was at no risk of being windblown, beyond its ancient roof tiles, which are held only in good faith by slotting into each other.

But the wind came charging up from the south west. A low rumble announced each new gust approaching, like some battalion clashing its swords and shields in distant warning. Then, it would hit with a bang that was more felt than heard. It whipped around the house a few times upon each impact, shrieking and stress-testing the shutters as it tried to get into and under every surface it met.

It never found whatever it was looking for and, with howling desperation, raced on. I lay in bed listening to each barrage and wondered about the horses I’d seen standing in their fields as we’d driven home from the airport. Their hips had been tilted as they relaxed a hind leg and stared off into the dark. How would they be sheltering? And the owls that had ghosted over the road ahead, twice?

The wind makes animals of us. In 100km/h gusts, you can think of nothing else, nerves trained too tightly to threat.

Of course, wind and rain are meteorological facts, but they possess animacy and agency, too. Animism is the idea that all things, including everything under the banner of ‘nature,’ have an innate aliveness and character. They behave in certain patterns, and they have a spirit that we can interact with.

Whilst not a religion, most human belief systems throughout history - up until the relatively recent rise of monotheistic ideologies and human-centric atheism - have attended to the innate, autonomous characters within their natural world. They named them as gods.

A shutter rattled, desperate to come inside to safety. I remembered that an owl across your path symbolised change on the wing, and must’ve dozed as the wind died in the early hours of morning. When I woke, I walked outside to a land of fallen giants. The roof tiles were rumpled like a blanket.

To identify a local god at work is to recognise the power that your immediate environment possesses.

2. Invoke

Question: Who are they, and why did they come?

So, a stormy spirit was acting on the landscape. They had loosed a ripping force that berserked its way across the region, snapping whole lines of wooden telegraph poles at their ankles. 30 trees had been ripped up from their root plates on our patch alone.

And I was not happy about it.

To drive around was to see the oldest and proudest members of our rural department of France lying cracked or collapsed. My stomach churned at Dad’s innocent field patients, whose limbs buckled and jumped under his chainsaw.

Storm gods are characterised as heavy-handed across various spiritual cosmologies, and one had undeniably made a cruel altar of the landscape. They had walked amongst us with a felling tread, taking by force the offerings that had not been willingly given.

Unfamiliar with Occitanian gods and, without any internet or electricity at home, I did my research in brief snatches. In the car to and from the supermarket, my phone was resurrected grace of the cigarette lighter.

I found that archaeological evidence in the region has pointed Gaulish and Romano-Celtic worship of a storm deity, Taranis.

Coinage, bronze votives from temple hoards and inscriptions on altars depict him as the embodied archetype of Celtic thunder. He’s the namesake for the power of storms, lightning, and other celestial phenomena, like the wind. But, more than his parallel storm gods from other traditions (Norse Thor, Hindu Indra, and Hittite Tarhunna) who share motifs of wielding thunder as a tool for cosmic order and combat, Taranis is a mediator.

He wields atmospheric forces that both devastate and renew the land. His role is emphasised less through epic battles, and more through the cyclical regeneration of nature. His symbol is the wheel - representing his balancing power and the cyclical renewal brought about by an ever-changing sky.

As resentful as I felt towards Taranis, I saw the sense in his stalking around in February 2026. Regional climates and meteorology have been irrevocably altered by rising temperatures and greenhouse gas levels, resulting in weather events of increasing frequency and intensity. Unprecedented rainfall has caused widespread flooding across France, Spain and Portugal. In Portugal, discharges from dams and reservoirs in January alone reached the equivalent of roughly a year of the country's water consumption.

Gale force winds have repeatedly exceeded gusts of 100km/h. The saturated soil couldn’t possibly hold firm to the root plates of windblown trees. People have been injured, killed, and billions of euros worth of damage has been done by falling trees, collapsed bridges and floods.

In our infinitely adaptable human capacity, we will do the usual shrug at the enormity of the mess we’ve made. We’ll call it all a new normal, and tried to go about the daily business of living as best we can. We always do.

Perhaps Taranis’ vindictive sweep is an attempt to make us as uncomfortable as possible and make us move faster towards more harmonious, less ecologically damaging modes of living. Things are wildly imbalanced, so his wheel clatters through, demanding our attention and trying to stir us into action.

And no wonder he has been indiscriminate. To date, we’ve thrown the animate power of celestial phenomena power back in his face, calling this period of climatic rupture the Anthropocene: a period marked by human hands alone.

We assert that these storms are the result of human capacity to shift and disrupt global cycles. Whilst not untrue, our worldview doesn’t recognise nature’s ability to recalibrate, respond and discipline us with its own power and agency.

As a result, we don’t listen or change our ways when it does.

The acacia’s wattle blossom, only just erupted into joyful yellow bloom, had heralded the end of a long winter. Now, giant golden brash piles glowed sickly under the rain and February’s somnolent grey light.

How could we placate him?

3. Appease

Question: how do we give them what they want?

The trees that came down were not accustomed to Taranis’ new calibre of storm. They were older, more brittle and more likely to snap than bend. They were taller, too. Their top-heavy, laden branches acted as massive sails. Or, they were internally decayed. Collapse was only a matter of time.

You could say it was a mercy, then. These were the trees that would sustain the most damage over the wetter, stormier winters to come. We worked solemnly, offering the penitence of our labour and promising to use the fallen giants’ bodies to return some nutrients to the soil.

I wished I’d known the correct prayers and rites for Taranis, which the humans who had more functional relationships with their nature deities had once offered. I didn’t have the fainted clue about the words or songs or which direction to face as I addressed him. But the work we had to do felt like a ritual that honoured his great balancing wheel.

By chipping the brash, we could create mulch that in the warmer months would increase organic matter in the soil, improve aeration and drainage, and encourage biotic activity. All factors that could help to secure stronger, healthier root systems in our remaining trees.

That might’ve been what Taranis was asking for; action to safeguard that which stands a chance of survival what it’s going to face. But there was something more.

As Dad wielded his chainsaw, its plaintive wail was echoed by a partner. Neighbours down the road were clearing their treefall, too. Like most of the landowners in the region, they are vignerons: grape growers and wine makers. They were well equipped with small tractors and trailers that day. When they noticed us piling brash in the roadside verge to haul up to the gate and beyond, back onto our land, they chugged up to help.

Grandfather and grandson waved down from the cab of a gurgling, high-wheeled machine. A car pulled up in the other direction and suddenly 7 people were working together to clear brash off the road.

The felling had wind cut us off from our electronic mechanisms of distraction and comfort. It asked us outside into the immediacy of the real world, and this was the place where our neighbours were. The penitence the storm demanded of us was care, dedication and interaction.

When sunset came at the end of a long day of sawing, hauling and dragging, a few egrets did their ghost dance against the glowing underbellies of rain-swollen clouds. The pressure of the storm had been lifted, like a lid. The world rose up sighing with relief. My skin sang with the cold, damp breeze that lingered - the last touch of Taranis.

I’d cursed the weather for not affording me the chance to rest whilst visiting my parents. It was what I thought I’d needed, and why I’d taken some time off work. But Taranis had forced me to disconnect from the technology that had been so overwhelming in the first place, resting my mind in a cradle of manual labour, fresh air and community. I thanked him for that.

The idea of large-scale, man-made ecological disaster is immobilising, especially when presented as intangible digital media. It prompts apathy and ignorance. Meanwhile, the local gods get louder, begging you to go outside and attend to that which you can touch.

The votive candles they want are the ones you bring to your neighbours when your area gets disconnected from the national grid. The food offerings they need are the coffee and cake for people who come to your garden unbidden, to help clear the debris.

If you are rocked to stillness by the scale of the storms in your world, attend to the animating forces in the landscape. Learn their names. Ask what it is they demand, and listen closely. They’ll tell you where to start.

To dwell is to join with other beings in the ongoing production of the world.
— Tim Ingold, Being Alive (2011)

It has been hard to pick up a pen lately. Not because I’ve lacked the will to write, but because I haven’t had the will to add my voice to the clamour. I found it getting loud in here - here being the internet - and there seemed to be something noble about sitting it all out in silence.

I saw writers I admired discussing integrity as the superior virtue in a world full of applaud-seekers, and I baulked. What if my creative work - published on social media, too - simply adds to the fracas of discontent?

But even in my silence, it was impossible not to engage with stories. Humans are narrative creatures. Stories are how we make sense of the world and our own lives. I wasn’t writing, but I was delving into stories about being alive. Wilderness survival stories crystallise the human work of ‘keeping on keeping on’ into a form that is so intensely distilled as to be utterly thrilling.

Aside from the unforeseen accident or event that kicks them off, the daily reality of wilderness survival is actually surprisingly mundane, and yet, I can’t get enough. It’s addictive and renewing, especially when your own daily ‘keeping on’ gets familiar and dreary, as it does this bleak side of the year. I keep returning to these stories, finding some solace in all the thrilling desolation. Of the formidable characters I encounter up mountainsides or out on sea ice, here are two of my favourites.

Ada Blackjack

Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiaq woman and the sole survivor of an Arctic expedition in the 1920s. She was born in a small village southeast of Nome, Alaska. At 18, she married a dog musher with a gambling habit and had three children. When her husband abandoned her and her only surviving child, Bennett, they walked forty miles to Nome. There, she was forced to put Bennett in an orphanage, because she couldn’t afford his tuberculosis treatment.

In September 1921, Ada was recruited as a seamstress for an ill-fated expedition to Wrangel Island, in the high Arctic Ocean between the Chukchi Sea and East Siberian Sea. Ada, who spoke English and was an excellent seamstress, was seen to be a good fit for the mission, which needed someone to make and repair the team’s thick fur clothing. She had been promised a $50-per-month salary, which would enable her to pay for her son’s tuberculosis treatment and reunite with him.

For this reason, she joined with the understanding that there would be other Iñupiat people on board their boat, The Silver Wave. Later, she found that she was the only Alaska Native and would be the only woman accompanying four men on the expedition. They set off that month.

In early 1922, their ship was stranded on sea ice and a resupply ship failed to arrive for them because of how extensive the ice was. The expedition ran dangerously low on food. In January of 1923, three of the four men on the expedition team left camp to find help and never returned. Ada cared for the remaining man, who was sick with scurvy and thankless towards her care, until he died in June. She was entirely alone except for the company of the expedition cat named Vic. But she was busy. She was an outstanding seamstress and her Iñupiaq upbringing had trained her for life on Arctic ice. In her logbook, she describes the days she spent trapping, picking roots, hauling wood, building a look-out tower, hunting, making her own gorgeous warm clothing (and photographing herself wearing it), and defending her camp from polar bears.

She was rescued by the ship the Donaldson, which arrived months later, in August of 1923. It had come to pick up the expedition team as planned, and found her alone on the sea ice. Ada received a flurry of press attention for her resilience and will to survive, but was never paid the full wages she was promised for her trouble. Except for few hundred dollars she earned for the furs she trapped on Wrangel, Ada received no compensation from the stories and books that she inspired. Thankfully, she did reunite with Bennett, and was able to pay for his tuberculosis treatment. She lived on to 85, before she passed away in 1983.

Maralyn Bailey

Maralyn Bailey was born Maralyn Harrison on 24 April 1941 in Nottingham, England. She grew up in post-war Britain, training as a nurse as a young woman - perhaps gaining the practical medical knowledge, discipline under pressure, and an ability to remain calm during crises that came in handy later in life. She met Maurice Bailey, an engineer and former Royal Navy officer, in the 1960s. They married and settled into a fairly conventional life but grew dissatisfied with routine and material stability. Maurice dreamed of long-distance sailing and Maralyn supported the idea, despite their limited experience. They spent years packing and selling up their lives, learning seamanship, navigation basics, and life on water. In 1972, they left Southampton aboard their 31-foot yacht Auralyn, aiming for New Zealand.

On 4 March 1973, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean near the Galapagos Islands, their yacht was severely damaged when a 39-foot sperm whale struck it. They abandoned the sinking Auralyn, taking to a small rubber life raft and an inflatable dinghy with only minimal supplies. They were adrift for 118 days with no radio, motor, or proper signalling equipment. They survived by collecting rainwater and, when their limited food ran out, catching fish, turtles, seabirds and sharks. They endured storms, exposure, dehydration and saltwater sores, and watched several ships pass without spotting them.

Their survival required not just physical resilience but mental fortitude. For the rest of his life, Maurice continually attested that Maralyn’s optimism and pragmatism were the reasons they were found alive after 1,500km of drifting, when a South Korean fishing vessel found them in June 1973.

The adventure in these stories is the persistent engagement with the raw business of living, including caring for others and co-existing with nature. There is a steady participation that happens in both. It is grim work, but it amounts to survival because of the responsiveness of these tenacious humans to their environments. “We were living so close to the sea that we became part of it, simply living just like some more sea creatures,” Maurice Bailey said, after their rescue.

As an Undergraduate Geography student I was gripped by the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s theories on ‘dwelling’ and ‘dwelling with.’ ‘Dwelling’ means that humans come to know, shape, and belong in the world by living attentively within ongoing relationships. ‘Dwelling with’ deepens this understanding into a commitment to co-creating life alongside others, responding with care as it unfolds.

Living is not the execution of a plan but a process of correspondence.
— Ingold, 2011

‘Dwelling with’ says that our survival depends on the ability to process reality and react with relational awareness and care, even when there is no plan. Ada Blackjack and Maralyn Bailey knew how to ‘dwell with.’

This is not an inherently feminine narrative - there are countless masculine examples of good ‘dwelling with,’ as well as women who do harm to themselves and others in misjudged acts of adventurism. But Ada and Maralyn exhibit something different from the familiar trope of people who deliberately take risks to exhibit mastery over inhospitable terrain, and that’s care.

It’s hard to look after others when you’re in harms way, no matter how impressive your mountaineering resume is. And the will to care for others is arguably what kept these two women keeping on.

Type the words ‘adventure’ and ‘survival’ into Google and you’ll pretty quickly see Bear Grylls’ smirking at you through a weather-beaten squint. A big culprit of continuously and willingly encountering discomfort and pseudo-danger for the sole purpose of being lauded as TV’s manliest man.

The toxic masculine trope is of someone who sets out to get closer to life and, grace of several unfortunate events and/or bad ‘dwelling with’ responses, falls into life-threatening situations. It makes for great storytelling, too: Chris McCandless gets a pretty bad rap here, but I find it hard not to romanticise his urge to just walk away from it all. Aron Ralston of ‘127 hours’ fame gets more kudos, possibly because of the actual survival thing, or the fact that he’s an extremely accomplished mountaineer outside of that one gritty solo foray in field medicine.

Blair Braverman discusses this with Sarah Marshall on an episode of You’re Wrong About that I highly recommend. As an adventurer, survival keynote speaker, correspondent and novelist (dream career alert!), she’s well-placed to discuss the psychology behind his misadventures.

She describes the ‘heuristic traps’ that Aron falls into, which I’m sure Bear Grylls has also been unable to avoid. These are bad decision-making habits that lead to danger in high-risk environments, and they’re absolutely not conducive to the ‘dwelling with’ process.

• Familiarity: Becoming complacent in a well-known area and ignoring current risks or changing conditions because past trips were fine.

• Social Proof/Facilitation: Assuming an activity is safe because other people are doing it.

• Acceptance/Conformity: Engaging in riskier behaviour to gain approval or fit in with the group.

• Commitment/Consistency: The determination to reach a pre-determined goal despite deteriorating conditions, a phenomenon sometimes called “summit fever.”

The last one - the commitment trap - makes it harder to imagine not seeing the thing through than backing out. Take our TV star: the audience expects he’ll do it, and he expects he’ll do it. But Mr Grylls, I’m sure there are alternatives? A man with your sponsorship levels surely had access to some water purifying tablets - shall we put the yak’s eyeball down this time?

To be fair to Mr Grylls, people in wilderness survival situations have to do gross things. Made easier, apparently, by the delirium and desperation. Maralyn and Maurice Bailey ate seabird fish-vomit (sorry). But they also surprise themselves. When Maurice pointed to the gas canisters of their yacht at the moment they first realised it was sinking, as a potential way to make their suffering brief, Maralyn knew a less predictable ending was possible.

She made their implausible future real by imagining it and coaxing it into being. Without denying the reality of what was happening, she dreamt up her life-to-come and wrote it down. She engaged in creative, crafty, common-sense routines of survival for 118 days, keeping herself and her partner physically and psychologically alive.

Although easy to romanticise, again, likely because of the survival - even Maurice said he’d willingly re-live it - this was undoubtedly a harrowing experience for the pair. But Maralyn, like Ada, executed a determined sequence of small, constructive acts, despite the pain and fear, and coaxed the reality she wanted into being.

Safety pin fish-hooks, turtle-shell fire pits for makeshift flares, playing cards from sheets of logbook paper, plans for dresses she’d one day make and meals she’d one day to cook - she joined in with the creative production of the future.

I have to talk about AI here. I really do. Because when Blair Braverman said that the best adventure stories come from situations when something really bad nearly happened but didn’t, it sounded an alarm in me as a writer and human.

There’s a timeline for humanity upon which we eventually turn to each other and say ‘Goddamn. Can you believe it? We almost let the robots think for us.’ We find that our own creativity and imagination is enough to realise a liveable future for us and our fellow earth-dwellers.

Now, that would make an incredible story.

There’s another timeline, though. One where, one day, a gormless child turns to me in a state of shock and goes ‘is it true mama, you once had all your own ideas and wrote them down on paper? With a pen? Why?!’

The fact that the better story is the harder one to envisage is why I’m writing on the internet again. It’s a reality check for this particular misadventure, and I don’t want to fall into any avoidable heuristic traps. It’s not safe to hand over our responsibility for co-creation, just because everyone’s doing it. Exercises in imagination - art, adventure, writing, dreaming, cooking, play, anything we do to stay close to our experience of aliveness - are critical exercises in survival.

Is there a unifying human code / we can count on lasting / something that will help us recognise ourselves / when this slopified culture / gets where it’s going / will traffic shunt aside / for wailing ambulances / forever? / Will mutual aid kick off / in every post-disaster community? / How about / will we persist / in our storytelling? / My favourites come from terrible things / nearly happening.

Keep ‘slopification’ out of your vernacular / please / slop is mess over dirt / no good lovers take mess / over dirt / keep mud in your nailbeds / stay diligent / responsive as clay / there’s still time to live your wilderness / to lay down on furs / by the fireside / if you want to / don’t let your fantasy world / be erased by ease / find your pen / this one could be good / really good / the story / you stand a chance of surviving.

And perhaps he was born in the wrong century, or is a grown up boy who likes clunking great machines. I did see him do a snow-day skip outside when his shiny new metal bandsaw arrived.

It was boxed up in a crate like some exotic animal arrived shivering in a Victorian city. Apparently, there’s still some excitement on the factory floor.

The watermill poured liquid black over itself and I said something cute like At least we’re in time for a romantic quest.

Recently I heard a poet say that the young folk have Y2K nostalgia, obsessed with a decade we were only yanked out of yesterday, because they know it has all gone too far.

Early November and the city is a glittering bowl of cursed rice crispies. Every dark crackle leaves a hole which will be later sewn up by our sentinel schizophrenics who make their nightly circuits of the city with stumbling persistence, doing repair on the cosmic rifts.

Their work is shaky, though, and I think something has either spilled in or is leaking out. Wind blows bright clouds past the sickly gunpower backdrop to this whole tragicomic film set.

An empty red stripe tin shrieks its way down the gutter. I need to get out. Have been listening to everything scream at itself so long I didn’t hear myself go hoarse.

If the end of culture is a quieter place, I don’t mind walking in that direction. I won’t miss all this terrible nonsense. But grown men still skip on bright mornings. There are things worth questing for. The writers are trying.

Look at us, heading deeper into the tired woods. Carrying small moons through the dark.

This time, the pomegranates were not strung up in my imagination as they were in the last piece I shared. Rather, I cracked the thick foam shell of the fruits apart in my hands and spilled pink crystals over my lap in the passenger seat of a rental car.

Our Jeep slightly killed the old-world romance of things in the Sardinian hills. We wondered why new cars sound like they’re beatboxing at you, and agreed that no matter how good at beat-boxing a person was, unfortunately, they’d never be alluring for it.

I had picked the pomegranates in morning drizzle, barefoot on wet tiles behind our little house. Bougainvillea and jasmine poured over the retaining wall out the back. And, as we drove down the eastern coast, I picked out the gemmy red clusters from their casing. We passed a sign for the Tomba dei Giganti di Doragli and pulled over, stepping out of the noisy car with mouths full of tiny, popping, bitter-sweet seeds.

Big piles of stones still have a magnetic power over the human body. I live in the southwest of England, home to Stonehenge and Avebury, so I didn’t have to travel all the way to Italy to feel that. But I was enticed by the evidence of goddess worship, apparent in Sardinia even to my un-archaeologically-educated eyes.

At Doragli, we stood in front of a huge, yonic portal to a mass grave. An elongated burial chamber lay behind the central stone stele, its birth-canal shape the last relic of its occupants, long-since disappeared back to the body of the mother that they came from.

Like all other funerary monuments built by Sardinia’s Nuragic ancestor’s in the Early Bronze Age (1800-1600 BC), it’s called a ‘giant’s tomb’ because of the scale of the graves, which has sparked more recent legends about mythical beings having been buried there.

The central stele was almost 4 meters high, with a tiny doorway at it’s base. The arcing exedra of stones either side of it were more than 10 metres wide. With this shape, the giant in question seemed to actually be composed of the stones and earth themselves. With the burial-chamber for an abdomen (which would’ve been covered to create a mound of earth), the vulvate stele, and the exedra of legs spread wide, she was lying in peaceful repose. In ‘Goddess pose,’ no less.

But another symbol is strung up on the golden thread of Goddess-worship in Sardinia: the bull. Because, from above, the elongated channel also resembles a bull’s face and the exedra, its horns. This crescent-moon, horned shape is repeated on funerary monuments across Sardinia. It’s another link in the global chain of the historical veneration of the bull alongside fertility, natural cycles of life and death, and the deities that ruled them.

Across the world’s Bronze-age civilisations, cows symbolised renewal, motherhood and the Mother Goddess herself. There were direct connections, such as in ancient Egypt where sacred bulls were linked to goddesses like Hathor. Ka, in Egyptian, is both a religious concept of life-force power, and the word for bull.

In Minoan Crete there was prominent worship of a Mother Goddess, often associated with snakes, and a bull god who was seen as her consort and son. Elsewhere in ancient Greece, bull-cult rituals were sacrificial and were often held in caves. The bull would be identified with a god (often usually Dionysus, Zeus or Poseidon), and the sacrifice of the animal would symbolize the god’s death and rebirth. Dionysus was also sometimes represented in man-bull form with horns and was honoured at fertility festivals.

A bull sacrifice was also part of the Eleusinian mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone. Annual ceremonies at the secretive sanctuary of Eleusis ceremonies were based on the myth of Demeter searching for her abducted daughter, Persephone, and focused on Autumnal themes of death, renewal and the afterlife. And, though I was in Doragli, Sardinia - not the sanctuary of Eleusis - it was not lost on me that I walked around the bull-shaped monument to death with pomegranate juice under my nails.

It’s easy to see why the power of the Earth mother to give and take has been venerated in Sardinia. That afternoon, we ducked out of the rain into a winery and sipped wine made from the local variety of Cannonau grapes. It was strong, dark red-brown and silty. It had a bloody, vital tang. Later, we sat on the balcony of a rural B&B, feeling voyeuristic for our privileged outlook over her supple hills, sensing a new weight to the word ‘motherland.’

Downstairs at the B&B, there was a very small older lady who had taken care of our every need through a series of smiling, sign-language interactions. She had scurried to find cups and plates and for our makeshift dinner of pecorino cheese, olives, cured meat and pistoccu (wafer-thin, dried flatbread). She brought over hot tea to warm us up, milk, and a corkscrew for the wine bottle. Her rheumy eyes had glittered kindly.

Sardinian folktales include characters called the Janas: tiny benevolent fairies that lived in little rock-houses. Some say that the fairies were all women who spent their time weaving on golden looms and watching over children’s sleep, showering honest folk with riches and punishing the greedy. They say the Janas had silver-white skin, and brought the tradition of milking cows to humans.

Their legend deliciously blends the Island’s archaeological history and more recent oral storytelling traditions. The fairies’ homes are called the Domus de Janas, and are actually pre-Nuragic tombs dug into the rock by the Ozieri culture more than five thousand years ago. There are around 3,500 of these tiny rock-houses, showing that island’s historical the funerary cult precedes the Bronze age Tombas dei Giganti we had seen at Doragli.

Bull iconography on some of the Domus de Janas also shows that the association of funerary rites with fertility worship was carried over into the Nuragic period from a pre-existing tradition. These associations exist deep within the collective psyche; goddess worship endures in Sardinia in the layering of cultural stories. The name of the Janas may be a derivation of the Roman goddess Diana, who was associated with hunting and the moon; all repeating symbols of death, sacrifice, strength, rebirth and renewal.

The tiny Nonna hosting us seemed to keep the tale of the Janas alive - enduring proof of the mystical, benevolent mother figure in this landscape. She had passed me the milk bottle to open - her gnarled and shaking hands weren’t up to the task. And I figured that thousands of years spent weaving delicate tapestries on a golden loom would do that to you.

On our last night in Sardinia, we lay on the grass of an olive grove reading books whilst sunset lit early evening fires on the jagged teeth of the mountains that encircled us. I had the sense of being a small child, concealed in the undergrowth with my closest friend, suspended safely out of time by some generous force that rested latent in our surroundings. We had tired ourselves out from all of the scampering and clambering crammed into a short trip and lay sprawled on the ground, like kids who, after running circles round a parent’s body have come, finally calm, to rest in their arms.

And what felt most restful about the trip, to me, was encountering so closely - touching - the proof of millennia of cultural practices that revered fertility and life force energy, that enshrined the living body of the Mother, and that ritualised and celebrated natural cycles.

Because, over time, monotheistic associations of horn symbology with the devil have risen, spurning the reproductive power of the feminine and borrowing symbolism from pre-Christian, pagan fertility deities to do so. The traits of wild, horned gods of nature (such as Greek gods Pan and Dionysus, and the Celtic god Cernunnos) were conflated with ideas of the devil as a seductive and chaotic force in Christian and Jewish tradition. Horns were turned into a symbol of evil and demonic power. Holy power no longer lay in the land, nor was divinity seen as present in the life-giving promise of the human body.

Popular TV shows and films today will still turn to the symbol of animalistic horns to evoke the darkest folk-horror evils; forces that corrupt humanity, disturb the sane mind, remove purity and innocence and harm female bodies. And this is wearisome. It hurts, somewhere deep in the feminine subconscious, which knows the essential, earthly facts of her body and its cycles are what connects it to the divine.

Strings of symbols still decorate our days, and the decorations of the modern psyche often seem to be all strung up wrong. You’ll see it this season, in the ‘spooky’ portrayals of horned creatures, devilish figures and darkness associated with punishment and evil.

But, deep in ancestral memory, this imagery is linked to the sacred, cyclical power of nature - the necessary retreat into darkness to renew, restore, and return life in its full capacity. Because the scarier story is modernity’s refusal to slow or do anything other than, as I once heard Richard Powers describe, emulate spawning salmon in a perpetual fabricated summer season, drunk on sunlight borrowed from the past. We guzzle our carbon stocks like festival-drunk adolescents and pay no heed to the Elder wisdom inherent in the seasonal capitulation to darkness, a period of still and quiet that might enable natural resources to recover.

The irony is that we went to Sardinia to prolong summer just a little - just a couple of Mediterranean days to make the long winter ahead feel less daunting. So it was reasonable - funny, even - that we were met with some rain. You can’t avoid the inevitable. But the weather brought its heavy pink gifts - apples and pomegranates - and it asked us to slow down more than we would have otherwise. Like we needed to.

When I returned to England, I did some research that revealed just how persistent the ancient fertility rituals of the Mediterranean are in Sardinia. Less than an hour’s drive from the tomb we had visited in Doragli, in a town called Ottana, yearly Carnival festivities are considered by anthropologists to be dedicated to the Dionysiac cult. Here, the nature-god is invoked in the Springtime. There are dance-chases that feature men, Sos Boes, dressed as giant oxen, adorned in sheep pelts, wooden horns and cowbells, and their owners, Sos Merdules (thought to be derived from the words ‘mere’ - mother - and ‘ule’ - ox).

The ritual invokes the herd’s fertility for the season to come, but there is a warning in the power of Soes Boes. The animals give chase because they have the ability to turn men into oxen, too. So the rite is both a modern celebration of our agricultural tradition, and a reminder that human exceptionalism is a fallacy. For all our farming practises, we are so not beyond the demands of nature nor the possibility of returning to our own animal ways.

After encountering all this, it feels more enticing to lean in to the yearly maturation. This week, we’ll have the usual Halloween vilification of all things chthonic, and the annual hiccupping of clocks which we call daylight saving, introduced 100 years ago or so to increase productivity and efficient use of energy during darker months. I want to lean past these modern emergences to the old-world rituals that sing of impermanence and dormancy; reminders of the importance of retreat for renewal. The Samhain bonfires and the soft, sweet nights with dear ones that are hot mulled cider for the soul.

And it’s easier to do, knowing that - in the year 2025 AD - 7 tonne, yonic stones still stand as giant, sepulchral monuments of offering to the Earth’s renewing dark.

The girl’s name is Persephone. She doesn’t turn around, at first. She closes her eyes and pictures her mother, Demeter, the divine force of abundance, responsible for earthly fertility and the harvest. Only Persephone knows her mother’s fickle nature, well-concealed behind displays of benevolence and a warm smile.

When Persephone does turn around, arms raised in capitulation, and approaches her new husband’s terrifyingly dark shape, she exhales a frost-cold air. She hopes it will drift through the vale - that the breeze of the first ever Autumn evening in Thrace will pass across her mother’s golden face, and Demeter will know of Persephone’s condition. It is a silent prayer to her mother: ‘do not let this be.’

Meanwhile, on an emerald archipelago that lies out in a cold grey sea, another divine mother, Modron, holds her own divine child to her chest. She names him Mabon. He is three days old, fits deliciously in her arms, and smells like a fresh dawn. But he does not remain in her arms for long. Treacherous men arrive at her door. They wrest the crying babe from her grip, and in her shock and grief, she cannot stop them…

What happens next in both stories is a convolution of plotlines; the introduction of new characters, an array of challenges and a turbulence of complex side-quests as help is sought and bargains are struck. This tender moment of folkloric flux is the beginning of Autumn.

Equinox: The pre-hibernal riot

The seasons are shifting their weight. Across a stretch of long days, for months on end, sunshine has been mainlined into broad and hungry leaves. Now these leaves are starting to suffer for their indulgence; soon they’ll start burning with the same glowy colours that have been relentlessly dumped on them from above and, exhausted, begin to drop.

The early Autumnal shifting has brought with it some disorientation. The trees in the park beyond our house have been waving like vast green sails, catching all of September’s bluster. Blue and blowing days tempted us outside, then gave way to rainstorms that rolled through, monsoon-dense and sudden. Unsure how to process this elemental information, we started to hunker down together, put logs on the fire, but it didn’t feel quite right. Too warm, too muggy, too early yet in the British southwest. But only briefly, before higher, clearer skies stole in and brought with them the fresh new cold.

Equinox is a moment of natural upheaval. It’s the last, most abundant harvest of the year, wild or cultivated, for which we can thank the closest full moon to the Equinox - the Harvest moon. In the first week of October, she will rise quickly after sunset, for several nights in a row, increasing moonlight hours and stimulating the release of bumper crops.

But we can also thank the deluges of rain which, after this year’s long, dry summer, have knocked a carpet of acorns, beech nuts, conkers, horse-chestnuts onto the woodland floor. Deeper down, the mycelial network stirs. Fruiting bodies have been bursting from the damp ground, and friends are sharing their harvests of woody boletes, chanterelles and porcinis.

I like the idea that within the supposedly balanced, peaceful, equal-time of the Equinox - Equinox translating to ‘equal night’ in Latin - there is a natural riot. An unsettled, abundant commotion has been happening. In the ancient Norse calendar, September is called þrýmheimr, meaning ‘noisy world.’ Pause in the midst of this shifting and you may notice that you’re not comfortable - soaked through, run down, exhausted after a chaotic summer - but nonetheless, everything is blooming.

The wavering Libran way

Libra season begins on the Autumn Equinox, too. The sign of the scales, which figures, because the perennial question that Libran’s get asked is Are you… very balanced? To which the answer is Not really, no. Nonetheless, like a set of scales, Libras can be painfully perceptive to imbalance. This used to seem like a cruel paradox to me. Too much action and socialisation: wiped out. Too much quiet and stasis: restless. Sensitive, and not typically very grounded. But within these tendencies lies Libra’s gift.

Moments of discomfort and imbalance are precious: they call you to adjust. And, if you find yourself highly attuned to each moment of disequilibrium, recalibrating and moving between them, you’ll find that you are walking.

Human bodies maintain their balance through communications across the vestibular system (in-ear structures), the proprioceptors in our feet and joints, and our brains, which jostle our legs to move. Its through movement that we stay upright. Keep on going, seeking out your centre of gravity, you’ll eventually turn around to see that you’ve come a long way. You’ll find yourself changed.

This self-organised displacement is an organic occurrence. There is no natural system that remains in perfect, static balance for any amount of time; ecologies are always dynamic, undergoing constant change. Equinox itself is a misnomer, because the idea of the ‘perfect balance of nature’ is a fallacy. Ecosystems are perpetually disturbed, recalibrating, existing in a state of complex motion. This is Libra’s memo: we have an inbuilt set of scales because it helps us to grow.

Who is Mabon?

No one knows his remarkable characteristics - Mabon ap Mydron the Swift…

No one knows where he is, or what he is, or whether he is alive or dead.

- Englynion y Beddau (Stanzas of the Graves), translated by John K Bollard.

Neo-pagans all over Instagram will be wishing each other a happy Mabon this week. They may or may not be aware that it was only in the 1970s that Aidan Kelly coined ‘Mabon’ as a name for the Autumn Equinox’s traditional Celtic harvest festivities. He was referencing Mabon ap Modron, a character that is mentioned in a single strand of the Mabinogi - a collection of medieval Welsh prose.

Kelly drew inspiration from Persephone’s story in Greek mythology. He wanted to find a mirror story from the British Isles, and did so in Mabon, who’s name means divine son of the divine mother. Mabon appears briefly, in the story ‘How Culhwch won Olwen.’ The hero Culhwch (pronounced ‘keel-hookh’) is required to complete a series of impossible quests before he can win the hand of woman he loves. One of his critical tasks is hunt a magical Irish boar, called the Twrch Trwth (pronounced ‘toork troo-eeth’). But the boar can only be tracked by a special hunting dog called Drudwyn (druh-dwen), which can only be controlled by Mabon. But Mabon was taken from his mother at only three days old, and had not been seen since…

A weary troupe of soldiers collapses on the banks of the Llyn Lliw. Their journey has been hard on them, and no lead they have followed - of which there have been countless - has run a true course. They doubt their leaders, Culhwch and his English cousin, King Arthur. They are not convinced that the man they seek even exists. Their morale ebbs low, draws them down to silty water that licks at their worn out boots by the river’s edge.

A flash in the shallows catches the attention of one. He yells, and the men gather as the largest salmon they have ever seen turns to fix them with a bulging, filmy eye. This is not their dinner. This is the oldest and wisest of animals that exists.

Without speaking as the men speak, the great fish tells them that as he swims up the River Severn with the tide, he can hear Mabon’s plaintive wail coming from within the dungeons walls of Gloucester castle. The men look at each other. They know their final task before they can return to their beds, shuck off their boots by dancing fireplaces, and kiss the rosy faces of their loves: they are beholden to free this unknown man from his cold, damp confinement, cross a grey sea, and follow him on the wild hunt. They have a long way to go, but their blood begins to race with anticipation.

With the hound Drudwyn, Mabon goes on to lead a successful hunt of the boar, and Culhwch marries the lady Olwen. And, aside from the mirror of his kidnapping, Mabon’s power to handle the untameable mystery of the hounds, lead the hunt, and reach the magical boar, is also significant for him as an Autumnal metaphor.

This is a character with a dormant storyline, who waits all year long to rise at a moment of chaos and need. Mabon is a resilient archetype, who can wrangle mysterious forces just as he can survive the period of long dark he is subjected to. The wisest, most ancient of creatures - the Salmon of the Llyn Lliw knows of him, his plight and the power he possesses even when no walking human does.

His magic reflects the enduring power of the natural world even in its annual dormancy.

And the boar represents a warrior spirit. The best hunters are those that can think with their quarry and move in its shadows. Boar symbology is associated protection, courage, and abundance across Celtic tradition. Mabon has to embody the boar in order to reach it, just as we need to keep notions of bravery and strength close in order to face the challenges presented by a harsher incoming season.

Although Mabon’s association with Equinox may not be a longstanding tradition, he is a fitting Autumnal spirit and I intend to keep him close. Faced with the moment to moment shifting of my small life, or our larger, collective human experience - unsettled surroundings, distressed environments and bewildering geopolitical dramas, it seems that a Hades-esque spectre looms, the harbinger of some darkness to weather ahead.

Mabon seems like a timely friend to make this side of the hibernal descent. But he’s not the only one I’ll be bringing with me.

As Persephone walks slowly towards her fate, she looks over to a copse of oak trees that stand on the valley slope at some distance to her, watching. She notices something strange and new, but it gives her heart a squeeze of courage. Some of the leaves on the branch-tips of the oaks have curled and turned ochre. This is a signal. Her mother has felt the nip of her daughter’s impending absence, and a bitter rage is stirring. Persephone knows that, whatever lies ahead, Demeter will go so far as to send the world spinning on a new, more tilted axis to bring her back again. She will ensure it’s just another temporary shift, one that, someday, will call abundance back in again.

Initiation Invitation

This week, I hope not to look ahead or behind for just a moment. I hope not to rush. I intend to linger in the shift.

Despite our lack of initiation rituals in the modern West, a 30th birthday feels like one of our strange, socially constructed staging posts. Out of nowhere it's my turn, and I'm glad to welcome it. The actual significance of a birthday day is up to the individual, as with any and every other celebration of this culturally ambiguous time. But I can’t refrain from my meaning-making tendencies with this one. It feels too deliciously synchronistic; the Equinox going sliding past just as I celebrate a transition from the frenetic sun-dance of my twenties into the ambiguity of whatever strange and unknown season comes next.

The celebration is a pause mid-step, to cast around and not to panic at milestones unmet (I was once sure I’d have published a book by now), but to notice all that’s blooming. I’ll manoeuvre my people into a field together aside the River Wye, where we’ll hoist a marquee and festoon lights, light a log-fired grill and fire pit, and pull out plates of food to share. And this truly feels like it will be a harvest celebration: these are the connections I sowed and relationships I cultivated with all the rambunctious energy of my teens and twenties. In their faces, I see a bumper crop that could feed me for the rest of my life.

And I’m heartened by rumours that wild boar from the nearby Forest of Dean have dispersed into the Wye Valley. The Twrch Trwth runs close by, and the brown-gold leaves that rattle in the wind are singing of a mother’s inescapable love.

“You were all over my dreams last night.”

A message came through from an ex I have not had a meaningful conversation with in over 5 years. He used the pet name he once knew me by, as if that girl still exists. As if it were still his right to claim me as “all over” anything of his.

I felt nauseated by this, in a nose-wrinkling kind of way. Like how I did the other day, driving down a road that looked familiar for a reason I couldn’t place. The smell of rotting fruit and plastic, diesel fumes and pre-teens post PE hit me like a smack in the face, and I realised I was following the old schoolbus route from my earliest days in a country that was new, too grey. What a strange world had gone streaming past the foggy window in sickening ribbons of green.

The message, and the dripping, familiar scene beyond my car’s windscreen had me shuddering in exactly the same way.

I was back in an old place to run errands, needed somewhere to stay, and got caught off-guard by the fact that the past is also damp. It seeps in unbidden. You’ll find yourself looping along the roads of a small coastal town by memory, or soaking in the bath of some Airbnb whilst rain rattles a stranger’s Velux, remembering how this place was the first to teach you what homesickness was.

But homesickness comes before the will to start again. Before acceptance of the pace at which a human soul can adjust - this thirsty thing that gallops into places ahead of us, a stagecoach of 6 horses with sweat foaming on their coats. By the time we realise that we’ve arrived, that there’s a soft bed upstairs, have begun to drag ourselves over there… the horses are nose-deep in fresh water and gulping. They’ve fallen on clover-rich hay. And that’s how I fell in love with this place - by running. To it and from it by turns.

Someone please tell my ex that there is no living hope for static visions. That I no longer fit in any of the old frames. That this darkening season I ride out laughing, have given over, have let myself be taken along by the wind and the rain.

Hundreds of people descended around a modest and unlit firepit as I waited for the opening ceremony to begin. A fat, buttery full moon slowly freed itself from the chaotic embrace of a dead oak behind us.

Soul Revolution. A festival in the West Midlands with a distinctly spiritual tilt.

The host of the gathering - a young storyteller - stepped towards the centre of the circle. His features were wry and catlike. A matted dread of pepper-black hair was squashed under a backwards Kangol hat, and the moustache and beard matched. He wore a kilt and cable-knit socks to his knees. A hefty-looking knife swung against narrow hips as he wove between hunkered-down bodies and expectant faces.

He opened with a story about a Celtic brooch which had been found by a detectorist in field nearby. It was decorated with a dolphin, which he told us was unlikely to have come from the local Cornovii tribe - they were not known to be sea-people, rather, were renowned for their dogs and horsemanship.

Decorative brooches often represented status amongst Celts, too, and the Cornovii were not thought to have been a particularly wealthy people - they depended mostly on a pastoral economy.

So perhaps, he mused, the brooch was dropped, gifted or traded by another visiting tribe. Perhaps one from East Anglia or the North East, who are known to have made ‘annular’ brooches in the same style as the Hodnet dolphin - closed rings of flattened metal with a pin set across it.

The crowd revelled deliciously in the idea that we were massed where our ancestors also gathered for millennia, for much the same reasons - to swap stories, music, ritual, knowledge and goods.

And for a moment, I had a swimmingly lovely sense of fealty for the land that I’d travelled from, knowing (from previous research and writing) something of the Dobunni tribe who lived there, and knowing some of their stories. It was almost as if I was representing them.

The storyteller went on. His midland accent swung its melodic downward tilt. With stretched-out vowels he invited the youngest children to the fire pit to help him light it, because in the Cornovii tradition, those who carried within them ‘the purest flame’ were the ones who lit ceremonial fires. Not the adults, who risk being corrupted by their egos and have a tendency to want to show off their fire-lighting prowess.

The crowd went silent and waited patiently as the young faces flickered. A disloyal flame disappeared from their unsteady hands many times over. We were more patient, quiet and still than any crowd I’ve ever joined before. And after what seemed like a long time, the fire caught, everyone cheered, and the storyteller rose. ‘This is why you lot are the best tribe. We could’ve been there for hours and I know you all wouldn’t have minded. Bless you. Have a great festival.’

The children stared after him as he disappeared back into the crowd.

A night and a morning passed before I sat on the carpeted floor of a polygonal tent listening to a historian talk more Celtic mythology. He described the Celts’ penchant for animal symbology and the power which was ascribed to animals which represented for them, freedom and transformation.

The dolphin was a symbol of rebirth and transgression between physical and spiritual realms. And the fact that the word stems from the related Greek word delphus - “womb” - describing the animal as a “fish with a womb,” reinforces this symbology.

The historian told us that the dolphin symbol was prominent amongst the north-eastern British tribes, including those around Lindisfarne. I wondered what the Lindisfarne’s Celtic tribe - the Votadini - so proud of their dolphins, would make of the present day fact that orcas are now hunting grey seals in their waters?

As the modern world’s creatures loose their boundaries in the name of survival, making increasingly deviant migrations in search of sustenance, I wonder if this transformation-under-pressure is called freedom, transgression, or another, more urgent thing.

Whatever it is, Sona Jobarteh advocated that human culture do the same. She was the festival’s headline act; the first female Kora virtuoso from a Griot family in Gambia. Griots inherit a tradition that dates back 700 years - they are respected members of society who serve as oral historians, musicians, and storytellers, preserving and transmitting the history and traditions of their communities.

Griot instrumentalists were exclusively male until Sona came along. She has broken the mould, not to interrupt her cultural heritage, but to preserve it within a modern context.

With fingers poised on the 21-string harp, balanced like a spectacular phallus at her hips, she smiled gently and told us that our traditions need to be adapted in order to be sustained.

I doubted whether we are sustaining the British tribal gathering as we should, keeping alive the beating heart of the thing. Because festivals have long-since been sites of ritual transgression. And the band on my wrist was printed with the word F R E E D O M. But the reality of Soul Revolution was not truly controversial or radical. The tribal lands we were gathered on had long-since become a privately owned country manor. Most people had paid a fair sum of money in order to be there.

British festivals, in general, have become increasingly commodified, shifting from cultural or political community gatherings into economic ventures, with increased corporate sponsorship, ticket prices, and on-site sales, alongside a growing emphasis on social media engagement and brand promotion. While all of this can bring economic benefits to contributors - often benefits that they depend on - there is usually a loss of authenticity and displacement of the intrinsic, land-based ideologies behind gathering and celebrating, such as the Celtic wheel of the year. Or the opportunities festivals presented to turn hierarchal structures of society on their head.

And I was disappointed, at first, by the tedium of the unpoliticised spiritual rhetoric I encountered over the first couple of days at Soul Revolution. I wanted to see more sacred rage: a deep care and love for people, communities, land and resources under threat. Calls for Palestinian and Sudanese liberation expressed in Kali-esque loud, ugly, passionate cries. A fearlessness about flipping everything on its head, because ritualised riot (read: protest) is the only way that we’ve ever been granted our most unreasonable demands; peace, autonomy, freedom, civil rights. These things won’t endure on love and light and incense sticks alone.

That being said, the Soul Revolution ethos was bent on community and connection. Every workshop, talk, performance and ceremony was an invitation to connect and authentically relate with the people beside you and the land beneath. Ancient rites were invoked. Mutual gazes were held. There were many deep conversations aside saunas and fire pits, over herbal teas or alcohol-free tonics. Empathy and understanding were extended between strangers. Adults played, danced, and wept together. I saw it, I was part of it.

And members of the Yawanawa and Huni Kuin tribes from the Brazilian Amazon certainly wouldn't have made it over to share their wisdom, medicine, and music without the support of money made from festival ticket sales. International cultural exchange is one positive outcome of the changes to tradition influenced by a globalised world.

The dolphin, a symbol of shifting and regeneration, buried in nearby soil, seemed to be a sigil, watching the new iterations of tribal gatherings that have manifested since it first landed on this ground.

If traditions are so malleable, and humans are just another species of animal changing the patterns of their collective movements in this pressurised moment, the question becomes about what kind of tribal gathering we want to usher in.

On the Sunday evening I walked away from the main stage into a copse of huge beech and chestnut trees. The sunlight was setting sweetly between them, back-lighting the flying bugs like they were fairies. The mantras that emanated from a choir of thousands over a dub-reggae backing band at the main stage were really getting too much for me. All the thanks and praise was nice, sure. But the brief head-nods towards ‘overseas conflict’ were too safe, too cursory, too vague.

Meanwhile, liquid amber light poured itself onto the base of the trees drew me down with it. At the foot of the one I chose to sit at, I found a shrine. There was a box of prayers set to one side, pieces of paper and a pencil. A cushion, in front of widening concentric rings of pebbles, seeds, rose petals, and crystals. Right up against the tree, a Madonna. Her head tilted tenderly towards the box.

I was curious, so I opened it and I read them. They were desperate.

Nothing more honest than a prayer.

I want us to push further than everything that’s simply bright and sweet about a modern spiritual gathering. Because, honestly, things are pretty bleak. A morbid question lodged itself in my mind recently. Perhaps the recent resurgence of a generational obsession - mine included - with humanity’s ancient history, wisdom and ways comes from the fact that, at this political moment, we are struggling to pour our young imaginations into a collective future?

The antidote to this grim mental block is our immediate task. The one that has to happen before anything else can begin: calling the purest flame to the stage.

In terms of the festival, this means denying the ego-fuelled and frenzied consumption machine. The task is making the festival a dress rehearsal for a survivable, shared future - the future of our wildest dreams. It’s slow and patient work. It needs to be done with the steady understanding that eventually, the flame will take.

Because the future is always the pith of the fruit, the emphasis of the prayer uttered as an urgent and strained whisper to some shared and living God. And the effort of calling the future in is what Jaiya Jon has called ‘Freedom Work.’

‘We are reclaiming and renaming ourselves, souls, lands, waters, ceremonies, gatherings, languages, values, dreams, prayers, relations, ways of seeing and being, our remembering, our healing and medicines, teachings and raisings, our grieving and releasing, our caring and weaving. We are doing this freedom work. All our generations shall feast on the fruit of it.’

So call it Freedom Work, or Dolphin work, the modern festival should be getting it done. And Soul Revolution, with its joyful expression and richness of ceremonial offerings, is somewhat on its way. But there is more within our reach. The places at which to begin are near. They’re anywhere. There are daily possibilities, and they are, appropriately, free:

Gathering at ancient, sacred sites - reclaiming our land access rights. Gathering as an overtly political act of resistance, solidarity and protest. Gathering for song, for dance, for play. Gathering to share our grief and to show our rage. Gathering to celebrate and honour the land we are on, or the land we have travelled from. Gathering to reinvigorate old stories and to give the disenfranchised a stage. Gathering for sharing and gifting, for intergenerational, intercultural wisdom exchange. Gathering to draw lines of connection between us, to learn, and call in a more convivial version of the modern world.

This time, a rare occasion when the threat came to life. Sounds dramatic, but IV drugs and certain words circulating above whilst you convulse blindly on a mattress covered in blue plastic will lead the mind towards its dimmest-lit doors and have it listening at the threshold.

My legacy would be this: a warning to never ever get so dehydrated that you can’t hold water down, and if you do, bring a toothbrush wherever you have to go next.

I called my mother. She did her best to distract me. She told me that she wants to get a new job - one at the reception in the doctor’s, or in the post office. It makes sense for her to be the first face someone sees as they enter a place you go when you need to tell someone something important. God knows, that’s how we met.

One of my biggest regrets: showing her my disbelief that time she took the orange rope of our tree swing in her hands and hitched her skirt over our log-seat swing, dark curls all fiery in the leaf-dappled sun. My reaction broke the spell and she thrust the rope back at me, along with ‘I’m a girl too, you know.’

I wonder how many more times I ever let that girl down. But she was the one chosen to be birds-eye witness as my egg-soft brain calibrated the social world I had come to occupy.

Apparently, we shunt away unacceptable parts of ourselves as we grow into it. What’s dark, mean, cruel, or just misunderstood, goes shooting away from our gathering wisdom like shadows behind the trees of a forest. Which must be why it’s called ‘shadow work’ if you ever dare reach around to your hide-and-seek partner, drag them by force back into the sunny glade of consciousness, sit the furious and dirty child down and hold out your hands so that they can spit out all the rotten seeds from their stained little mouth.

As a child, I used to walk around with a mirror and gaze through it into the world behind me. I'd swing the bright red frame around, trying to see and see and see my place in all of it; in the warm cocoon of long school breaks when the front door was locked and the trouble would make itself. There was so much deep green growth and bottomless sky. I had to put it into that little red rectangle and disappear into its depths, meticulously. Frame by frame.

Even then I sensed that both my face and the world were kingdoms of change which I could inhabit for a time and never entirely know. It scared me then and maybe I never quite quit the childish habit of scanning a dry, tree-dense horizon for bushfire smoke. I did get causal about heeding warning signs, though. And the trouble continued to make itself.

It’s known that a good stick is the one smoothed and punctured by many canine mouths, and as I've grown, I’ve gone again and again to the dogs with alarming exuberance. Their master’s arm, unrelenting and imprecise. But the hounds of love honed their faculties for each time they nosed me out of the weeds. And this time, they knew exactly where to drop me.

Tender-hearted and brave are synonyms in people, and especially in men. Which is to say that a man who wants to read me to sleep is not a gift horse I have ever looked in the mouth. But a man who, when presented with my black-lipped, unhealed little selves, decides he still wants to gather me in beside him by night is the man I want to sleep beside. I believe there is no hobbling lamb on the hillside of my life that I could point out to this unexpected shepherd which he would not care to mind.

Because I’ve seen the way that he stands, 10 metres above the sea, peering as if curious, readying for the jump. There is a moment, nearly unseen, when the shoulders relax. Just before the legs bend and he resigns himself, wildly, to gravity. I watch from a distance, thinking perhaps I’ve seen that bend before when he looks down to me on the bed in our room, gauging the depth of what waits to enfold him, and then yields.

Back on the blue plastic, a hot teardrop on my forehead from above somewhere made me think that these mortal bodies could be both the safest and most dangerous places we've ever been. Our most familiar opponents. Might as well surrender to their desires, guess. Now I joke about being his wife because it helps release what I realised in the writhing dark: that I would actually want us wed before ever it so happened I had to navigate my way back past the stars.

In the beginning there was the word, so they say. And run all the way through was a heart that gasped with it. ‘Love,’ scrawled across the letter that the woman in the post office once carried over the line.

It was passed, then, breast pocket to breast pocket. Pat your chest and find my papers there. We like stories so much because they’re what we turn into. So I’ll remain to spend this time trying to live so that my newborn niece has reason to grin when she tells people what she knows of how I did. Perhaps, as she does, she spits out a single rotten seed like the ones we used to roll around in our mouths. Probably she will have no need.

Anyway, I’m fine now. But if any of you need to send word, the woman in the post office has the right stamps for me.

A shout came across the sun-baked field. It was the barman, hauling in buckets of compost that had been donated to him from the surrounding food stands. Two heavy horses dragged a colourful wagon past. Their driver waved in thanks.

His mission on at the Land Skills Fair - serving ‘living drinks to restore a living soil’ - epitomised the spirit of the festival. It was three days of talks, workshops and performances, organised by Britain’s grassroots union of foresters, farmers and land workers: The Landworker’s Alliance.

The earth at the festival site was hot and hard underfoot. Revellers who had stumbled into their tents late emerged from them early, gasping incredulously at morning’s heat. They went wincing barefoot across the spiky, yellowing grass. Wood pigeons sounded out sadly over the noise of stoves on the boil for coffees, balanced carefully by shaking hands to avoid any errant stems catching light.

Glastonbury Tor shimmered in the distance, like the vision of another possible existing just beyond our reach, on the other side of the veil.

At 11am, I walked towards a coloured tent where my impression of British history would be forever altered by a man with a kind, open face and silk waistcoat, alongside a woman who stood in a swinging dress, smiling as they waited for the crowd to quiet itself.

“The first step in resistance is a history lesson. Not one that is written for us, but one that we write ourselves.”

- Three Acres and a Cow

The duo’s comic back and forth recounted how England’s common field system of agriculture, whereby peasants could once graze stock, cut wood or peat, draw water or grow crops, on various plots of land at specified times of year, was attacked for over 1,000 years. In brief:

The Norman invasion saw the arrival of serfdom. William the Conqueror assigned land to men he saw fit to own it, and peasant farmers became tenants working the land, beholden to the will and wage provision of their landlords.

After the Black Death, serfdom gave way to customary land tenure. With the labouring population of Britain so wildly diminished by the plague, peasant farmers had much more bargaining power. Pastoral production was concentrated mainly on the large farms of landlords who were highly dependent on resident workers - which resulted in postponed marriages and curtailed childbearing - and so a ‘War on Women’ ensued. After 1350, women were increasingly confined to the domestic realm in order to go about the business of boosting the working population.

Rural oppression and the oppression of women went hand in hand for centuries. Women’s herbal wisdom - which included use of natural abortatives - was violently smothered along with our social mobility and economic participation. We were distanced from each other, our land based rituals, and the embodied knowledge of natural custodianship of our native island.

As medieval England progressed to modernity, wealthy landowners increasingly privatised the use of their land. Capitalist agriculture emerged. Landowners converted arable land over to sheep. Large-scale enclosure projects were initiated and backed by Parliament.

“The gentry are all round, stand up now.

The gentry are all round, on each side they are found, Their wisdom’s so profound to cheat us of the ground.

Stand up now, Diggers all!”

- The Digger’s Song, 1649

The peasantry responded with revolt after revolt after revolt. The terms “leveller” and “digger” appeared, referring to those who rebelled by levelling ditches and fences erected by enclosers. The participants included a high proportion of women. Pitchforks, songs, cakes and ales; revolutions erupted like carnivals of the oppressed and exploited. Authority was contested in ways that drew on traditional festive practise. Cross-dressing represented a challenge to hierarchy, and mythological figures emerged as symbolic leaders of the revolts.

In the seventeenth century, increased enclosure met increased resistance. The riots grew from local to regional uprisings and got more organised, but were brutally stamped down. The leaders of the Captain Pouch revolts of 1604-1607, for example, met violent ends at the hands of mounted vigilantes who had been hired by local landlords. This didn't stop people mobilising, though. Between 1640 and 1644 there were anti-enclosure riots in more than half of England’s counties.

And, when it came to the Civil War, Parliament couldn’t have overthrown the monarchy without the support of small producers, peasants and wage-workers. But these folk gained little from the victory, given that most MP's were substantial landowners. The new Republican government supported enclosure, sold off forests to raise revenue, and defeated the common people just as it had the crown.

Between 1750 and 1820, nearly 4,000 Enclosure Acts were passed over roughly 6.8 million acres. Despite centuries of resistance, the power of capital prevailed.

The efforts of what became the Land Reform movement did see 5 Land Acts being passed in the UK in the 1900s, to reduce the concentration of land ownership, but the story is this: the commons in England were driven out of existence, and the majority of our access to the land has been forcibly removed.

“Long is the day that is dawning - the light that is coming in the morning.”

- John Ball by Sydney Carter, 1381

I sat in that sweltering tent, surrounded by today’s landless peasants and radical hedge-priests, all incandescent with something between rage and grief and perhaps just the rising heat of the day. The songs of rebellion we’d just learnt and sung together were not yet swallowed in the back of our throats.

Taking this long view of oppression and exclusion is a heavy-lifting exercise. It's a history of defeat for women, for the working class, and for nature. The weight of this knowledge is stultifying.

But history is a contested place, and the way it is currently re-told is having an oppressive, chilling effect on the energising heat of protest. Mobilising against fossil fuel giants and breaches of human rights will land you years in prison. The 2022 and 2023 restrictions on protests and increased penalties for those involved are a tough deterrent for activists.

The truth, as brought into the light by the Three Acres and a Cow actors: people have fought long and hard to claim fair pay and workers rights, win suffrage, and regain access to the countryside. They were a threat to the establishment. They broke laws, caused outrage. Their wins were costly, but there were wins.

The play ended. We got up, stretched, and brushed ourselves down of dry grass. Within minutes, two young DJs were pumping an irresistible, energetic selection of global resistance songs across the PA system and we were all moving as a throng of sticky limbs and grins.

Amplifying and circulating stories about the rights won by rowdy gangs of disempowered folk is crucial right now. We need motivation to continue to apply pressure for justice in the face of recent expansions to police powers. We need to reclaim indecency.

“The rights that we enjoy today were not won by sober, god-fearing men acting reasonably.”

- Robin, Three Acres and A Cow

The women of the enclosure revolts had no ‘theoretical’ political power, and they still managed to conduct petitions and political campaigns on behalf of their husbands and households. They marched with banners raised and children in tow.

Despite their exclusion from political fora, women also won suffrage after decades and decades of lobbying, keeping the issue in the public eye and the mouths of MPs.

A century’s worth of ramblers skirmishing with police and landowners led to the Countryside Rights of Way Act as it stands today, and ground is still being covered. Just earlier this year, mass trespasses and media furor lead to a supreme court ruling that enshrined the right to wild camp on Dartmoor.

Even though insurrection and successful protest might feel like an object of ancestral memory and imagination, we have to resuscitate stories of unruly persistence and unlikely wins, and keep them alive.

“Ye labourers in the vineyard, We call you to your toil!
Though bleak may be the furrows, The seed is in the soil.”

- Our Summons by Ernest Jones, 1829

Keeping the pressure up is necessary because this land has been mismanaged for centuries. The UK has lost almost half of its wildlife and plant species since the Industrial Revolution, and thanks to enclosure, most of the population are too removed from this crisis to even see it. 94% of the land in the UK is privately owned, and entering upon it remains a civil offense.

Meanwhile, food sovereignty feels like a fever dream to the everyday wage labourer.

It would take a fairer food and land-use system to regenerate our natural resources whilst enabling fair livelihoods for growers. It would take employing ecologically-sound land management practices to truly nourish a population.

It would take bringing the people back.

A week or so after the festival, I was picking berries on an allotment in the city. The raspberries were tiny, heavy lanterns of scarlet pink, as perfectly shaped as the juicy glass jar jellies of an old penny-sweet store. They hung from bending tendrils in the thick, grey humidity of a summer evening.

The play I’d seen back in Glastonbury still weighed on my mind.

An allotment - one 16th of an acre - was the final outcome of the General Enclosure Act of 1845, which made provision for ‘field gardens’ to be used by the landless poor. The later ‘Small Holdings and Allotments Act’ of 1907 and 1908 imposed responsibilities on councils to provide allotments if there was a demand for them. But very little enclosed land was actually set aside for this purpose.

Today, allotments are what a lucky minority get to enjoy, having signed up to a several-year long waiting list, eventually able to tend to their plot for a yearly fee. And recent allotment rent hikes mean that the privilege of growing ones own food on common land is increasingly a middle class hobby.

I looked up from the blushing raspberry stains on my fingertips, across the patchwork of fruiting trees, lavender bushes and grapevines dangling from potting sheds. I saw cherished abundance; a place that humans devoted themselves to cultivating, which I was able to enter because someone had shared it with me.

1,000 or so years feels like a long inheritance of loss. But in the allotment I saw how, across all that time, there has been a continuity.

A slow and steady enactment of power. Not the false, short-lived expression of power gained and lost by oppressive establishments, but the eternal expression of power we see in the continuity of nature and human rituals of shared connection to it.

Every season, with varying abundance - and despite the pressures bearing down on natural cycles and systems - fruit has returned to bushes and trees. People have tended to the harvest. It has been shared. Women have continued to brew potions of raspberry leaf tea to ease their hormonal fluctuations. Preserves and jams, syrups and ciders and wines have been made. Radical folk gatherings and mass trespasses are still happening, enacting our connection to the land through footfall and song.

This is resistance, routine and ongoing. This is how we need to keep up our work - like it’s natural. Like it's a birth right. Enacting your personal liberties; the freedom of speech, the freedom to vote, to wave a banner, to walk the length of your land, to grow food or medicine... all of these things are acts of praise for your political ancestors.

Some of them sacrificed themselves so that we might embody these liberties. So we need to keep going; habitually, ceremonially, collectively. Before the amnesia of comfort kicks in - or the comfort of amnesia - and makes these conditions of disconnection seem more bearable than they really are, just because we know no other way.

The raspberries seemed to tumble headlong, eager and sweet, into the centre of my palm, even when summoned by just the softest pinch.

These precious, velvety red gems - and the space we have left to grow them in - are the legacy of all those ancestors who rushed out, singing, to meet injustice head on.

A vow to try to do the same seems like a fair exchange.

Links:

Find a performance of Three Acres and a Cow near you: Shows | Three Acres And A Cow

Support the Landworker's Alliance: Landworkers' Alliance

Support England's Right to Roam: HOME | RIGHT TO ROAM

Sources:

Thelandmagazine.org.uk

Britishonlinearchives.com

Resilience.org

Leveller Women Petitioners and the Rhetoric of Power in the English Revolution (1640 - 1660) - Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille journals.openedition.org/acs/1994

Rebel Captain Pouch - faminetales.exeter.ac.uk

The men are thrown, flipped over their heads and stamped on their backs.

They get one breath in the sand before, walking as if shot, they go over to reclaim their hats.

In America the Spectacle, the West is alive and kicking.

The tin colosseum is adorned in banners and ads.

It spills with slushies and nachos. It is a pageant of curled hair and trucker caps,

Bolo ties and diamante-studded chaos, where furious animals throw their feet into the purple sky.

Till relief, when the straps under their hard, muscular bellies are released.

Sandstone buttes stand off like sharpshooters in the painted backdrop.

Their colours bruise in great falling bowls of shadow and light.

The next event of the night: a rodeo clown folds himself into a barrel and surrenders to the heavy beast that rolls him around,

Until steady, men in starched white shirts haul him out.

“This is a family affair!” the man on the tannoy cries.

A routine as well-rehearsed as Sunday dinner, any indication of risk concealed by dust, beer and glitter.

Bull riding, saddle bronc, barrel racing, steer wrestling, calf roping and a wild horse breakaway - the state’s most insane event of the day.

Teams of men dragged around for sport by a gang of unbroken fillies and colts.

One unbridled Appaloosa flies, full pelt, along the barriers. She takes in the crowd with a wild roll of her dark eyes.

And we see. And we sit with cold Modelos sweating in our grasp, it was pure curiosity that brought us to witness all this dusty pageantry

But I hadn’t known what I wanted it to be till I witnessed her,

Running like the spirit of liberty, fresh from the mountains, shaking men and their ropes into the dirt.

Then, slowly, over stumbles a weary-boned, sallow-cheeked cowboy.

She hurtles at him and he doesn’t blink, but speaks horse a second - stills her with one slow, and silent hand.

In America the Spectacle, we realised who comes out in first place.

Not the boy with the shiniest belt buckle and the worst car-crash of a limp.

Not the hot, running things brought in and taught to kick with a prize-winning rage.

But the ones who fill the seats, cheering at the blood and dirt stage - entertained.

You couldn’t possibly stare someone in the eye as you squeezed past them to break out of your aeroplane seat, inching awkwardly, knees grazing against thighs as you narrowly escape into the relief of the aisle.

This is how I would explain why Brits (of the south) are (stereotypically) ‘unfriendly’ to one another. We don’t have the breathing room for exchanging niceties on the thin pavements or the crowded public transport of our cities.

On the other hand, my experience of New Mexico was people reaching out to one another energetically, across the wealth of empty space between them. And I got used to it. Just one reason behind why I was a little nervous about swapping the llano for the urban south of England.

The switch also symbolised the end of a big adventure, and a return to normalcy and work. I didn’t foresee it feeling so much like a homecoming.

But, in the morning, this city drifts with the familiar scorched-toast smell of coffee roasteries. I go to get milk and there are missing cat signs with FOUND scrawled over a grainy picture. There children sailing to school on the shoulders of their fathers, dignified as little kings.

This place has its enclaves of community, and I’ve landed squarely in one that’s signposted with dozens of my own stories. Even though I’ve only been living here for 4 years. Maybe it’s because it isn’t very big - this city, this country, this island - it holds things like memories more closely.

The past is like a small woven basket in the crook of my elbow. I walk around here slowly, prompted by certain landmarks to periodically look down into it and nod.

There are strange things in there, but I once cared about them, deeply. A girl I remember lived here, best she could, before I arrived. Peering in with a mildly mystified acceptance lets the basket hang light.

And you have to let the basket hang light.

My partner has lived here for most of his life, so it’s an ever thicker medium for him to move through upon a return. When we go out, he’s decelerated by various inevitable interactions with people who are something akin to neighbours… Fixtures. Witnesses.

The butchers, the veggie shop, the pub are all sites of warm reunion that ring of village life, and discredit the hard-edged British stereotype. It’s surprisingly nice.

One trick, I’ve found, to finding peace in the teeming epicentre of tarmac and brick is looking out for the ways that the city is overrun with all life, not just my own, not just his, and not just with humanity.

The allotments are tumbling with berries. A blackbird visits our back garden at dusk. Beyond the garden is a little stream, and beyond that, the sky is thick with trees.

There’s one in particular, a plane tree, who’s ancient, scaled body makes me think of God if God were a cosmic, interdimensional elephant, and elephant had stamped hard, once and forever, into the patchy grass of Mina Road Park.

And we are unsettled, watching uneasy as leaders we don’t trust linger over their next chess move. Their game is war and their prize is money and though we bray like animals for the board to be flipped, they don’t hear. They never tried to listen to languages other than their own.

Their sacred cow is a cash crop. Their sacred cow needs to be tipped. It’s time to mock the modern gods and stop the airless concepts of purity and progress from stifling us.

Time to enter the Kingdom of Summer, that fecund land where we bring brief, uncultivated little worlds into being - places that we can escape to and devolve for a while. No more fathers of progress, no more gods of gain, no more algorithm kings, no more masters of manipulation.

Nothing but the sweet hum of a June afternoon, and a small world to be built on our own terms, stone by stone.

I met some friends in a field last weekend, on the coast in Cardigan Bay. I arrived to find my tasks waiting; digging up cobbles from a creek bed and getting covered in blue-grey clay. Slipping and sticking and stinking under the dappled shade of ash leaves and harts tongue ferns. I dug the purest patches of clay up, too, and carried chunks to the others, who built a drystone wall around a bath tub on the grass. Firepit below it, and chimney jutting out from the back.

We made sure there were stones perfectly placed to hold tea lights, or wine glasses, and put a bunch of lavender in the hole where one tap used to be. It was our monument to carnal delight, because there is nothing else left to devote ourselves to other than spelling out the shape of the word ‘play’ with our human bodies. A disobedient dalliance that goes dancing and spluttering through woodsmoke as the light falls.

Someone tended to the fire and someone read their book. Someone saw to the needs of whoever was in the hot water, for they were, briefly, the queen. Someone turned steaks on the open flame - a roadkill deer found and butchered by the group the previous day.

She had a strangely familiar flavour, as if there was still too much life in the way she tasted. But we were grateful for the nourishment, the unintentional blood sacrifice made.

Our haven was not fortified against the troubles of being alive; inevitabilities like time or fear or pain. Our bodies entered this place by jumping into the sea’s silver chop, searching the seaweedy murk for crabs, getting scraped on barnacles and swimming, shivering, through the low thunder of a narrow sea cave. It was traversed by motorbike, the passenger’s hands folded tight over the drivers heart as if she could offer them any protection from disaster. But there was none to be had, no guarantee of permanence, even there, no concepts like ‘forever,’ nor ‘safe.’

In short-lived summer worlds such as these, wisdom and intelligence are isolated to the body. That weekend, we solved no problems other than the simple, fleeting issues of comfort, desire, and need.

There was only the scalding hot, fire-fuelled bath, the bed in the ramshackle cabin, the flies trapped in with the heat, the freshly picked raspberries that started moulding within hours.

We understood the bargain - had come to be taught brevity by summer's pause. The single, high moment of sun-stand-still we get per year. One short night and a breath, caught hard and gold between two mouths. One small, animal noise when sovereignty was ceded and the held breath fell back out.

This is how you surrender an empire. Trembling with excitement. Fear swallowed up by trust.

But our leaders don’t seem to know how to yield. They go on, pretending to prize life whilst bartering, buying and selling it to win their poisoned game. They belong to a death cult that believes security can be sustained and decline can be guarded against.

Meanwhile, we hear summer's rustling invitation to get archaic for a season; build more small worlds from meat and stone, seawater and wood, fire and clay.

We will steal brief and beautiful moments back from the churn of their bleak machine. And then, we’ll show them how to hand a dream back again, letting it rot away quick as it came.

We watched the stars emerge awhile, dog and child dancing round the fire whilst we sipped beers and stared upwards at the dark sky spectacle.

Then Starlink sailed over.

It was a long chain of moving specks of light, stretching all the way from one horizon to the other. The unnatural caravan took some time to pass. We were disappointed, to have thought of ourselves as the sole evidence of humanity within the empty quiet of the canyon. It had seemed that we were surrounded by only its sleeping ponderosas and junipers and cottonwoods, threaded by a chilly breeze.

Starlink removed something in that moment. We had been out in the sticks, in the presence of something so big and distant and benevolent as space, watching us with its million sparkling eyes. And then we realised that those eyes were human, too.

That event made me think about the intoxicating promise of vastness that drew me to America; to nights in canyons with friends sleeping in truck beds, tents, or simply out on the ground, wherever they pleased. The open access to federal public land that is an invitation here.

I know that "wilderness" is a myth, that this land, no matter how untouched it seems, has had human occupants for tens of thousands of years. But I wonder if the men who colonised it, who crossed empty oceans by night, got a taste for keeping fathomless scale as company on those long lonely journeys.

Did they find that appetite affirmed under the swelling oceans of coloured rock when they arrived on this side of the world? Did they decide then, in that moment, that they'd fight for their stake to the silence of its mountains, and incomprehensible depths of its gorges - the bewildering sense of being human in the presence of something unknowably big? Something they called their God?

Now, other people of a colonising mindset have also claimed the inky black that was precious in being unknowable and unreachable. Do we all just want to get as close as possible to something bigger than ourselves? Does that desire and effort make us brave and intrepid adventurers, or childlike in our constant reaching upwards for reassurance?

Georgia O'Keeffe's home, Ghost Ranch, isn't so far from here, over in Abiquiu. A few days after that trip to El Rito, I went to Taos' community art centre and watched a documentary about her, called the Brightness of Light. They said something I liked, about how Georgia lived on the knife edge out there, and how living a remote life like that requires a responsibility that is inherently American.

I see American preparedness everywhere, and I feel and understand that call. Not when it falls off the cliff of doom prepping and arming oneself against the world - which it does - but because New Mexico asks fitness of the body and resilience of the mind if you are to interact deeply with it. Ask anyone who takes their kit to the crags, anyone going out on long adventures with gallons and gallons of water and petrol in jerry cans strapped to their truck roofs.

It makes me think the best way to live with vastness is not to claim it, but to make yourself into something that resembles the thing you want. Something tough and rugged and wild.

Georgia said that if she painted the Piedernal enough times, it might belong to her. It's a flat-topped crest above Ghost Ranch; I saw this sweet, iconic shape in the distance from across the mesa on so many drives through Taos. It hit me in the gut every time, watered my eyes - that cartoon cowboy country silhouette under the constant circus of colour and light that is the New Mexico sky.

And I like to think she meant she'd earn her view by painting it again and again, embodying it; silhouette travelling through her arm to the canvas on so many journeys that something of it would remain in her.

Like when the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, speaks with God's voice, he says, “You, sent out beyond your recall/ go to the limits of your longing/ Embody me/ Flare up like a flame/ and make big shadows I can move in.” I think that's what I appreciate about this landscape: its call to live big, responsibly, reverently.

So when a friend offered to take me on a multipitch trad climb up a nearby 400ft rock face, it felt like the perfect way to answer this tall request.

We met up after I'd driven through a cloudless, simmering early-morning sky to the Midtown Lounge in Arroyo Hondo, a gas station-cornerstore-bar and pool rooms, just off the highway that runs north to Questa and on through wild horse country into Colorado, if you follow it long enough.

He was leaning on the back of his blue Tacoma, smoking, uncomfortably bereft of his dog for the day, but Bismarck couldn't join for this adventure.

Just outside of Questa, and up into the hills, Questa Dome raised her proud stone head, sheer and proud above the surrounding forest.

It felt early in the whole world on our walk up through the forest gulley, which was slow and hard with all our gear. Water rushed the last of the snowmelt down fast from the sun-struck mountaintops. The ponderosa pine needles looked like green stars caught in webs of bronze bark.

From the top of the first pitch, I could see out to the Rio Grande gorge. A flat, black snake in the distance - a dark crack in the mesa. The climbing was fun, slabby, thoughtful but not difficult crack climbing. A little tough on the toes and fingers - the glittering gold granite was sharp. And the wind was pretty relentless, distracting, alongside the camelpak spout which leaked water down my shoulder all morning as I climbed.

It was methodical going, with my buddy placing the cams where the rock could hold us, me following behind and retrieving them. Our belay points were exposed but safe, and the tanned grinning face leaning down to watch for me every time I popped up into view heartened me.

For all the wind-battered waiting between climbs, slow work moving up cracks with rucksack and buddy checks and swapping cams back and forth, it felt sudden when we arrived at the last pitch. The rock up there was more weather worn than anything I’d seen yet, worked into grippy nodules by wind and rain. We scaled up round the side of an overhanging roof, and had a long scramble before a change of shoes and celebratory beer on the sunny dometop.

The trees must have been tall; they didn't seem so far down. And the Piedernal, way off in the distance, was still making that unmistakable shape that went straight to the heart of me, reminding me of how Georgia kept her beloved mountain moving through her arms, representing it rather than owning it.

My own arms, and fingertips and toes, and the breathlessness of my chest and the sun burning my cheeks, were all ringing with Questa Dome. Thanks to the trad climbing ethos, no trace of us or the morning we’d had was left behind as we bumped down the dirt track. We headed back towards the determined, prepared, or stubborn, or just insane humans eking out their human business on the unforgiving mesa, and having a beer about it at the Midtown Lounge in between.

We joined them there, dazzled, dirty and happy. And when I drove home back through Arroyo Hondo once again, I felt attached to this world for the woman it was asking me to become. Someone physically strong, brave and free, with big thirsty eyes and a heart that will never quite get full up on all of this place’s shapes, nor it's dry, bright light.

“Manby hot springs later?”

When gardening is through, we roll down a rutted dirt track towards the Rio Grande gorge on the north side of the overlook bridge. Her old 4x4 judders. As with every other windshield I've sat behind out here so far, hers is badly cracked. We take our chance on our parking spot. “Private property. Sometimes there's a dog,” she says. Today, we're lucky. The only things on a chase are the sun, the wind and the intermittent rain.

We descend a track from the plateau down to the river bed, cracked basalt blocks on one side of us, steep slopes of sage brush and scree on the other. The river is running narrow, dark and fast below. Eventually, at the bottom of the gorge, we meet three shallow pools of still water sitting above pumice silt, brimming over the stacks of stones with dark green algae at their edges.

The sky has gone briefly grey above us and we're chilled, nude, stepping into the hottest of the pools. A young couple in one corner say nothing to us nor each other. Their soft embrace is unbreakable, dark mutual gazes communicating something secret and unwavering. Petra asks me if I know the story of the pools and I confess no. So she tells me about Arthur Manby.

The hot springs were used by the Puebloan communities for hundreds of years prior to the arrival of the Spanish, and they knew it as “Wa-pu-mee,” meaning “water of long life.” Spanish settlers thought they’d found a candidate for their apocryphal Aztec fountain of eternal youth when they laid claim to the land in the 1600s. In the 1880s, several anglos made a tourist buck from visitors taking the toll bridges across the river, when the Chili Line railroad was put up on the nearby western edge of the Taos Plateau. But no developers were so interested in the hot springs as Arthur Manby.

In 1906, British-born Manby was awarded (through coercion, it's said) the Spanish Land Grant - a parcel of property awarded to individuals and communities by the Spanish government to encourage settlement and expansion of their New Mexico territory - that included the hot springs. He built them up from the surrounding stones and ran a bathhouse, likely a brothel, that was accessible by stagecoach track along the river.

Allegedly, he'd have people damage the stagecoaches or block the track, so people would have to stay and spend their money at his shady establishment.

Manby lived out near the springs, away from Taos town, due to his involvement in various local disputes and reknowned disreputability. He was planning to build a resort that would include a luxury hotel with the springs as the centerpiece, but struggled to gain investment.

“These springs are the long lost springs of the Aztecs, and the fact coupled with history seems to indicate that such a belief is well founded, then these springs … should ultimately develop into one of the world’s greatest resorts,” he pitched to potential investors.

In a possible karmic retribution for his nauseating imperialist dream, a flood destroyed much of what he had started building in 1927. But what's more, two years later he was found decapitated in his home. The local lore is that Taos' authorities dismissed his death as due to natural causes, because they had no qualms against this grifter's murder.

The sun cracks past clouds and goes streaking through the water around us as Petra finishes telling her story. Our companions have not stirred from their gentle clutch. We quietly soak our human bodies, briefly still and heated by water moving up through deep and slender seams in the endless Earth, into a world full of our folly and crime and nonsense.

It emerges into a landscape that feels made yesterday, and still full of its frontier recklessness; cracked windscreens and land disputes. Then the light and the old, rising water combine, and to see it and feel it on your skin reminds you that this is, all of it, ancient.

A few nights later, I’m back down at the bottom of the gorge, a mile or so upstream from Manby, at the Black Rock hotsprings. The night sky is bright with an invisible full moon that hasn't yet crested the canyon walls above us. They're lit up in silver. This pool is much deeper, dropping away from my feet in places. Hotter, too.

The wild spa is not crowded, but it's a revolving door of characters at this late hour nonetheless. There are flashes in the bright black around us. Stars. A meteor. The intermittent glow of a vape pen. “That hole up there's a mine shaft,” someone points to a dark gap in the rubble above. “What were they mining?” I ask. “Not sure, probably gold.”

Every so often, a change of guard in the pool; a farewell and a new arrival and a shift in conversation. Someone begins telling an unbelievable story about two mountain lions they once saw fighting at the top of the plateau from down here in the water. The animals wrestled, swiped and batted in the moonlight, until things seemed to calm down and the pair sat, side by side, looking out across the gorge in apparent peace.

Suddenly and silently, they recount, one of the animals raised a giant forepaw, unseen behind the other. It smacked the other cat's shoulders, hard, sending it careening down the silvery rockface.

“He ran off like a criminal!”

I make the appropriate noises for so wild a story and think, perhaps. Perhaps this land not is peopled, or even animaled, by creatures that are wholly good. It would be OK. A story’s nefarious characters don't make it an inherently bad narrative.

Similarly, this landscape has known its crooks and knaves, and yet the inky pools do not let up their hot embrace around us, even for a second.

Quickly, there's another shift as someone asks the tender question, “When was the last time you were in love?” The responses come in low and jaded tones. “3 years ago.” “10 years ago.” I say mine like a confession, feeling foolish for my persistent heart.

“I can't stay out of it, God help me.”

But the hotspring water is also delivered by the churning heart of stubbornly warm Earth. And so I grin into the dark, and get a flash of teeth in return.

“Fucking writers.”

A father and daughter duo were selling ‘Spirit Spirals’ at their stall in the dusty car park - their own creative take on dreamcatchers. I intruiged them with my out-of-townness, and in return for sharing my story, they told me about the Taos Hum.

Allegedly, this place emits its a low-frequency drone which has been researched for years without any resolution on its source. Whatever it is - wind patterns, seismic activity, military testing, or even ‘UFO research’ going on 270 miles away in Roswell – a deep, faint droning sound has been picked up by a small percentage of the population.

It’s a vibrating feeling, the pair tell me. Similar to a distant diesel engine. I held in a laugh, but my disbelief wasn’t about the hum’s existence. Bristol - where I began my travels from, the city that had kept me snagged for the last 4 years - is also a humming place.

Bristol has its own mysterious, low-frequency rumble, reported by a small number of residents since the 60’s, who describe a pulsating, low-pitched sound. Maybe due to industrial noise, maybe seismic, maybe oceanic waves; I know I’ve spent many a sleepless night in that city, listening to a low reverberation I just assumed was passing traffic.

There are river gorges that cut deep through both of these places. My personal theory is the wind, barreling through the Avon and the Rio Grande channels, reverberating their rock walls as it goes. But, both places also have their irresitibility. Like many other people, I describe Bristol as sticky. It’s difficult to leave for long. Maybe the hum is in fact its people, its music, its back-to-the-land folk resurgence, its hotbed of activism, its cultural scene, which create something necessary and resonant when all rolled up together.

I’ve arrived another rumbling landscape, and maybe the hum explains why. Studies on migratory seabirds have shown that when they decide where to go next, they choose the direction with the loudest infrasound: they can detect a low-frequency humming, called micro-barums, that’s typically inaudible to humans. It likely comes from high winds and wave activity on a distant shoreline. Invisible energetic lines criss-cross the Earth and draw out our creaturely migrations.

One Friday night, I drove to the nearest bar. It’s a solar-powered radio station and watering hole that gets electrified every evening with a local buzz. As I sped across the mesa, the ghostly canine vision of a coyote nosed its way out of a patch of roadside brush. A steely shelf of cloud sat over the sunset out west, and above the cloud band, a huge anvil-shaped stormcloud flashed with lightning. The rest of the sky was clear and open, painted with dreamscape pastels. The mountains to the east deepened their blush.

As I drove, I felt like my soul was being pulled, out and up, expanding to fill all the space offered by the boundless, dancing sky. At the bar, I’d told them - the inquisitive, bafflingly friendly locals - that I’m just passing through and they had all laughed.

‘We said that too, *insert number of decades here* ago.’

The license plates of all the trucks outside the bar bore the same New Mexico strapline, ‘The Land of Enchantment,’ adorned by two chilis, one red one green. Their owners fondly tweak the phrase, calling it ‘The Land of Entrapment.’

Well, if leaving would require packing one's soul all back in again, I understand why so many of the people I’ve met never did.

A week later, I sat up front in a new friend’s Tacoma as we drove back from a climbing and camping trip in southern Colorado. Driving towards Taos, San Antonio mountain slid by on one side, domed and dusted with snow. The long flat sweep of dry plains stretched out in the other direction, east to the Sangre de Cristo mountains.

I had to ask my friend the question that was on a marble-roll through my mind, which was otherwise as wide, peaceful and empty as the land around us. He has lived out on the mesa beyond the Rio Grande gorge for a few years now. So I felt like he might understand.

‘Do you ever feel kind untethered here? Because of all this space? Because I'm getting this feeling like something in me is expanding and coming loose. Has that happened to you?’

His dog, Bismarck, stood on the back seat, resting a chunky head on my shoulder, scenting the cab with marine breath. Stroking Bismarck’s fluffy jowls in one hand, I waited for the answer. My friend cast his gaze around our surroundings, leaned to look out and up at the high, floating clouds in an endless depth of blue. Their shadows played out in full across the mountain slopes.

‘Indiana, where my mum lives, is super humid. Loads of forest. I felt so damn claustrophobic last time I went back to see her that I had to take her car and just drive around, smoke a bit, to feel better. So, yeah. I think that's the same thing.’

I nod, satisfied with the answer, grateful for the validation. He turns his eyes back to the tarmac, the straight line running forever ahead.

We had just driven out from under a thunderstorm, rain falling like iron rods as we raced down a soaked and rutted dirt track he had hoped would take us towards the sand dunes at the foot of the mountains. The sky had darkened as we left behind the canyon we’d been camping in with some other climber friends.

The rain front of us was like bolts of falling sheet metal. Occasionally, there was a split in vision all the way to the dirt, when white hot electricity cracked the air. A brief interruption of sky for light, so close it felt personal.

We pounded along the track until we reached a gate, yelling to each other in the cab over the noise of the rain. I had to get out, check to see if was locked, and for the first time in my adult life was scared of a thunderstorm - reluctant to be the tallest thing in the vicinity aside from the metal gate I needed to touch. But it was locked, anyway. We laughed. No roadtrip without at least one dead-end detour, and no destination that could’ve been more exciting in that moment than what was over our heads.

I used to be so incredulous at the idea of every American household owning and driving a big fuel-hungry truck. And I’m still not saying it’s right, but here, now, it does make more sense. The Tacoma’s flatbed was filled with camping and climbing kit. The pitted dirt roads we’d encountered were unproblematic because of its suspension, its high cab. Up there, I had my privileged view of the broad sweep of the world outside. I watched the storm cell roll along and away whilst the engine and wheels sang their low hum through my body too.

New Mexico is similarly tempting and complicated. For all the ways that creatures respond to a resonant murmur running through their animal bodies, there are all the ways that their worlds collide. Migrations and battles have played out here for millenia; Spanish colonisation, Indigenous revolts, the Mexican-American war, the American Civil War, the Navajo and Apache wars, to name a recent few.

There is vibrancy and cultural exchange across a remarkably varied, hyper-scale landscape. And there are ongoing struggles along socio-economic, post-colonial and class-based lines. I won’t privilege myself to use words like ‘belonging’ or ‘affinity to describe my draw to such a contested place.

But I recognise its magnetics and relate to all the others who followed its humming call before me, rolling their bones towards wide open space and stopping when they realised just how much was there.

Something about being in transit provides a moment to decide what you want to bring with you. You can decide what you’ll leave behind. You can make room for whatever it is you might become during your time in wherever it is that you’re going.

On that first, blue New Mexico morning, I blinked in all the space I saw between people and things. I was waiting outside for the Rail Runner – a short passenger train with monstrously big carriages – from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. All the breathing room was different to how it felt in Europe, and was likely because everyone was in their cars rather than out and walking around. Dodge RAM after Dodge RAM rolled slowly by, along wide, straight roads. But I was bound for a town called Taos, and all the space around me felt like room for another moment of shapeshifting.

The previous night I had walked, dazed and sleep-deprived, into late-night chaos in the lobby of a daggy mid-town hotel. A wedding reception, no hot water in any of the rooms, and a conflict in the parking lot were unfolding all at once. It had been a 36-hour day. I’d travelled through the night from Granada to Madrid, spent the morning in the airport before taking a 10-hour flight across the Atlantic to Dallas, and transferring to Albuquerque.

In the morning, a crowd of folks who were town for the Gathering of Nations (North America's largest annual powwow) appeared, making the lobby a sea of colourful earrings, bright skirts, bum bags, proud bellies and long hair. Ernesto, my Uber driver to the railway station, was half-Italian, half-Spanish. Like much of New Mexico’s Hispanic population, his forebears aren’t Mexican, rather, the Spanish settlers who arrived in the 1600s.

Ernesto told me that I was in a ‘young place’ – somewhere that suits people who want to start fresh lives. I would soon hear the sentiment repeated again and again amongst locals – ‘it doesn’t feel like the US here. It’s its whole own thing.’ True enough, New Mexico has only been America for 113 years.

Ernesto described New Mexico’s unique fusion cuisine – which incorporates staple crops of the Indigenous (Pueblo, Navajo and Apache) diet with baking and frying techniques introduced by the Spanish, as well as ingredients (coriander, avocados, limes) and cooking traditions introduced by Mexican settlers. He told me to ask for ‘Christmas chilis’ when I next ordered tortillas - the mix of red and green is best - and warned me about the lack of humidity and the altitude as I headed up towards Taos.

When I’d told people in Europe that I was travelling to the States, it often came out of my mouth like a confession. Why are you going there? At the time, I couldn’t say I really knew. I had a few connections? There were seemingly nice people to host me, and some friends of friends I could get into the outdoors with?

For the most part, the draw was (what I’d feared to be) an over-inflated impression of the romanticism of the southwestern US landscape. Thank you, movies (Easy Rider; Paris, Texas; Thelma and Louise) and books (All the Pretty Horses and Animal Dreams).

Rolling out of Albuquerque, I’d had my doubts. Squat buildings sat in sandy yards full of battered cars and gaudy ornaments. Sway-backed, ribby horses waited for nothing in their rusting corrals. Men were moving through the bright sun like spacejunk cast out of Earth. One can in the hand was enough to enact gravity on their stooped bodies. A man at a bus stop crossed himself as he buckled. Even the cottonwoods seemed to be collapsing under their own weight. The sense of rural atrophy was disconcerting.

But, when we hit Pueblo land, it was like someone had taken the southern Spanish desert I’d just flown away from, and rendered it at some unthinkable new scale. There were huge, dry arroyos filled with cattle prints. Snow-topped mountains ringfenced the high mesa. Dust-devils were being struck up by wind in the distance, lit by sunrays beaming through gaps in the cartoon clouds.

And later, when I rounded a hill along Highway 68 towards Taos and the south Rockies, my tired mind bent. The Rio Grande gorge stretched out in front of me, a rift valley like some huge rip in the physical world. Reality had warped, and I was heading 60 miles an hour into my own daydreams.

Walking through town with a new friend on my third day in Taos, I wondered out loud to them what the small clay domes were that I saw in the yards of every adobe home. A stranger passing me at the same time hollered out helpfully, unashamed to admit having overhead - a typical display of American friendliness (which I was finding baffling). ‘It’s a horno! A Native American oven!’ A little research, later, shows me that hornos were originally introduced to Andalucía, the region of Spain where I’d just spent the past 2 months, by the Moors who ruled it between 711 to 1492 AD. Hornos were later introduced to Spanish-occupied lands, and have been used in the Pueblos for centuries.

New Mexico’s Pueblos are the permanent settlements of the Puebloan peoples - Indigenous tribes of various different language groups. Other Spanish traditions endure amongst them, such as Catholicism - 90% of Taos Puebloans practice Catholicism alongside their older religious rites. Their languages - Tiwa for the Taos Puebloans - coexist alongside New Mexico Spanish, which is a uniquely old-timey dialect of Castillan Spanish.

And here, as in Andalucía, you can find acequias; earthen canals which were designed by the Moors to channel and distribute water communally through mountaineous, arid landscapes.

Andalucía’s Muslim inhabitants perfected its acequia irrigation network, which still stretches over 15,000 miles in Almeria and Granada. An acequia ran through the last village in Spain I stayed in, and was still its lifeline, managed as a community-operated water resource. In Taos, the acequia system was introduced by Spanish settlers and also still exists, managed by the Taos Valley Acequia Association.

The collision of cultures is a vibrant thing with a violent history, and for all its cultural continuity, there is a memory of grief and trauma on this land that lives on as injustice. Some of the street names and names etched in Taos Plaza's plaques are so bitter on the tongues of Puebloan people that they avoid entering the town. Paternalism and betrayal on the part of settler authorities are unfortunate themes of these interwoven histories.

Taos Puebloans predominantly live within and around the boundaries of their traditional lands, as they have done for over 1,000 years. Their tribal government is a sovereign entity and manages the land and resources within its own jurisdiction, which includes 48,000 acres of spiritually significant land that was returned to them under the Nixon administration in 1970.

It’s a triumphant story of re-desgination, but access to land beyond the Pueblo is still limited due to its prices, or the fact that Spanish Land Grants still demarcate ownership, which were often designated under dubious or brutal colonial circumstances.

I know little about these stories - this place’s stories. I’m new. But I can say that it does really seem like its ‘whole own thing’ here. Not Mexico, not Spain. Not all the way America, even, by grace of all its influences. The language I get to learn whilst here is an entirely new one to me.

Because I could probably keep up my Spanish practice whilst here. There are Spanish translations under lots of the signage. But I’m talking about new vocabulary; words I’ve never needed to use to describe the world before. Words like ‘sagebrush’ and ‘cholla cactus’ and ‘aspen.’ ‘Bighorn sheep’ and ‘coyote.’ Words for the birds, like ‘grosbeak’ and ‘towhee,’ and the brand new sound of hummingbirds darting amongst apple blossom - a precious, high-pitched whirr.

Joining Taos’ unfolding, big-world, small-town conversation requires speaking a bodily language of dry heat and altitude. It’s joining a dialogue that’s cast in basalt rock walls and etched in dust. One that’s painted in pastels and hung on display in an astonishing number of art galleries for such a remote place. One that sounds out on the KTAO community radio station and plays across the barroom, and is exchanged easily between the people who all seem to know each other.

They all seem have time to stop and chat. And I don’t entirely understand it all yet; the words, the natural sounds or the social currency it takes to be entirely included in this small town’s human machinations.

But, travelling enables shapeshifting, and I plan to take on an open form; one that permits me to hold this bodily conversation as fully as possible over the next few short weeks. For all its beauty and its uncomfortable truths.

All we’ve ever needed was a minor retreat from the galling nonsense: we could always handle the worst if we were sometimes allowed the tiniest of awakenings from the nightmare, and the gods, so far, have allowed us this.

– Bréné Brown.

I met Karolina on the bus from Almería to Sorbas, southern Spain. I was traversing Andalucía, from Jimena de la Frontera to Granada and onwards. Heading to where the land turns arid, almost lunar, on the eastern side of the country.

Karolina is Polish, with sun-bleached hair, a dark tan from having spent the past two months in Morocco, and an easy giggle. Dry river beds, slopes and canyons carved by erosion rolled by us. A ‘TEXAS HOLLYWOOD’ sign shouted the fact that this place was the filming location for many spaghetti westerns. We shared snacks and wondered, together, what the community who awaited us at Sunseed would be like.

Sunseed Desert Technology is a regenerative, off-grid community project. It was set up in the 80s to further the sustainability transition in Andalucía. Organised around principles of sociocracy, with a small, ever-evolving population, it seeks to continually develop an ecologically-harmonious mode of existence whilst protecting and regenerating the resources it depends on; water (namely the river that runs through it, the Rio Agua), and the semi-desert soil.

Two dusty, smiling Sunseeders, Leonie and Lucas, picked us up from Sorbas in the Sunseed van. When we rounded the bend into the Los Molinos del Rio Agua canyon, Karolina and I were both dazzled. Our noises made Lucas grin. ‘I love showing people this place for the first time.’ The canyon walls were crumbled sandstone towers that glittered with gypsum crystals. We saw plateaus of bright wildflowers, blowing grass canes and poplars, gardens, orchards and a native tree nursery, and the collection of houses that formed the Los Molinos village.

The lush river valley seemed out of place in the surrounding dryland scrub. Decades of work have gone into minimising the community’s water demands on the endangered river. Grey water is cycled through their gardens and rainwater is filtered for drinking.

Because the river supports the biodiversity of the Karst de Yeso natural park, the community also are fastidious about ensuring they use no chemicals that will cause harm if they enter the waterway. Soap, shampoo, toothpaste, cleaning products - everything is natural and handmade.

Yet, they told us, the river level is still visibly decreasing. Intensive monoculture olive farms nearby are depleting the aquifer faster than it can recharge. And, for all their conscientious efforts, recent testing still shows that the river is contaminated with E Coli by the time it reaches Los Molinos.

But this hasn’t interrupted the stubborn, collective commitment to care. The bentonite clay, peppermint oil and baking soda we used to clean our teeth, the cold showers and vegan meals, the lack of washing machine, the limited use of electrics to daylight hours, the compost loos and the diligent sorting of all material waste we created.

Between a dream and its reality waits the work that must be done; the sacrifice and the effort. There is another Spanish phrase I like, one I learnt during my time at Sunseed. ‘Se hace el camino al andar.’ The road is created by walking. And Sunseed’s walking paths all seem to braid through its gardens, down to the river past a native tree re-forestation area. A bright, incessant chorus of warblers, collared doves, robins and nightingales sound out like advocates of the work done so far.

On my first night, I sat outside next to Karolina, under a lamp that was handmade from the gypsum shards. We’d been introduced to our home for a short while, and it had exceeded out expectations. We didn’t need to talk that through, just pause together, chests rising and falling in unison.

Trying to live a less ecologically-costly human life is impossible in isolation. It takes discipline, accountability, and supportive systems. We fall into apathy without these things. As I spent my two weeks of volunteering at Sunseed, the world beyond continued its nihilistic churn. A depressing majority of people continued to opt for disengagement with the consequences of their lifeways.

Participating briefly in the careful dedication of this group to their cherished, limited natural resources felt like coming up for air.

Sunseed takes a sensitive approach to sociocracy. The daily check ins, which are sincere and tender moments of sharing around a morning circle, and the more methodical weekly meetings, help all members of the community understand and relate to each other. I think this has a huge part to play in fostering the ethic of reciprocal care that extended beyond the human relationships within the Los Molinos canyon.

In nature, all flourishing is mutual. In my two weeks at Sunseed, my cup was filled to brimming by dozens of hands, despite the dwindling water resource. They were as attentive, generous and loving towards relatively brief visitors like myself as they were to their surroundings, and this approach was catching.

I learnt that the opposite of apathy is empathy, or something like it. Something akin to love ensures that these people still have the heart to keep trying to keep the Rio Agua running. Thank God for their heart-led faith in themselves and each other. Perhaps that’s what keeps us humans moving - what will keep us alive.