Early spring. Primavera [1]. Time for long-dormant ideas to sprout and make themselves known. Time to sense the sunlight breach the wall. Time to stop hiding for the winter. Time to stop hiding, full stop.
It’s ten years since I started seriously thinking about writing. Ten years of scheming, reading, sketching out ideas, blogging, appearing then disappearing from view. Nothing has landed, nothing has taken root, there has been no commitment to myself long enough to place careful black words on white page and send them out. I read Katherine May’s newsletter this week as her new book Enchantment is published in America (and in the UK today), and I’m heartened to hear this feels reassuringly like a writerly process: have an idea, kick it around, abandon it, pick another, join the two, grapple with the point of it all.
But there is something different about this year that is bringing things to a cusp. Something is rising. Maybe I’m just getting older and can spot the limited sunrises on the horizon. I feel like the scaly buds on our tiny pear tree we planted two summers ago, cracking open its scaly buds, offering its raw vulnerable flesh to whatever edge of air or creature may find it. Anyone - anything could pick or nibble them, squeeze or freeze them. So vulnerable and yet they still do it. Their life force is so compelling that nothing stops it. Being out there is a risk, it always is. But it brings such potential that I can’t deny it anymore. Follow the energy, they whisper. Follow that small growing bud of rightness within your bones.
It’s been a week of sending tentative buds into the ecosystem around me. I’ve signed up to geotherapist Ruth Allen’s Embodied Writing Mentorship programme for writing running through spring and summer (sign up to her Substack, Breccia, it’s wonderful). Questions rattle through me: how do I integrate my whole self? How do I bridge the chasm between academic me and me me? What do I have to say, how can I speak, what can I learn from my place, what does it mean to write from my body? How will I ever make it achingly beautiful like those words I love to read? How is there a point otherwise? How can I stop hiding?
I take my questions on a walk and I’ll take you too, but I’ll warn you now that there are no neat answers to these questions. It’s a late February afternoon, sun full in a vivid blue sky. Work done for the day, the hours until sundown are my own.
Across the road, on past the nursery where children’s voices bubble into the sky. The light seems to grow colour. I’ve been reading Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s delightful book again - The Grassling - and I follow her lead and count the yellows of March as I head west out of the village. Weak yellow centre of an old wall daisy, bowing over the tarmac. Scabs of lichen hugging the stone wall. Pools of acid-yellow celandines, one, two, a dozen, flowers crisp and perfect, their best selves for a brief moment. Fresh lime-yellow catkins of hazel saplings, plentiful from last year’s growth, hanging like chromosome pairs in a textbook. (Later, a yellow stain of lemon and ginger tea will seep from the flask and crinkle the edges of my notebook.) Tiny daffodils bloom impossibly in the steep banks where they were likely thrown by old market-gardening hands clearing the growing fields in the last century.
I leave the cars and houses behind and the empty lane stretches ahead. Bare branches of sycamore and ash to my left cast shadows from the still-winter sun, barcode-like, blanks and lines, zeros and ones. I reach Spanish Corner, named (by a previous me, new to the village) for its solitary umbrella-like pine so familiar from our travels in the pinos of Costa Blanca. There’s no wind today so I pass beneath its silent shining branches, no shush of air through thin waxy leaves. Turn north, down the hill where the far side of the valley opens out in zig-zag lanes and jumbled fields. Sleek and tiny rich green leaves line the steep-descending lane, early intimations of the wild garlic to come next month. Past the staggered crossroads, each road an invitation to almost nowhere, and continue round to the west now, the gentle slope now felt in my breath. The village stream appears bubbling in my right ear, then crosses beneath the lane and carries away across the enclosed field in my left ear; a stereophonic test of water. On up the hill, steeper now, lungs working hard, sun casting airy shadows across the ground, eyes squinting. Hello: a young man tends the newly planted hedge saplings in the bank above my head. A rare walker appears ahead of me with peaked hat in hand, head bare to the warming sun. I slow my pace and slink behind him.
Round the dusty corner: small gateways gape to fields dropping to the river beyond, home to a few curious cattle and (always) startled pheasants. The lane outlines the end of a rectangle at this point and loops back round to the east where it winds its way back to the village. But today, I take the earthen track at the top corner of the rectangle, and head straight up through a narrowing track. A Dartmoor version of a holloway, a rural version of a ginnel, that small track between fields, wide enough once for farmer and beast. I step beside animal spaces that tube up through the hedge trees atop the bank. Hart’s tongue; tattered from a winter of deluge and desiccation. Pale primroses - primavera - ready to flower. At the top of the track, a heavy galvanised gate has to be worked free to allow me to squeeze through and I am there. In a different space. Moor.
On up the gentle slope towards the white rock, exposed amongst creeping moss and close-worn grass. I can see all around: to the moor ahead of me, rusty bracken fronds collapsed on themselves, laid flat, as if the aftermath of a devastating flood. Down to the crenelated ridgeline of the Tavy valley far below this place. On up, paths offering choices up into the tangle of ground cover, holly trees, and spreading oaks. I almost step on three tiny fluffy pheasant feathers at my feet, an intimate triad of sheen and copper. I choose the path ahead. Feet float through the crispiest oak leaves I’ve ever seen. Weeks now of dry weather, unusual for February (isn’t every patch of weather now), has dried everything on the ground to leave it thin, brittle, unyielding. There is barely a sound up here. No wind in the trees, a faint thrum of a solitary tractor in the valley below.
Berra Tor is around here somewhere. It’s an elusive tor this one, not like the bold slabs of rock further east on the main part of Dartmoor. Described by a keen observer online as a pretty small (granite) tor, and another as a large, compact sedimentary outcrop, it is almost completely hidden by trees and stands 132 metres above sea level, making it one of the lowest, if not the lowest tor on Dartmoor. It’s self-effacing, modest, and humble. Underwhelming, even, always discrete. As rocks go, I like its style. It hides for all time, solitary (except for the trillion more-than-human inhabitants that keep it company) until a human explorer stumbles across it, oh. I guess this is it.
I find the path, duck under the low holly boughs and veer between young hazel saplings. I look up, squint eyes, where is it? Nothing. I look up. There it is, right there twenty paces ahead of me, hiding in plain sight. A momentary grey-white cloud in an otherwise blue sky has merged for a moment into the white-grey rock of the tor and it has performed a neat visual magic trick.
Tor sits here, reaching deep down into earth and history, and I see the barest tip of its magnificence. Even then, it is largely hidden amongst young hazels, behind proud hollies, aside older oaks and fly-by-night bracken. Lightweight, brief visitors to this patch, in the timescale of this rock. I am an even briefer visitor, seated with my back against its mass, just long enough to smooth out the rippled notebook pages, write some notes, and consider the many ways in which I too have hidden in plain sight.
There is no more to say for now. Words are the beginning of revealing. Tor has my back, singing its song of hiding and being: I am here, out you come, in we go, on we go.
[1] ‘early spring’ in Galician-Portuguese or Old Portuguese.
Loved going on this journey with you Lynne. Your words create such vivid imagery - I’ll forever see scabs of lichen now. So beautiful. Also intrigued by the yellows of March, as I haven’t read that book. Yet. ☺️