Small Things

Slipping into November

I haven’t shared much here about the process of writing but this delicate act of spooling words into a blank page has its own story behind the scenes. I thought my creativity would come back in the autumn. I hoped it would. After a spring of surging energy in my writing, followed by a summer of damp excuses, a brief flurry of place-based writing from my coast path walk, October was a difficult month. I struggled to adjust to the new demands of an extended job role at the university. There was a health scare (and subsequent positive conclusion), followed swiftly by a week of ‘flu. There was the seasonal descent towards darkness. There were the horrific attacks on Israel followed by cataclysmic and ongoing retribution on Gaza. There’s been much nibbling away at my creativity and I have responded by being hard on myself, bemoaning my lack of flow, setting myself ridiculously high expectations, and then punishing myself when I inevitably don’t meet them.

In the midst of this, I spoke with a wise friend and she said, take two months off, just forget about writing for two months, your creativity won’t disappear - it just doesn’t appreciate having such strictures placed around it. My initial response was to insist that option simply wasn’t feasible, how would anything ever get done, writing needed discipline, you had to show up at your desk, etc. How’s that working out for you, she replied? Hmm. She was right and so I agreed a compromise, I would take one month off. Why not try being kind to my creativity? How about that? Could I handle that? It seems I could and so I gave myself permission to not think about writing or do anything unless the urge took me. Which, of course, (that’s the funny thing about creativity when we unbox it from our demands), it did. Only a few days later.

I am now allowing myself to play a little. I read a lot about writing here on Substack and stumbled across the idea of the vignette essay, familiar to those who have read Ernest Hemingway, which I haven’t. Plenty of other people write or talk eloquently on his style (check out Arnie Sabatelli’s podcast) so I won’t repeat it here, but it has given me the idea that whilst I recover my muse, I could just try placing some ideas, observations, thoughts next to each other and see where they lead.

Here goes.

[journal, 3 October]

I spot a dark movement on the large building sandbags being stored outside our bedroom window until the driveway is finished. A robin hops down the four-by-twos like steps and pirouettes at the bottom, before it peers into the window (l like to fancy) and disappears beneath the sagging green of the wisteria. A faint gold light spreads over the roof to the east. All is quiet and still after the frantic squalls and leaf tumblers from last night. It was a real autumnal evening, dark, wet, leaves falling in front of the car like snow.

Rooks call into the blue, I sense their black chaotic chatter as they greet each other and make arrangements for their sky day. They fall silent and a solitary bird calls from the ivy. The quince hedge fills with small hard green spheres, a feast for the blackbirds later in the winter. Sycamore leaves crisp on the branches at the foot of the garden.

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In our writing group, Christina asks what we wish to carry into the darker months, in the style of Kerri Ní Dochartaigh. I write:

I want to carry my own bones, hard and white and spacious, into the darkness. I want to carry myself and meet myself on the dark porch of the world. I want to carry memories of light and the sea and flowers and laughter, into those softer supple edges of night. I want to carry hope of breathing into my creations, of noticing the myriad tiny ways I must hear my own animal call for sleep and desperate darkness. Folds over and beyond and onto the hooting seams of night. I long to lie with grass and pear and oak and yew, as they slumber safe in the knowledge that light will come again, when we’re least expecting it.

Dunnocks in the ivy. One each in a perfect vegetal space. Tattered hedgerows, brown crisping gunnera in a patch, red earth spattered on the lane, emerald-green moss glowing in the middle of my tyre tracks.

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When I returned from my coast path walk (oh, those days filled to the edges with sea and blackberries and air!) I read Ronald Blythe’s Next to Nature, a towering and gentle work of a long life lived deeply in the landscape of Suffolk, woven from the tiny observations of his days - the way the sky looked, the pattern of weather, the sounds and sights of his garden and surrounding woodland, the tasks he completed (sowing two rows of spinach, completing a chapter, clearing the water course) - and his Christian heritage and entanglement in daily church life. A soulful elegy to English rural life. It was both illuminating and deeply restful, and it got me thinking about the seduction, and comfort, of reading such writing, variously called nature, or place, or rural writing. Why does reading, and then writing, the small things in life matter? Whilst so much devastation is wrought on this planet and its people, I can only respond by digging deeper, noticing more closely, anchoring myself to leaf and soil. From this privileged home of safety, I can do little but exult in this place and its more-than-human inhabitants. I do it for every person in the world right now who cannot.

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The clock ticks. The brass lamp shines in its own glow. Two chairs sit empty on the porch, memories of summer coffee and burning legs. I wonder at the flow of words in those light days. The words feel sticky now, dark, hidden. They need teasing out into the air.

We must go out and re-ally ourselves to Nature every day.  We must make root, send out some little fiber at least, even every winter day. (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

Thoreau’s words remind me that too much of our lives are spent indoors, almost 90% for those of us who live in the British Isles I read yesterday. That is a desperate statistic. And so I go out. Autumn in an English village is damp, to be put it mildly. We have had regular downpours, moments when the sky switches its tap on and lets its innards fall to the earth. Water runs down the street. Water clings to the grooves in the black deck. Leaves drip, mulching begins in the gutters, on the paths, over the stone steps.

I have felt a reluctance to write these past few months. In part, my walk was a generative act designed to free the writing will, and it worked for a moment, but mornings quickly return to dull thoughts, aching bones, sniffles, viruses prising their way into my body.

My habits, designed to nurture creativity, have grown stale. I do the same thing each morning: read, non-fiction usually (although Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Demon Copperhead shouts at me every time I pass my to-be-read pile). Once I’ve put my book down, I sit with pen in hand, yellow notebook spread on the bedcovers, the blue light seeping through the blinds in the eastern sky, waiting for inspiration. A trip to Birmingham in mid-October reminded me what happens to my mind once freed from its confinement, imposed by my desire for a productive routine and discipline.

And so, following Blythe’s lead, I begin taking my morning tea into the dark living room, settling into a chair by the window with a blanket over my knees, and reading whilst the light slowly grows outside. I do this for the first time the morning before the clocks went back and it was a revelatory experience. Where my thoughts had been dull and stupefied for what seemed like months, gazing out of the window unsettled them and allowed some space into which ideas began to take root. We are our own worst enemies.

My book and journal now live in the lounge. It faces due north, and we have a spectacular view of the church, which I used to go for days, weeks without seeing properly. Now I greet it each morning. The deck feels like it is perched in the canopy, eye-level with the tops of trees in the middle distance. The church lies perhaps two-hundred metres away down in the village and from my chair I look directly into the top windows, just below the turrets where the rooks like to roost.

[journal, November 2]

Ciarán has come to play with our bamboo. He is not a neighbour’s child, nor our gardener, but a named Storm that is wreaking early autumnal havoc in the south-west of England. A low thrum of drainpipe water onto a leaf-blocked grill pulled my husband from our bed last night. As I listened - where was that sound coming from? - and he went out of the front door, the sound switched off. He had pulled the leaves from the grill and came back to bed. The storm raged back and forth for most of the night and is now tearing at the bamboo and irritating the yew. A chair on the deck sails past to the left, pushed by some invisible hand. Another chair skids the opposite way. The wind plays. Leaves tumble. The church remains solid, a grey mass, rooted in the earth for centuries. A tentative blue tit braves the bird-feeder in between violent swings. Our dustbin lies on the garden path. Grey smudge-clouds pace across the sky, west to east.

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Death visits me on All Hallow’s. I learnt that back in May, another much-loved professor from my previous university died, Henry Buller. I helped on his seminar course for a couple of years. He always dressed in a black shirt, black jeans, grey ponytail. He liked to drink black coffee and eat a croissant every morning, I learnt on our fieldtrip to New York. His mind was astonishing. I hadn’t seen or spoken to him for years but news like that rents a small rip in the fabric of time. The world carries on, his memory lives on, but his physicality has returned to the earth. That night, I light a candle and whisper to those I know who have died. The list grows longer.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this jumble of thoughts and observations. Is it too distracting? Does it flow, or is it too disjointed for you? Let me know in the comments…I can handle constructive criticism, honestly! And thanks for reading, if you’ve got this far.