The Solace of Landscape and Soil

Broad Beans, I learn, are some of the oldest recorded vegetables, cultivated since biblical times. Apparently by the Middle Ages, stealing the crop was punished by the death penalty!



Yesterday the temperature went up to 9 degrees on the allotment and my spirits soared as layers of clothes were peeled off to stay cool! And all this after weeks of temperatures hovering around freezing and when I often found it hard to summon up any enthusiasm to do anything!

Part of our spiritual healing comes from our commune with, our intimate contact with, the earth, the soil. In Alastair McIntosh's wonderful book, Soil and Soul, he writes: "If humankind is to have any hope of changing the world...we need, first, to make community with the soil, to learn how to revere the Earth." Belden Lane writes of The Solace of Fierce Landscapes in a book of that title. Peter Owen Jones in his new book Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim, writes: "God, I loved the desert. It allowed me to see to what was broken - with all my hate, with all my love, my unknowing, my unbeing - and gave me the time to begin to mend."

Back to the allotment. And doesn't it look a mess!? The heavy snow brought down some of the netting protecting the brassicas from the pigeons, and before I could get up there the pesky birds had made a good job of stripping all the fresh young growth off the sprouting broccoli. The plants are now struggling to recover - although I think they will. Other plotters pulled up their pigeon stripped brassicas last year and put them on the compost heap. I persevered with mine and eventually had a tolerable crip. Let's hope this year is the same. At least the Bright Lights Swiss Chard is recovering after looking dead when the snow melted.

So back to those broad beans. Soon I shall be sowing them, alongside Cauliflowers, Globe Artichoke and Tomatoes under cover for transplanting out later. 
Let Shelley have the last word:

I love snow, and all the forms

Of the radiant frost;

I love waves, and winds, and storms,

Everything almost

Which is Nature's, and may be

Untainted by man's misery. (Percy Shelley 1792-1822)

Reflections on Life, Love and the Soul

I am reading a super little book. It is by Peter Owen Jones, a rather wacky Church of England priest, who after presenting Around the World in 80 Faiths for TV, disappeared high up into the Sinai Desert in Egypt to live in isolation in a cave for a while, to pray, think and of necessity live extremely simply.
From his soul searching during this time he wrote several letters, letters to friends and family, to the Prime Minister, to Jesus and God, and even to Osama and these have been collected into a neat little volume, Letters From an Extreme Pilgrim - Reflections on Life, Love and the Soul, (although he makes clear that he wanted to call it Letters From the Moon, and refers to his cave and landscape as The Moon throughout.)
In these letters we see his own vulnerabilities and uncertainties, even his own tortured soul, as he grapples with understanding himself and rediscovering, even healing, that soul within the context of all his different relationships and within the context of this crazy world.
"God, I loved the desert," he writes in the Epilogue. "It allowed me to see what was broken - with all my hate, with all my love, my unknowing, my unbeing - and gave me the time to begin to mend." And in that mending and in his forthright and honest writing, I believe he can be a wounded healer for all of us who are honest enough with ourselves to know we need that healing of our own soul and spirit.

healing power of nature part 2

Whether I am tucked away in my writing eyrie in Dorset or travelling further abroad, the one thing that can give me inspiration, peace, and a profound sense of well being is the landscape, and the wilder this is, the more healing it seems to become. Gales that whine around my little attic hideaway, or whip the waves into a frenzy as they crash onto the rocks during a storm, torrential rain that blots out the landscape, these can have a particularly soothing quality about them, a spirituality that is hard to describe. It is something that must be experienced. I have known such extreme conditions lift me out of a serious bout of depression when nothing else could! Belden Lane has described this so beautifully and eloquently in his book: The Solace of Fierce Landscapes – Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality. “There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within.” If we do not allow the natural world to speak to us, if we do not allow the silence to reach us, the fierceness to give us solace, then we will turn our wounds, that brokenness, against the natural world.



1 Belden C.Lane Oxford University Press 1998