The Battered Landscapes of our Edens

JOURNAL ENTRY

15th November, Wednesday

"Across the fields, 
A train clatters it's way to Birmingham.
The lit carriages flickering like 
A procession of glow worms 
Through the hedges. 

A rabbit's tail strobes white in my torchlight.
The hill becomes alive with
Unblinking ovine eyes."

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

 A thick milky veil of cloud has quenched the stars, and tonight the moon is blind. As night fell, the temperature rose a couple of degrees, but it is still the type of night to settle down in front of the stove and relish the comfort of a warm cabin. It's now begun to rain and it's set to rain deep into the night.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the night to you wherever you are.

It's lovely to see you, I am so glad that you're here. The kettle is warming and the biscuit barrel has been restocked in case you dropped by. Come inside, make yourself comfortable and welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

It might have just been a shift in the light, or maybe it was because, for the first time for quite a while, the sun was out fully shining, but it seems that almost over night the trees have turned colour. Bronze and copper, russets, ochre, mustardy yellows and yellowy-limes. The colours of autumn stretch down the towpath with their warmth. The old ash on the hill has now lost most of her leaves and taking her winter form, but the convocation of oaks are still thickly leafed, but filled with coppers and olives and light. 

There was a frost this morning. But with the sun came a sky of Wedgewood blue, fleecy clouds drifted high on the breath of icy winds. On the ground, the air was still and sleepily warm. I watched a cormorant fly in from the west, circle twice and then descend a little further down the canal.

Tawny owls – or at least their calls – have been much more in evidence this year. The fluttering piping of the males sound out along the canal side – stretching south and west- just after dark when the Great Bear still hangs low in the north. In the mornings, the shrill kee-wick of the females is more audible. I don’t know if that is characteristic or simply coincidence that males have just happened to be closer at night and the females in the morning. I find that there is something almost palpably quieting about the sound of a male tawny owl.

The encircling sky above stream with flocking birds – starlings and jackdaw, and of course the rooks, but also redwing and the busy flusterings of goldfinch, and the ever-present wagtails. It’s a wintery or an autumnal sight, these ragged rivers of birds strung across the sky.

Earlier this week, Maggie and I were standing on one of the bridges just down from us and I became aware of a kingfisher, almost within arm’s reach perched on an elder branch. It’s amazing how something so brightly coloured can merge with the foliage. Our eyes met and he (or she) was gone, sending a spark of blue along the canal-side.

Tracie asked after the horses this week. They’re still here. There’s nine of them now. I tend not to have quite so much contact with them now that Maggie is living with us and accompanying me on most of my walks. She’s a little scared by them, but I prefer that she treats them with a healthy respect. I also would not want to stress the horses. For their part, they watch us walk along the paths in that silent knowing way that they have.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

THE BATTERED LANDSCAPES OF OUR EDENS

I’ve been reading some of Thomas Merton’s journals again lately. I have these fads and compulsions in my reading. Merton was a Trappist monk, but also a renowned theological writer and activist. He was a complex man. A man of many persons which at times he seemed to find difficult to reconcile. ‘I am Legion, for we are many.’ He was a man drawn to the limelight who craved solitude. For a lot of his later life and up until his untimely and rather mysterious death in 1968, he spent in his hermitage among the wooded hills of Kentucky. ‘The hermit who never was’ is how one later commentator described him.  

From December 27 1963

[READING]

I’m drawn to Merton’s writing, even though a lot of it I find jarringly dogmatic and theological – smacking a little too much of the synthetic parry and thrust of the academic high table. Even so, there are deeper currents there. Currents which clearly informed his thinking and I wish he’d given himself the freedom to explore more. As those extracts show, he was deeply affected by landscape around him and, even if his sense of dogma constrained him a little, they spoke to him. He very much belonged to the time and the tradition of theological essentialism that, at times, bordered on colonialism – where doctrine was rigorously imposed on the wild and natural world and all who lived within it (human and other): Nature, literally, being brought to book. Rather than the earth simply providing the natural breath that breathes life and meaning into the language of faith and religion – or do I just mean life?

I first came across him through his writing on rain in a little collection of his writings Raids on the Unspeakable (1966). I must read it to you some time. It is truly astonishing and wonderful. In my head – and it should only be in my head – I see Thomas Merton and John Moriarty as being part of the same journey.  I wish they could have met. They have so much in common, although – both being capable of fiery passion – I suspect their conversation would not have been an easy or particularly pacific one. However, it seems to me that Thomas’ end point mirrors John’s starting point. I am convinced that given enough time they would have made wonderful pilgrimage companions for each other.

Merton hankered after a hermit’s life, petitioning the abbot of the Abbey of Gethsemani monastery, in Kentucky, to be allowed to establish and live in a hermitage soon after his joining of the monastery. Institutional or perhaps the Abbot's personal reluctance – at least in Merton’s perception of it – was to prove to be a continuous and long running sore, and he continually grew frustrated (often voicing it in his journals) at this refusal to allow him the freedom to live within the elements as a hermit.

Merton, who by then, was published and becoming a well-known figure in inter-religious dialogue and conversation, felt that he was being used by his superiors as rather a cash-cow. A role that was not suited for the solitary or the hermit. From time to time, Merton recognised that there was a streak of ambition in him, but there was also the realisation that he was becoming the victim of his success.

Nevertheless, the Abbey allowed Merton to establish a hermitage in a hilly forested area within the monastery grounds. As far as hermitages go, it was spacious, and well equipped. A modernish (late 40s early 50s style) building but it allowed Merton the space to just be – to listen to the rain by the light of his Coleman’s lantern, to watch the birds and passing deer.

How much he needed these times can be measured in his journal entries, the way his writing becomes freer, looser – as if it reflects the unknotting on tense shoulders and the deepening of shallow breaths. Even his thoughts seem to slow down, become more measured, less hot, less hunted. I would even go so far to say ‘more human’ in all the best senses of that word. The smell of the soil and the sound of the wind in the trees that encircled him, did Thomas good.   

December 17 1963

[READING]

However, Merton seemed almost tortured by the sense that he was simply playing games at being a hermit – and, in truth, they do seem to have acted more as retreats than embracing a hermit’s way of life. Caught in a system that would not allow him to cut those ties completely, he felt a fraudulent, dilettante; grabbing pockets of time to play out a kind of life that he was not allowed to live. At times during his reflection, he even admits that perhaps he is not really suited to the life to which he aspires. For all the frustration they bring, he enjoys the company, the famous authors and leader who visit, he enjoys having his work published and read. He enjoys flying all over the world to speak at conferences. Without them, he acknowledges, he would lose a significant part of who he is. Perhaps, this is the real reason for his resentment and anger at, what he sees, as institutional stubbornness. They might know Thomas Merton better than Thomas Merton knows himself.

Perhaps this perception – real or otherwise – that he was being stopped from embracing this hermit life within the woods and the elements allowed him to drink more deeply of those times he could experience them.   

What struck me from my return to his journals has been repeated references to an aeroplane that regularly passed overhead.

February 7 1964

[READING]

July 28 1964

[READING]

November 24 1964

[READING]

I could go on.

These were the lumbering B52 bombers from the Strategic Air Command. Daily and nightly they would fly overhead. Merton assumed, possibly correctly, that they carried atomic bombs.

October 30 1964

[READING]

It was the 60s, the world still reeling and then coming to grips with the ‘brave new world’ of atomic power and weaponry. Towering mushroom clouds still cast long shadows across the world. The almost unbelievable destruction wreaked upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh in people’s minds. It must have been particularly so for a social and peace activist Trappist monk and, particularly one, who had a growing affinity to Japanese Zen Buddhism and was cultivating personal contacts with Japanese practitioners.

January 6 1965

[READING] 

It is no wonder that Merton viewed these fly-overs as a troubling intrusion. Even his beloved hermitage retreat was tainted with the remembrance of (and future threat of) the devastating power of destruction held within human hands.

Our Edens often turn out to be not the Edens we have longed for.       

Why I mention all this is because a few weeks ago I caught myself thinking about John Moriarty. It was a familiar trail of thought, but one I had thought I had grown out of. It went something like this. What I need is to have the type of life that John had. A small cottage – or even better a cabin – deep within rural Ireland (or Wales), perhaps close to the sea. A manual job that freed up my time to just be able to wander the mountain slopes and isolated coastlines and think and write. How different my life would be, how much easier it would be to concentrate on the things that matter. To live as off-grid and close to the elements as I possibly could. These were familiar thought-trails and mental desire-paths. Perhaps, if we lived on a small island, we’d really be free to pursue that type of lives we aim for. I love creating these podcasts, but how much better they would be if rather than being from narrowboat in the middle of domesticated urbanised England, they were from a disused lighthouse – high on a teetering rocky pinnacle, storm-wracked and wild sea-sprayed. I could THEN be happy. I could then be free to live life as I truly want.

And yet, Moriarty candidly talks about a breakdown that he nearly had being faced by what he refers to the yoga of horror (a term he borrows from Aldous Huxley) – helping his fisherman friend and neighbour, he was confronted the incomprehensible vicious brutality of the world. Images that seared deeply into his consciousness. For one seeking to walk beautifully in the world how could he reconcile this with the reality of limbless crabs being thrown back into the sea to be hacked and pecked at by screaming gulls. Later, renting a room in an old Victorian house he was charmed to realise that a pine-marten and her family were living just above his head in the attic. However, he was later to come across the carnage left by them of a blue tits nest that he had been keeping an eye on and watching the fledglings develop and about to take to the wing. As much as he was enchanted when watching the mother with her kits playing and growing, he was acutely aware that, this loving mother had the ability to turn her razor-sharp teeth upon them and, if provoked or alarmed would kill them all in an instant.

These incidents nearly drove Moriarty mad. I wish he had been able to read Merton’s journals and his continual recording of the SAC plane. I know that he would have had the insight and perception to understand the significance and that it would have helped to drag him back from the brink. It’s alright John. Every Eden has its serpent. Every Eden has the possibility of becoming a little bit broken. As it was, Moriarty had to fall back on his own mind – with the help of a couple of his friends. One night, tottering out of a local pub, he and his very drunk friend and neighbour became disorientated. Trying to guide his friend back towards house, his friend suddenly sat down and said “I know where we are John, but where the f**k are we?” That was all that was needed. For John knew where he was – he just needed to find out where that ‘where’ was.    

Once, someone wrote to me to say that they wished that they could see the world through my eyes. They couldn’t, they could only see ugliness. I didn’t really know how to respond. For, I knew, that they wouldn’t want to see the world as I see it. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. But their saying that made me uncomfortable. Was all that I was doing just spinning romanticised, sentimental untruths that hid me (and others) from the unpalatable reality of life? For a long time, I was unsure.  

Yes, our Edens are far from perfect. They are battered and in places even broken and shattered. But that does not stop them from being our Edens. Those places of our flourishing (again, as imperfect as that may be), the home of which we are a part and to which we belong.

Many years ago, I remember a work colleague once telling me of her visit to Japan during the much-celebrated cherry blossom season. She recalled how strange it was to her and how dissonant she found it. Crowds would gather to view a group of beautifully shaped trees in full bloom, but it was surrounded by an urban wilderness of pylons, wires, waste heaps of industrial detritus. “I found it difficult not to see all the ugliness that surrounded these beautiful trees.” She said, “they, didn’t seem to have a problem. They could see beauty despite the ugliness, I couldn’t separate the two.”    

At the time I thought I understood. I had assumed, like a skilful photographer they had gained the ability to focus on the detail and frame the image in a way that left the ugliness out of shot. In fact, I too had taught myself to look at the world in that way. At the very time that I was having this conversation with her, I was working in a school in an area characterised by high rise building blocks and what the media would call significant social deprivation. For a number of reasons, I found the situation was stressful that necessitated me often having to wait for lengthy periods in the front entrance. I was uncomfortable in it. The school was lovely and I now have very fond memories of it and the work it does, but at the time I felt alien. However, just outside the window beside which I would have to stand and wait was a struggling tree – I can’t even remember now what type it was. It was small and I think young and the only living thing in a sea of concrete and asphalt. A nest of roots could just be seen above the scrubby patch of mud in which it grew. Rich emerald-green moss grew among the crevices and up the trunk. From time to time a sparrow would perch and settle or peck among the moss and roots. In the weak autumn sunlight, this small garden of moss sparkled with dew taking me far away to the moors and fell lands of the Lake District and Wales. Losing myself in that tiny scene is what kept me sane.

So, I thought I knew what those thousands of Japanese visitors saw when they embarked on their Cherry Blossom pilgrimages. It was how I had taught myself to view the lands and worlds in which I found myself. Bracket out the ugliness and the brokenness. Look only at the beauty and avoid the imperfections. It can work, sort of… for a time. But it breeds a discontent, even resentment. It breeds the ‘if onlys’. For by refusing to allow the imperfections to come into the frame, it denies the realities and creates a longing for a landscape, a home, a world is forever be beyond my reach.

The SAC plane flying over Merton’s woods. The yoga of horror for Moriarty. All these are just reminders that in every Eden hides a serpent. Perhaps, it might even be that Edens are conditional on having a snake. In other words, the presence of a snake does not mean that it is not Eden.

That shift of thinking made all the difference – it is not the bracketing out of the ugliness, the battered brokenness, that creates a world in which we can grow and flourish and, most important of all, we can call home. It is accepting and embracing it – acknowledging its brokenness. Recognising its imperfections and finding ways to love it and live within it – the touch of rain on a city street, the shrill chatter of jackdaw laughter amid the sirens, the hum of a bee around a burst of dandelion in a cracked paving slab, the ethereal glow of a swan in the dusk, amid a slurry of mud and grey drizzle.

Because your place within the world is not perfect – the dreamt hermitage – does not mean your experience is inauthentic or in some way less true than those who through fortune or circumstance appear to live there – you also may never know the brokenness and scars on the landscapes with which they too must negotiate and reconcile.

Don’t wait to start living, to start being the you that you yearn, to be until you can find the perfect place. SAC planes will keep coming. Those gulls and pine martins will keep up their slaughter. Grief and sadness will still cut deep into our lives. Those things will always be part of our Edens, those places of our flourishings; those places of our enlightenment; those places where we become the people we are born to be. 

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG