What is England?....
I ruminated as I walked through the Stroud valley heading through Paganhill with Randwick in my sights. What is England today? to be specific and to rein in my thinking as to the present face of England that leers out at me now.
I have found a boundless and abiding passion and wonder for my home shores in recent years that always lay firmly deeply in some secret wellspring in my heart. Going roving in Spain as an itinerant Wwoofer for two very long months awoke me to this secret wellspring. This virgin fount of singing water hidden and gently, persistently guiding me in my outer life towards the vast love it had always been whispering to me about. The land! oh beautiful England! land of so many tribes, so many stories and secrets! Yes whatever you may call these strange and mysterious shores embroidered in myth and legend, it is a holy homestead to this roving poet. Yet in these modern times, brutally shorn from its past marriage with soil and community, my holy homestead, my love of my life, and England to you, I am painfully aware of how we have rapidly changed the landscape with concrete and commercialisation. I walk through the Paganhill area into its housing estate under the enormous Victorian anti-slavery arch. The grand archway commemorating the abolition of slavery, was once the entrance to a mansion and its estate. Now only the archway stranded almost comically, but quite sadly, is all that remains of it along with the lodge built behind it as the home of the former groundskeeper or whoever they were. A sixties housing estate has now buried it all out of recognition. I walk through the uniform housing lots, much bereft of colour and life, wondering about the meadows that must have once flourished here.
There are rarely any spaces left in these housing estates for Nature and humans to breath, and if there are then they always are rather sickly looking. The oppressive concrete, the presence of cars, the glaring street lights shuns the delicate, softer and infinite forms of Nature. Consequently our human spirit, which in its primal germ is a child of Nature, humans having dwelled until recently very intimately with the Earth, is plunged into an unhappy struggle which has it never before experienced. The struggle might be named our disconnection from the Earth, but it is more complex, we have not just pulled our life plug out of the Earths electric socket. No the struggle is more awful, more tragic than disconnection: it is like an anaesthesia, a loss of feeling for Earth. It is as though humans have come out of all the massive and shocking upheaval of first industrialisation and then second modernisation after the second World War, like people who have become used to not exercising an once important limb or faculty of the senses. Unused to actively employing this limb or sensory faculty, we have become critically unaware of not only its direct importance to our survival, but its ancient relationship to our more than physical wellbeing. Earth nourishes the spiritual life of the human being, as well as providing for our physical needs. But modern man who does not even know where his food comes from has forgotten that feeling, has become numb to its world. That deeply rooted feeling for the Earth and modern mans anaesthesia to her vibrant, complex depths expresses itself in the struggle I see everywhere in England's decision to embark on the mass consumerist train.
On the one hand we faintly remember this feeling, like the distant but strong echoes of our ancient love of Earth, a kind of Geophilia. We all know we take priceless enjoyment from walking in green spaces. But as defines the struggle with our Earth anaesthesia, we don't realise this priceless enjoyment does go further and wants to permeate our whole lives with Geophilia. On returning to our electrically powered lives we return to our societies anaesthesia in a bliss which is agony to our spirit as we sink into the stygian slipstream of modern life. The struggle continues everyday, and some people fight and stand up for Nature not aware they are in the grip of Geophilia, and some people look down and don't wish to get involved because they are in the grip of Anaesthesia. Either way there are no sides in the struggle because this is a war of the spirit, even if you believe we are a lot of lumpish ape-descendents trudging on aimlessly which is a better description of the mindset of humans who have forgotten Geophilia.
As I walk on through the Paganhill housing estate, I come to a gate which leads thankfully out into an expanse of grassy field.
There a few sturdy oak trees and a big sycamore with a rope for swinging on dangling from its bough, scattered in the field.
Behind me the cold concrete of the housing estate comes into perspective. It looks like the jumbled cluster of gravestones in a graveyard, every house in memory of a sward of green England (R.I.P meadow flowers and earthworms). It resembles a coagulated blob of fat from the flesh of a beast it ignorantly butchered to make way for the modern world. I understand perfectly well humans have to have somewhere to live, but we have narrowed all other life down into a margin with humans taking up the main page. That is dangerous. That is the tragedy and agony of modern mans Earth Anaesthesia.
Stroud is fortunate to have retained large areas of its countryside, while having had the bomb of modernisation sweep suburbs, supermarkets and infrastructure into its heart. Its hillsides have been invaluable in keeping back the worst of it. But like with nearly every town today, it has suffered so many casualties as old farmland has disappeared under indiscriminate concrete. The individuality and integrity of the land is swallowed up in a black hole, and then we find ourselves in a maze of housing and supermarkets wondering where the hell have we got ourselves?
.................What is England?
The land where its people of many tribes and faces, forget the feeling of being in love in their life with the Earth and her beautiful infinite? Or one by one do touch on the ancient Geophilia and are swept away into a romance with the land that permeates their whole lives, that becomes a relationship with the soil, that turns in time into a healing of the spirit?
What is England?
Changing as I write.
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