Walking On Wondering Up

I have not really had the time to work out what this former blog of a certain 'Roaring Poet' was about, or its general direction other than being a cyber place I every once in a cheese-wheel moon posted various contemplations/musings/imaginative-insights.
But I think I know now what I would like it to be about. Walking the land and wondering up its interior where the faculty of imagination mingles with the jewels of memory planted everywhere. Where people in England have settled at some point in a history distant enough to have become only contactable via the weaving of imagination into the physical loom of the present landscape.
It is a process walking out into the land, of the body and mind as it engages with the contours of the earth and the mind with the contours of ones inner world. I feel most confidently that when walking and allowing the land, and thoughts come to you in a stream of sensory and mental interactions, that the assumed Cartesian separation of the physical/non-physical, mind/body is shown to be delusion. The walking naturally flows into a wondering, as modern mans' divided mindset is restored to the original meeting of Man and Earth, reintegrating us into the experience of being part of life: a part of its great Wondering Up. As walking on and wondering up act as the catalyst to reawaken to a real communion with the voice of the land, imagination unfolds like a canvas on which to catch the residue of the breath in the landscapes utterings and whispers. It makes sense to me to think the land has its own interior consciousness of a kind, as we have our own thoughts, emotions and dreams. Of course it would be a very different sentience from our own, pulsing to a vaster track of time and occupied one would imagine with far different matters as our own heads are daily caught up with!
I am fascinated by history and the layers upon layers of human lives that have all gone before us under our feet in England's well-inhabited landscapes. The reality is very true here that wherever we go in England somebody else has been there before. A mosaic of peoples populating the land stretching back to a time lost in the forgotten faces of primeval hunter gatherers tracking mammoth and other extinct megafauna through Englands shires. The richness of human dwellingness in this land is quite awesome. The soil of England is imbued with a deep loam of memory, remembering all who have come and gone, retaining some essence of whoever they were and whence they went.
We walk and the ancestors talk.
Humans must have always sought places in the land with which to communicate with their dead ancestors, whose own spirits have become one in the Earth and the mysteries of after death and before birth that are her most deeply guarded treasures. The voice of the multitudinous dead are alive in our footsteps, and in the trees, rivers, stones, plants: the whole of the Milky Way in fact is a street the deceased walk, a river of souls going on to Saturns gate. Observe the round of the seasons. No life is utterly extinguished it returns to the soil and like a miracle somehow comes back in spring. Death is necessary as winter is to thresh clean the land of the old, decaying and weakening. Life is as necessary as spring to bud and blow forth new shoots of life from the mulch of those who-have-gone-before.
Walking we can reengage with a time those doors open beyond now, to the before and the after, to the past and the future. Wondering we can connect with the deity of the landscape, the memory of the ancestors and are own myth-place in its evolving weaving out from under out feet.
Here's a poem I wrote this summer on a walk in Wiltshire along the Wansdyke to Avebury, where I plunged into its landscape-mythscape and Walking On and Wondering Up began.

Wansdyke Wander

Foot padding,

sole marking,
miles on the chalk,
on the white,
on the ghost semen path.

Land over land,
hill over hill,
head above sky,
in Wodens realm of heights,
in sky dreaming abode.

Walking on,

Wondering up.

A landscape of air-folded hills,
a timeless other England,
captures my rolling feet,
in the summer heat.
Ghosts of my ancestors,
white-hands, white-faces,
chalk-daubed,
hover and twist,
about the heavy air.
I’m following a serpents track,

a running barrowish hump,
ditch one-side,
and white lines run across the old earth bank,
a ghost river,
that flows up.
To Chair Hill,
and Tan Hill.
There where Beltane fires blazed,
casting the sacred herbs,
to Woden,

wind,

sky,

air.

Ancient voices chanted,

as the summer fire,
burned white-eyed a way over,
to spirit land.

 Footsore soles of chalk,

gently I climb down,
the flowing dyke,
to flowing water;
Honeystreet and the Barge.

 To sleep in the grass,

by a Saxon church,
below those sky barrows,
in memory of Woden,
battles,
round houses,
and summer wanders.

 Walking on,

Wondering up.

Robin Collins 2013

A kind of Geophilia

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.

Earth Connection

The idea of our vegetable seeds and therefore our vegetables being replaced by genetically modified breeds does not leave me with a good feeling. Third world farmers in India who have already experienced growing genetically modified cotton (patented by Monsanto corp) ended up cripplingly in debt to Monsanto (paying for the pesticides they manufactured to save the weakening crop from its natural predator that rapidly adapted to the genetically modified variety) and unable to make ends meet saw many committing suicide. Why did these farmers have to surrender the natural right of storing your own seeds, growing your own plants from your seed, and generally being in control of how they grew and maintained the health of their plants to some corporation those only interest was really in milking money out of these vulnerable third-world farmers, as well as a far more sinister motive of spreading corporate ownership of land, crops and seed over the world. This scenario not leave me with a good feeling, in fact that leaves me feeling rather sick.
The thought of these anonymous-faced corporate titans lurking in the shadows of every nations economic-political house, desiring all the same goal of consuming mankinds last freedom of growing his own food, and owning his own land to grow it on without having to enter into bondage to centralised powers that want to squeeze every ounce of his living into their sweaty hands. Then there is the reality the corporations manufacturing genetically modified 'technofixes', pesticides, fertilizers, etc. are pushing for, that is one of a world subjugated to base materialism: a techno dystopia where our food, clothing, medicine, is all generated out of a vast sterile laboratory of scientists in league with death. Consider as well that if we lose the natural gift to grow our own food then we are losing our deeper connection with the Earth, and if we lose that folks then ultimately what have we got any more?
Can you say man knows of freedom if he cannot feel the soil between his fingers and toes? Can you man say knows of a higher reality beyond himself where ideals of love exist if he cannot plant a seed in the ground and see it grow? Can you say man even can know himself if he cannot have his actions and deeds shown to him by what he does to the earth he cultivates?
The resistance to the corporations and their imposed techno-solutions of genetically modified food/synthesised pesticides and fertilizers encompasses manifold issues:
one of the ordinary man losing the freedom he is born with to grow his own food and to choose how he grows it.
two of the ordinary man losing the freedom he is born with to live on the land to corporate possession, bureaucratic centralisation and commercialisation.
three of the ordinary man losing his connection to the living earth.

Today there are 'pop-up gardens' happening over the country to raise awareness and protest against the 'New Alliance on Food Security and Nutrition' which is an initiative between corporations and governments to reduce world hunger, focussing in particular on Africa. How they want to reduce world hunger is of course not through some unconditional boon, but just a calculated manoeuvre to inject Africa with GM seeds and crops, and get the farmers hooked to the big corporate patents until they either commit suicide or decide poverty was better after all than corporate servitude. The rich land as well in Africa is under the cycloptic eye of eager land grabbers and the corporations will help further the advance of land loss to ordinary people, putting it into the grasp of greedy men.
All of this paints a grim picture, but it allows us who are aware to what is going on behind the veil of false promises and awake to the Earth to really clarify what kind of world we want to create for the generations to come.
We don't agree with the motives of the corporations, who seem to be perpetuating a deeply divisive model of society from the past; one of a strata of people who gain unfairly from the pain of all those working beneath them in conditions of material subjugation (and now nutritional subjugation if we are forced to eat GM food from GM seeds). Now there is science and technology involved in this division making between rich and poor, and the division is driving in deeper like a knife to try to sever us from our Earth connection. Yet the Earth needs our connection now more than ever, as we equally need to be connected with our own body's and their health more than ever in history.
The Earth i'm sure she feels in this age of scientific-faith-in-the-machine, the children being educated to perceive and think about the world in a thought-mode which abstracts them from the living Earth to a conceptual Earth. This is where the severance of our connection with the Earth begins in how we taught to perceive her. This mindset is ingrained in us that permeates the world today. it is not a wrong mindset, but rather what is wrong we are only educated to see the world this way. We are seeing the world not as an embodied experience of the senses, but as something in our heads that we are taught ideas about from a book. Genetically modified crops and the rest of the laboratory engineered arsenal represents the manifestation of this disembodied, conceptualised, and compartmentalised mindset at a level that treads disturbingly into what I would call institutionalised hubris (or arrogance, though hubris as the Ancient Greeks talked of was man overstepping his own natural boundaries or the limits of his own power on Earth, therefore inviting harsh retribution from the gods) this hubris is now meddling with the Earth on a level we don't properly understand, a microscopic level with a mindset that fundamentally treats life as dead objects. I am starting to imagine now what is going on now in the world with genetic engineering, involving scientists who are more susceptible to corporate corruption, is the beginning of a world disaster the likes we never have seen before on Earth. The nuclear warheads made in World War two, were heralds of a new age. Mankind is experiencing new forces of a highly intellectualised mind transforming rapidly the material world he see's before his own eyes. But this intellectualism must learn its limits if humanity is not to become extinct. It's other side of the intuitive-feeling mind is another gift we have to deeply reengage with, to balance the materialising force of the intellect-conceptual mind. The intuitive-feeling mind can show us how to receive, and be receptive now to the Earth, instead of imposing and controlling Earth under concepts and thought-forms we have been shaping the world with.
Now is the time just to feel the Earth, and to let go of this idea of controlling her and trapping her energy in the webs of concepts that serve to disconnect not to connect.
Let us let go of everything we have tried to pressure life into, and let the Earth be free.
The Earth calls us to being, as we call her being to learn again what it is to be human.

This poem I wrote I feel is meant for humans as well as the Earth:

         Being who I am

 Today,

   I’m not going to follow you,

   I’m not going to fit in your box,

this is the beginning

of being who I am;

I’m going to be a flower, a thunderstorm, a tree

I’m going to unfold my being like a cake

being made.

 

This is the beginning

of being;

who I am is not accepting chains as part of

my identity,

who I am is letting myself,

to roam off the path,

rambling over the wall,

to reach further everyday beyond my limits,

beyond self-judgement,

far beyond opinion and lies fabricated to keep me tied

down to something I don’t want.

 

Being who I am,

is a journey,

not focussed on destination,

just being here,

expanding with song, stories; dreams and dances with myself.

 

Being is not performing

to the status quo,

but discovering what

you have you can show;

I’m not here on Earth,

to be somebody else’s project,

or a pawn in the system:

here I am to be who I am.

 

Roaring Poet 2013