Discontinuity with the landscape

The planetary alarm bells are now clanging so loud that the human race has mostly gone numb to the warning. We are in seriously warm times, each day we inch closer to ecological cataclysm that does not necessarily spell the End of the human race, but the end to the particular kind of human race we have become. Nevermind anyway our extinction, really that's not the point, for it is the overwhelming amount of extinctions happening to all the non-human species over the Earth that is rather cataclysmic and should be making us stop right where we are and make radical changes to the current paradigm of society. It is a society based on discontinuity with the landscape.

Discontinuity with the landscape in what way?

1. with past, traditional land-based communities
2. with human beings as integrated physically, economically, domestically, and psychologically in the surrounding landscape.
3. with the land as a source of life across species
4. with its sensory experiences
5. with its future as a wider transcendent, evolving shaper of all
6. With landscape as a place outside as well as within

Broken from the landscape society has been able to achieve the scientific and technological advances to create the kind of living standards that have enabled us to make choices about our lives which previously were not possible. We have chosen material comfort and pleasure in the mainstream, and banished the apparent hardships of a former age of drudgery (though look at the kind of drudgery we have made for ourselves today, at least the drudgery of a non-mechanised age was in your hands) . We exist in a time where we stand at cross roads with the opportunity to look back at what was good and what was bad in that prior age, and to look into our time, weighing also what is a benefit to humanity and not a benefit. This has to be weighed with Earth and all the species we share it with. Our great grandfathers and grandmothers could not have possibly be able to conceive the dilemma modern man would be faced with within the space of half a century. Who would have thought it that mankind would become so over populous that Earth would become unable to support our accelerating demands on her resources? They also wouldn't have imagined how dependent we would become on fossil fuels. We now dwell in a fossil fuel powered world, and seem horrifically unable to make changes to how fast we are guzzling the oil out of the Earth, or to even conceive of a future where there is less consumption full stop. But the human race here in the west has only lived like this for half a century, and seems to think it must go on like this. But it cannot. Our past and our future rests in the landscape.
A return to a continuous existence with the land is what we must embrace if we are to endure and restore harmony between us and Earth. At all levels of our lives we now experience discontinuity, as number 2 in the list tells us. It has become very dangerous now the road humans have embarked on. Land has become abstracted, tarmacked, and removed to a state of being a commodity and property. The change in the western world in our day-to-day living standards and expectations of living may have been a beneficial achievement to us at least, but it has resulted in a cheapening of the landscape and a general passive acceptance of its demise, pollution and continued commercialisation of the land. This is in no way beneficial or indeed acceptable to the myriad species that share the landscape with us.
There is a concept that the only way the human race can survive into the future is through increasing development and pervasion of technology into our lives at a biological level. This current mode of civilization we have got ourselves into a mess with, is fixated on maintaining the levels of consumption and luxury we apparently need and would have us rather than change our ways develop a even more insulated and isolated technological existence. It is a vulgar, degraded and spectacularly arrogant position some humans would wish us to perpetuate in our relationship with the Earth.
I believe the only way humans must go is by returning to the land, not as exploiters or imposers, but as children with their eyes and senses open to new learning.
Can you see out there how the landscape yearns for us to remember its sensuality and song?
But we are blind and fallen lot, going about heads down, television, cars, supermarkets, money. Hemmed in by concrete, believing all there is to it all is walkers crisps and the cuddly BBC, we are waiting to slough off a skin that holds us all back from waking up to reality.
If we continue to forget the land as somewhere that is directly connected to us and the future and the future of all species besides us, then we may never wake to remember because not the land but we will have passed on then into the fossil record.
The land calls us now to dream a new walking forwards for humans!
Let us surrender to the beauty and possibilities that throb in the Earth!
There is nothing more to be done than to let Earth now enter our lives as a flower opens and fills our eyes and soul with that nourishment we have so forgotten and neglected to give her.

The River Severn

Walking about Stroud where I live, one's legs are made quite aware of the hills. And they are hills with real character and inclination! It's as if this landscape wants you to have that experience of going up in quite a strong way. Or if you are going down, then your visual experience again is changed and all the wiggling ridges that tuck the valleys in them close up around you. The feeling when you are on high on one of the escarpments is a spatially widening one. There is a distinct hilly promontory at the end of the ridge that is straddled by Randwick woods, with the old villages of Randwick, Ruscombe, and the modern sprawl of Cashes Green below. It is called Doverow Hill, though to my eyes it is more of a beacon than a plain hill. From Doverow you have a dynamic wrap-around view of the valley one side with the neighbouring ridges, and then the other side the plain of the Severn river stretching further to the Welsh Mountains. Its a view you can literally breath in, as though it were a living organism which it is of course, but today with modern industrial developments, and extensive tarmacking over of the landscape it makes the living aspect of the land much obscured.
From my Doverow beacon with a bracing air about my ears, the mirror-like sheen of the Severn winding away down on the plain towards Gloucester's gangling suburbs is the source of life on this plain. The Severn could be the Nile of Gloucestershire. Her waters have fed the fertile pastures of the wet plains before we were here in the numbers we now are. She opens to an estuary further on at Bristol, where another wetland plain begins: the Somerset levels. The Severn wherever you go wandering in these valleys up a ridge to get a perspective on the land, always manifests herself at the borders of seeing: a mirror-like curving serpent. She is mysterious and so very ubiquitous everywhere you go in the land!
The streams in the valley, for example the Fromebrook (which today is high with the rains and rushing at an exciting, pumping pace) wend their way to her mirroring waters to become part of her journey. In days long ago, it must have been easier to more clearly see the path of the valley streams dancing away. It is a difficult thing now to follow these beautiful streams without them disappearing under concrete! At least the Severn won't know such crude treatment.
Water is a vital part of the landscape, and the plains of the Severn are well populated and settled because the soil has been anciently nourished and formed by her mirror-like hand. Life thrives here because the tidal bosom of the river. This gift of the Severn must surely have been revered by our Celtic ancestors. What deity did they perceive in the river when the tidal Bore surged and pulsed up the river course, a rushing wave boiling forwards like horses!
Though I have not seen the phenomena known as the Bore myself, but I feel its appearance to our old ancestors must have been like the essence of the river showing itself. The fact Gloucester cathedral now stands near her, its golden spire like a ships mast is surely testimony to the continuation of an ancient site of worship that beheld the Severn as god or goddess.
For a time I was living closer to the Severn on the opposite side of the river from Stroud. I remember walking on particularly bright mornings and seeing the river glistening wonderfully, yet so still but yet so full of dancing speckles of light! It was the skin of an awesome fish imbued with all the beauty of the sun!
I think the Severn was the first river I had encountered in England that seemed so alive. Her stillness and her tidal blossoming imparted that aliveness to me. She was breathing it seemed. When I experienced the light on her waters she seemed to become the very embodiment of light, and this makes me ponder the first half of the name of 'Gloucester'. The 'Glou' element of  the name derives from old Celtic roots, and an equivalent of the word can be found in Welsh. It means to be bright, or shining.
It makes sense. Gloucester is founded on the banks of a river that when touched by the sunlight, becomes so bright and radiant it makes one stop and ones heart see's a threshold to a divine realm of lightness, sweetness, grace and eternity. No wonder there was a temple to the Celtic fisher deity Nodens at Lydney, perhaps there were many more sacred places, strung along the banks of a river that is the journey of life itself.

Here's a poem!

Severn drowned Sabrina

Streaming in out,
flotsam of fishing lures,
jettison of today,
car tyres drowned like Sabrina,
a shoal of drift things in the bore,
In the eels quicksilver tails,
flashing eyes in the depths,
we step down its mud banks, 
cold tidal lips,
reveal each of us a mantle,
flung out,
a yard of cloth,
bringing beauty,
breathing bright,
the banner of the Severn.

Robin Collins 2014

Heal the Paths

 

England is a continuous map of paths, and they have been vital to the emergence of human settlement and civilization. Paths are the bloodways through where humans have hunted, traded, exchanged stories and time. They were also where our world met with Earth along the way, and for the journey on the path we would be marking a point in time when we would be observing not the hearth-centre of the home and sound of human activity around us, but the sun, the sky, water, animals and plants. But in these stainless steel modern times, how we have lost such paths! As once in our everyday lives we were able leave behind the fuss of humanity, and enter the peace of Earths green girdle.

Today's technology oppresses, stifles, blocks off the experience of walking those old paths. Cars dominate travel, and legs are no longer obligatory to move through space and time. Motorways cut through the landscape blind to its magic and undulations. Paths have fallen into disuse in the ebb and flow of human business. One important, and indeed intrinsic element of those paths that we once walked in a communal landscape was their nature of wandering. Wandering is another subject I will likely discourse and digress on later. But paths wandered because they had to yield to the curves in the land, and skirt around difficult terrain like marshes and woods full of robbers. Wandered because the paths were tracking the time of the land which went to the slower Earth-time that slowed us down. In the modern world it has become a sinful practise to go slow, to wander, and put aside the march of the money-counting clock. We are glowered upon as snails holding back progress of an aggressively materialist world if we dare to wander off! It is a tragedy that today man exists with a wall between him and Earth, for his paths no longer yield to the land, its vagaries, and that humbling bodily experience of knowing you cannot go any faster, nor further than what your own body can give, and you can give to your own body in the way of care and nourishment.

Its a cerebral traffic jam modern civilization is stuck in. The environments we are familiar with today supermarkets, carparks, sprawling housing suburbia and all the rest, are cerebral in their monotonous, rigid layouts. Cerebral in that their origins have come out of a human mind that is thinking in terms of abstract figures of money, designs and attitudes that when they are stamped out there for us to see, tell us how well this person understands using a computer and has never once thought of the Earth as more than a 'Click and drop here' exercise.

Such is the state of modern man's world I would call it a pathless one, for it dismisses the journey and its destination is a low-grade reality it grasps for, involving the production of tons of objects with which the consumers can fill up their boxy homes. For a lack of path, here man is adrift in a strange land that keeps everything that it entices him with hidden from his eyes. Globalisation, mass production lines, and corporate ownership are the great pillars of this theatre that vows to keep man from the wandering path. If he struck out on its road might take him on a rich journey those destination will shear asunder the false façade, horrifying and at once empowering him with the truth beneath its barbed cotton: we all have to find our way back to Mother Earth, because she is the source of all true prosperity, happiness, and freedom to be. But once somebody tries to control her gifts, and manipulate their purity they become darkened out of their selfishness changing into the very opposite of what they are. This feels like an appropriate place to stop at now and hand it over to the poetry.

Healing the Paths

Heal the paths,
that took us,
to meet worlds,
beyond ourselves,
and did not finish at the page in an empty box.

 Heal the paths,

that once took us,
to find ourselves,
at home among the growing trees,
learning again,
how to watch and listen by its sounds and signs.

 Heal the paths,

that once,
brought us to,
be nourished,
where the land,
once grew abundantly,
for itself.

Heal the paths,

that wended,
towards wild places,
where mind and body could be free,
to run, jump, get dirty and feel the warmth 
of being alive.

 Heal the paths,

that did meet between,
us and all the wriggling,
flowering and tangling things,
those own paths,
begin where ours end.

 Heal the paths.

Where else can we walk?
But on the Earth,
on a journey,
towards our heart,
taking the tracks
of animals, birds and insects,
who have always shown us,
the way home.

 Robin Collins 2013