they say: find out.
10.
It’s a Sunday in April and I am at home. I have a whole day to spend outside. We have herbs to plant, and onion sets, and heather. We have beds to dig and grass to cut. Spring is roaring out. Time is pressing.
My nine-year-old daughter, Leela, appears by my side. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ she says. ‘Would you like to come to my stone-carving workshop?’
‘Er,’ I say. ‘Yes, that would be great.’ She leads me to an upturned box in the porch on which lie a selection of scratched stones she has found in the garden. She hands me an awl and a lump of sandstone.
‘How long will it take?’ I ask.
‘About 20 minutes,’ she says.
‘I’ve only got 10,’ I say, instinctively.
‘Oh, that’s OK,’ she says. ‘You can still do something good. You have to decide what you want to carve. Maybe a lady’s face, or maybe Quincy.’
Quincy is our dog. I sit on a stool and begin to carve the dog’s face on the stone. Shit, I think to myself, for the eight-hundredth time. I am a terrible father. The thing that has haunted me throughout my children’s lives has been the remembered moments. We all have them: standout images from our childhood, times, pictures, events, things which sank in, good or bad. But there’s no rhyme or reason to them. You never know what they will take with them into adulthood. Will Leela always remember the time we camped together in the woods by Lough Gill, just yards from Yeats’ Isle of Innisfree, and cooked dinner over a fire? Will she remember us playing vets together in a garden beneath a volcano in Chilean Patagonia? Will she remember us sheltering from the rain in a Cumbrian wood? Or will she remember the time I couldn’t spare 10 minutes because I had to do something which I had told myself was more important than being with her, because it was ‘work,’ and ‘work’ is always more important than living?
Part of my plan, when we came here, was that my newfound rootedness would spread like a slow mist into every other area of my life. My restless energy would be channeled into planting trees, clearing brambles, building treehouses, hacking down long grass, hefting stones and all the other heavy, ongoing work of running a working smallholding. The time I spend in my head, writing and thinking, which in the past had nearly eaten me alive so often, would be balanced by time outside, in the sun and rain, using my hands instead of my brain. I would tame my monkey mind, force myself out from my internal world into the external one, at least for a little while, and this would save me and those around me.
This wasn’t such a bad plan, and it has worked to a degree. There is nothing like setting a rat trap or carrying a bucket full of shit in the rain to force you back into the real stuff of life. But if you have that monkey mind, as I suppose all writers—all humans?— do, this stuff is not going to keep you occupied for very long. The dark truth, which any writer or artist, or indeed reader or music-lover, will know is that the worlds we create inside us are often simply better than the one we are forced to live in. I don’t want this to be true, but it is. I still enjoy carrying buckets of shit in the rain, and I enjoy catching rats too. Everyone’s inner sadist needs a regular, healthy outing. But being here has not calmed me as I hoped it would. It has not saved me and it is not going to, and I have taken too long to understand that.
Here we are, staring into the timeless gulf between ideal and reality. I have come to hate idealists like the one I used to be, as a born-again non-smoker hates the smell of tobacco. Ideals are a pox on humanity: if you have ideals, you will go out into the world as a destroyer. You will always see what doesn’t work rather than what does, you will always be able to leap into the space between things as they are and things as, in your narrow view, they should be. Then you will try to close the space, to heal it, and you will end up either clinically depressed or running a series of death camps, or—the worst possible outcome— both. As any Buddhist master will tell you, repeatedly for several lifetimes, the only way to free yourself from this trap is simply to be. To pay attention. It is what it is, they will say, patiently, as your Western, university-trained mind screams, what it is isn’t good enough! Make it better!
I talked to Jyoti about this. I said: I wanted to be one of these dads who plays with their kids all day, who crawls about on all fours with them riding on his back, who is genial and avuncular and never impatient. I was going to be rooted and stolid and reliable, like an old tree. But I can’t turn my head off. And she said: you were never going to be that kind of dad, if they even exist, so why don’t you stop trying to be one? They love you for who you are. They can see that you live in your head, because everybody can. They know you’re like Uncle Quentin out of The Famous Five. Why did you think that was going to change?
I thought the land was going to change me, I mumbled.
Oh, honestly, she said.
I thought I’d get here and reach a plateau, I said. I thought the journey would be over then, and I could concentrate on just being. Digging in, honing my skills, becoming calmer, wiser, steadier. I thought I’d arrived. But maybe it’s not a plateau after all. Maybe there aren’t ever any plateaus.
The plateau, she said, comes when you’re dead.
11.
I wanted to be a tree, but I am not a tree. I wanted to sing to the forest, but no one ever taught me the words, and I don’t suppose they ever will because there is no one in my world to teach me. Nobody here has known the words for centuries. I was born in those rootless suburbs and they have given me a rootless soul. I am not a tree. I am some kind of slinking animal in the hedgerow. I am a seed on the wind. I am water. I am coming to the rocks at the lip of the fall.
12.
I was writing a book. I usually am. Last winter, I started writing it. It worked for a while, and then it ground to a halt. This is common enough. Books stop and start, they go through rough patches and charmed patches. But this time, something different was happening. I could feel it. There was something missing; some energy. It wasn’t ‘writer’s block,’ because I could still write—here I am, still writing. So what was it? What was happening here?
I realized, after a while, that anything I have ever written in the past which has even approached being any good at all has been written from some place of desperation. It has been written from the edges: from the dark slope of the mountain, not the warmth of the campfire. I have been writing in, not writing out. I have been shouting something, in the expectation that I would never be heard. Now I had to face—I still have to face—a possibility I don’t know what to do with. Maybe I can’t write anything from the campfire. Here, in this settled place, in this comfortable place. Maybe I need to be desperate again. Maybe I need to be bare and hungry on the mountain. But what does that mean? What would it look like? Where did the words go, and what do they want? I don’t seem to be able to write anything but questions anymore. See?
Out in the field now, among the poppies and the cornflowers, among the creeping buttercup and the walnut trees smothered by couch grass, under the elders and the daytime moon, something is whispering to me what the headless statue once whispered to Rilke: you must change your life.
Oh, God, I think. Not again.
13.
When did magic disappear? When did stones stop talking? When did birds stop relaying messages to me, and tree spirits stop replying when I left gifts for them in the knots of their trunks which twisted around and reached upward at the same time? That’s what children have that adults don’t. That’s the Garden we can never
