A Way Home Through the Woods

 I've been in the wrong place

long enough to know I'm in the right place now.
Eddi Reader

I was born and brought up in the Rhondda Valley. I went to Swansea University and then to the University of Wales, Cardiff for my PGCE. My first teaching post was in Hampshire and the last in West Yorkshire. For most of my adult life I lived in England. 

Cynefin is a Welsh word that cannot be simply translated. It has multiple meanings – the place of our belonging, of our roots, a place where people and nature are interconnected, the place where we were meant to be.

It took a mysterious viral illness that lasted for two years, to bring me home not just to Wales but to a part of Wales that my soul had always longed for – the mountains of North Wales. I came to live in the forest at Coed Hafod y Llyn. This forest marked the final stage in my recovery. Here I found the fulcrum – acknowledging that up and down, lost and found are all essentially places along the way.

Each year I spend a month in Manhattan and love the vibrancy of the city and the spaciousness of Central Park. Every summer I camp near The Lizard in Cornwall and feel pained when I leave the ocean and the stunningly beautiful coastal path. It is the lively connection with place that makes it worth living in.

Last week I took the opportunity to walk home through the forest from a different direction and on a newly designated path. I reconnected with the pure joy of having a forest to walk home through – right to my front door.

The Rest is Silence...

As an English Literature graduate, writer and Certified Poetry Therapist, quotations have had, and continue to have, a huge significance in my life. From the time I began to read, certain phrases attracted my attention, mainly because they were congruent with my own thoughts and feelings at the time.

As a teenager suffering from the anguish of jealous love I was both tormented and comforted with quotations from Othello.

 “But there where I have garnered up my heart,

Where either I must live or bear no life,
The fountain from which my current runs
Or else dries up—to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!”

 When my mother died I wrote on the card attached to her wreath, "Nothing left remarkable/beneath the visiting moon", from “Antony and Cleopatra”, and later, on my father’s, “And you my father, there on the sad height,/ Curse, bless me now”, from “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, as it spoke to me of his sadness and isolation since my mother’s death and also of our ambivalent relationship.
 

When I first had a mobile phone, I had "The rest is silence" as my screen message. I wanted to remind myself that there is a finite amount of time "to live out loud". In times of stress and anxiety I come back to the simplicity of “Breathe my dear” and “This too shall pass”.

But the two quotations that I wish I had been aware of from a much younger age are “Know thyself”, attributed to numerous Greek sages and spoken by Plato's Socrates, and “Only connect” from E M Forster's "Howards End". So much wisdom contained in just four words.

Wild

Two weeks ago I spent three days at Ty Newydd Writers Centre on a course about three of my favourite topics  - Landscape, Memoir and Travel. I had such an enjoyable and profitable time there with twelve other writers and two inspiring and encouraging tutors. I was also lucky enough to meet Jay Griffiths for the first time and to hear her read from her book "Wild".  She wrote, "for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind".  I realised that for the first time I was hearing someone describe what it means to be wild in a way I connected with.

 

Every morning I got up early to run down to the estuary and along the coast path to Criccieth and back. Each time I saw this pair of swans feeding together.

 

Later I wrote: Up with a rising sun and into the brightening day. Running down lanes of slurried mud and moulding blackberries. Out onto the loose banks of the estuary - and there, two swans holding their own against a current intent on taking them out to sea. Bent necks, one movement, breaking through silver and gold. In this I saw the tender synchronicity of our own life together - the strength  and vulnerabilityof being one part of two.

Gwen and the Yellow Flower

Sunday, 17 January 2010




















For some time now I have seen my lovely old dog Gwen become more frail and sick. Her spirit has always been strong and part of my deep sadness was witnessing her determination to survive.















Grief is an Open Door
(for Gwen)

Look in and see all
that has been.
I took love in through
your flame and fed its fire.
The crimson rowan berries
that lined our path,
sweet fallen plums
and soured apples.
The hunger for it all.

Look out and see all
that is.
The oak tree, bare now
with crow its one dark leaf
ready to fly.
And you, my beloved,
like the one yellow flower
that refuses to yield
until it is time.





After the recent harsh frost and heavy snow the flower wilted. Gwen finally succumbed and died yesterday, January 16 2010.
Posted by Jill Teague at 14:39 0 comments

Shrew Babies

A family of four shrew babies were nesting underneath the studio. A few weeks ago they decided to take an outing together. As babies they tolerated each other and cooperated to dig small holes and keep each other warm. We watched them - small bundles of silken vibrating energy - as they darted around searching for tasty bugs. Then one by one they headed for home, as if the instinct to regroup at the nest had been passed from one to the other on a cellular level. Their interconnectedness was absolute. As they grow into adulthood they will become intolerant of each other and will part ways to live their solitary lives.

 

 

Gwen asleep on the Rug

My little dog is 16 and two months. Her heart is straining to pump the oxygen she needs and her lungs are bubbling and crackling with fluid overload. Still her eyes are bright and full of expectation. And in her sleep all four legs kick out in synchronised jerks as she runs like the wind in her dreams. I trace her outline - her boney head, the cleft where her shoulder blades meet, the curve of her ribs - like someone who is losing sight of our shared future.

Lizards

It seems like an age since we were in the wonderful Spanish sunshine. While walking in the mountains we saw lizards basking and understood their need to soak up the sun. Back home, after days of rain, the sun seemed unseasonal. I went into the garden to pick the last of the peas and there on the fencepost was a family of lizards - a mother and two babies. Desperate for warmth, they were head to tail, a circle of petroglyphs in relief. We were all suspended in the shared moment. I watched the rhythmic tic of the mother's heart. Then one of the babies loosed its grip - unhinged its four limbs and seemed to float down into the dark roots. I read that lizards have the ability to slow down their landing so that they don't harm themselves when they fall. Also it fascinates me that they have a predetermined fracture plane from the sixth vertebrae onward and can perfom self severance of the tail to survive. I thought of the lines from Eddi Reader's song "Simple Soul" - "if it hurts you, let it go".