Category Archives: environment

Home made retreat

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In a time of grief and anxiety, I created my own retreat at home.

My next-door neighbour, Alfredas Chmieliauskas, posts on Instagram on issues related to health and well-being, sobriety and detoxing. I occasionally send him links to podcasts, articles, or other media that I think might interest him. Recently, I sent him links to episodes from two podcasts.

One was from Maya Shankar’s A Slight Change of Plans on the theme of awe and the other was from Laurie Santos’s The Happiness Lab on aligning one’s personal actions against climate change with activities that make us happy. My podcast tastes are catholic, to say the least, and I have a tendency to fall down a rabbit hole of one and listen to nothing else for weeks on end. When new episodes of both A Slight Change of Plans and The Happiness Lab popped up on my podcast app a few weeks ago, I started to dip into them again.

Both podcasts were key elements of my pathway through grief and overcoming the panic attacks and anxiety that I experienced after Julian died in September 2021. My grief was messy and complicated, owing to our recent separation and his subsequent sudden death from a heart attack. In the weeks that followed, as I mourned his loss, thought deeply about his life, supported our daughters through the loss of their dad, and worried about the effect his death would have on them, I started to have panic attacks. At the time, I didn’t know what was happening to me, only that my heart was fluttering uncomfortably, sometimes pounding like it would jump out of my chest, I was short of breath, the world was closing in around me, black and hazy in my peripheral vision. Each night, I’d go to bed terrified that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning, panicking even more that the girls would find me dead and that they’d have lost both parents in a short space of time. I would fall asleep quickly, but wake up an hour or two later, in full panic attack mode, and then spend hours scrolling through my phone to take my mind off the flutters in my chest, eventually falling back to sleep, and then waking up in the morning exhausted.

I realized that there was a psychological element to this, because when I was with other people – with friends, doing the shopping, or when I was out walking the dog over the hills, I didn’t have these sensations. Ever. Only when I was alone, or just with the children, did I get these awful and terrifying sensations.

I made an appointment to see the GP one Wednesday morning in late November 2021 and, perhaps as luck would have it, all of these sensations came on at once while I was sitting on my own in the waiting room. I thought I would faint and that the GP would find me in a heap on the floor. I didn’t. But he only had to hear a couple of my symptoms and learn my very recent history to diagnose panic attack. “This is a panic attack?” I asked him. He was sure of it. But my heart was fluttering, so, he sent me down the hall to the nurse for an ECG, told me to come back in a couple of days for blood tests, and made an appointment for me to see a cardiologist. He was, however, pretty confident that these were panic attacks and nothing more sinister. Oh, and he prescribed Xanax, and told me only to take one when I felt these symptoms coming on.

I went home relieved that I had a diagnosis and made up my mind to do something about it. I decided to create therapy conditions in my own home, to find ways to walk through my grief and release my anxiety. The first thing I did was improve my sleep hygiene. At night, I banned my mobile phone to the kitchen with the sound turned off. I bought an alarm clock, so I no longer needed the phone alarm to wake me up. Before going to bed, I kept the lights in my bedroom low and practiced yoga for 10 minutes (with the wonderful Kassandra on YouTube) followed by 10 minutes of silent meditation. Once in bed, I would read my book for a few minutes before turning the lights out. When a panic attack came on in the middle of the night, I took a Xanax[1] and read my book. I fell back asleep much more quickly from reading my book than from scrolling my phone. Each morning, I would again practice yoga for 10 minutes and meditate for 10 minutes before going downstairs to start my day.

I found time each day to write and poured my complicated messy grief out onto the page. Stuff came out that I didn’t even know was in there. I never want to share what I wrote with anyone; indeed, I’ve yet to read it again myself. But I needed to get it out in order to work through it. I went for long solitary walks with the dog, giving free rein to my emotions. For weeks, maybe even months, every single time I went for a walk on my own, I cried. I can only imagine what the other walkers I occasionally met on the trails must have thought of me, tears and snot streaming down my face.

And, I discovered these two amazing podcasts. In The Happiness Lab, Dr Laurie Santos, a Yale University professor of psychology, explores the science of happiness and provides practical advice on how to improve your wellbeing. A Slight Change of Plans is hosted by Dr Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist who was a senior mental health advisor in the Obama White House. In each episode, a different guest shares their personal story of a sudden and unexpected event that dramatically altered their lives. Guests have stories about accidents and illnesses, being kidnapped or held at gunpoint, or receiving a piece of news that changed the direction of their lives. With great empathy, Dr Shankar interrogates how these ‘slight change of plans’ have altered peoples’ perceptions of themselves and others, of their place in the world, and of their value to the world.

Both of these podcasts had a profound impact on me as I travelled through my grief and anxiety and figured out how best to support my girls as they travelled through their own. I found fellowship among strangers who had experienced and could now reflect on their life-changing experiences and I learned about practices I could enact in my own life to support my wellbeing. I guess you could say I created a retreat in my own home – one where I could turn to these two experts and their guests at a moment’s notice, where I could roll out my mat as often as I wanted to practice yoga and meditation, where I wrote my grief onto the pages of my notebook, and where I created and stuck to healthy sleep routines.

By the time I had my cardiology appointment a couple of months later, the panic attacks were behind me and my home retreat practices had become routine. I haven’t looked back. The following summer, ten months after Julian died, the panic attacks returned. This time I knew what they were, I knew what had triggered them and, though they scared me still, I knew how to take care of myself through them. Grief evolves rather than disappears and I know that my home-made retreat is not the same as speaking to a professional therapist. Maybe I will go down that road some day too.

This is the first time I’ve publicly written about Julian’s death – even though this has been about my reaction to it, rather than about Julian himself. It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I wanted to share anything, even with those closest to me. I’ve chosen not to write about my daughters here – their stories and their grief are theirs alone to tell. 

[1] The GP prescribed me 30 Xanax in November 2021. When I threw the box away last month, three Xanax remained. I used them sparingly.

Walking through January

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In late December, I set myself a challenge to walk 200km in January.

2023 had been an exceptional year for me. I was joyful and exuberant in turning 50 and everything about my life seemed to glow. That was until the end of the year, when it felt as if someone let the air out of my balloon. From early December, I felt lost, drained, living in a cloud of cotton wool, from which I neither could nor desired to work, be with other people, or drag myself out of the house.

Happiness and contentment are my default modes. If chemical imbalances play a role in the onset of depression, then I often think that I have chemical imbalances in the other direction. I’m chronically happy. I’m annoyingly upbeat. My glass is always way more than half full.

Except at the end of 2023, when it wasn’t. I had no reason to feel down, and yet I did. A weekend in Sevilla uplifted me momentarily but, even there, I was unusually sharp with my daughters and, at times, felt the strain of being in a city more acutely than usual. Then I came down with COVID and a week in Tenerife over Christmas that was supposed to relight my lamp instead left me feeling even more down in the dumps. I returned home to Sanlúcar COVID-free but feeling flat.

Then one day, in the last week of December, I set out to walk the dog. Not an ‘oh god, I’ve got to walk the dog’ sort of walk, the kind that had become my default over the past year, when I’ve increasingly cited lack of time, but a ‘let’s see how far we can go’ sort of walk, with a backpack on my back, containing my water bottle, a notebook and pen, and my phone to take photos. I walked north, along the path that leads up the river, stopping to allow myself to be enveloped in the silence, to watch a raft of canes drift down the river, to marvel at the orogeny on a wall of rock. The dog, of course, loved it too, walking farther than she had in months. At the farthest point from home, I decided to set myself the challenge of walking 200km in January.

I walked for the first few days of January, recording the distance so that I had a sense of how far I might walk in a certain amount of time and considering how I could make space in my work day for this challenge. On each walk, I was uplifted. The land was brightly green, decorated with patches of wildflowers, yellow and white. It was a balm to the eyes and to the soul. Each day, though my spirits descended again when I returned from my walks, the troughs were not so deep. By the second week of January, I felt like myself again.

Some days I walked 10km or more, one day I only managed 1km. I walked at all times of the day – in cold early morning mist in jacket and woolly hat, bright afternoon sunshine in t-shirt and sunglasses, at sunset, carefully picking my way along rocky paths in the dark; Lady always my faithful companion, the land I walked through nourishing and uplifting me.

By the end of the month, I had walked 201km, along paths leading out in a radius from my house. I became reacquainted with places I hadn’t walked in years, just as I became reacquainted with why I love living here in the first place – the immensity of the land, the stories it tells of the people who lived here before, if only you take the time to read those stories in the landscape, the other creatures nourished by the land, and the river that brought me here snaking through it all; the vastness of the sky, at times a blue so deep as to seem unreal, at times ominous shades of grey, at night the riot of stars a glorious reminder of my insignificance, the Milky Way mirroring the route of our little river.

Over the course of the month, I observed changes taking place – sudden changes brought about by a heavy rain shower, slower changes as grasses grew, the number of lambs in a herd of sheep increased dramatically, the oranges continued to ripen and fall from the trees. I have found one, two, or even three hours in each day to walk. Those hours were there for the taking all along, I just failed to see them. Walking became the fulcrum of my day throughout January, uplifting me, soothing my soul, reassuring me that in the face of such ordinary magnificence, it is only to be expected that happiness is my default mode.

As for February? I’m back on the tracks and trails again, mostly in the lengthening evenings, challenging myself to another 200km. It hardly feels like a challenge. It’s starting to feel more like a drug.

Remembering Lahaina

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I spent less than a month of my life in Lahaina, but the town had a profound and lasting impact on me. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the two visits I made to Lahaina shaped the direction of my life.

I first went to Lahaina just a couple of weeks before my 23rd birthday. It was spring vacation in Japan, and my Portuguese-Australian friend, Liliane, and I booked a two-week holiday in the Maui tourist town. At the time, going on vacation to Hawaii from Japan was equivalent to northern Europeans vacationing in the Canary Islands. We booked the holiday through a travel agent (remember them?) who travelled from school to school, booking holidays for busy teachers, and in March we flew east from Japan, across the Pacific Ocean, to Hawaii. It was my first grown-up holiday, and the first time I ever flew somewhere to take a break from work.

Lahaina was beautiful, full of low wooden buildings, palm trees, and artists. The mountains behind the town were deep green and, from the perspective of a boat at sea, dotted with rainbows. The streets were lined with artists’ galleries selling art inspired by the sea – humpback whales, turtles, fish as paintings, sculptures, silk prints, photographs. The sunsets each evening were mesmerizing and, as many nights as I could, I found a wall to sit on, where I could look west over the ocean, and bathe in those sunsets.

It was in Lahaina that I first ate mango, first ate Mexican food, first ate macadamia nuts and macadamia nut ice cream. Ah, the ice cream. I wasn’t much of a fan of ice cream, having mostly only ever eaten tasteless blocks of HB vanilla that we had in the freezer back in Ireland. The ice cream in Lahaina was like nothing I’d ever tasted and I soon discovered the best ice cream shop, on a corner just by the banyan tree. That banyan tree, claimed to be the largest in the western hemisphere, covering over an acre of land. It was the first thing I thought about when I first heard about the fire – that vast tree and all of the activities that took place under its shade – family gatherings, markets, people raising awareness for their important causes, buskers making music.

Lahaina was also my first time in the US and I was unprepared for how friendly all the service staff were. Shop assistants, waiters, bar staff were all so NICE. It took a little getting used to walking into a shop and the shop assistant telling me how much she loved my dress or my sunglasses or my accent. I’d never before encountered such fresh and unabashed complements and I quickly grew to love that attitude.

My lasting impression of the local people I encountered was that they were fiercely unique and independent. On that trip, and when I returned a couple of years later, I met aging hippies and flower children now in their sixties, and Vietnam vets from the US mainland; I met native Hawaiians and people of Japanese descent and I spent a memorable night sitting in a diner with a 76-year-old jazz musician, getting endless top-ups of coffee, as he told me of the amazing life he’d led. I’d never met people so keen to tell their life stories. As a recently graduated anthropology student, I was hypnotized.

But the biggest impact that Lahaina had on me was in the ocean that surrounded it. As part of that vacation, I had decided that I wanted to learn to scuba dive. In the first couple of days, I found a dive shop and signed up to do the PADI open water course. The three-day course involved classroom work, four open water dives to practice and test skills, and a classroom exam. The instructor was a huge red-headed Midwesterner called Gary Bluhm, who had only recently moved to Lahaina after 25 years as a dive instructor on Lake Michigan. I felt in safe hands.

Scuba diving was a transformative experience for me and something I continued to do regularly for many years afterwards. I put a tank on my back again a few months ago after a break of almost a decade, when I took 12-year-old Katie for her first dive in the Mediterranean. I was delighted that she loved the experience as much as me.

Lilian and I took a boat trip one day to a humpback whale research station along the coast. On the way, we saw humpback whales breaching, diving, breathing. That first experience of seeing whales in their natural habitat had a profound impact on me. The waters off Lahaina are a humpback whale nursery, where pregnant females, who have spent the summer in Alaska, migrate to Lahaina to give birth and raise their calves, preparing them for the arduous migration north in spring.

From that first moment, I decided I wanted to learn more about humpback whales and whales in general. I returned home to Japan and dug into the natural history of humpback whales, into the history of whaling, into the science of studying whales. Two years later, in 1995, I returned to Lahaina as a volunteer humpback whale researcher, joining Dr Adam Pack and Professor Louis Herman and their team of post-grads and PhD students, for two weeks of research. I was almost as much in awe of the dedicated scientists and the work they did as I was of the humpback whales that I had the privilege of seeing while assisting in their work.

For those two weeks, I lived in a rented house in the suburbs of Lahaina with the scientists and two other volunteers. Each morning, we’d quickly make our lunch for the day (peanut butter and jelly for me…another first and another revelation), hop in the van and head off for a long day’s work. Some days, I was up on a hill overlooking the ocean, from where we had a panoramic view of where the whales were and the direction they were travelling. We recorded their movements – coordinates of where we saw them and what behaviours they were exhibiting (spouting, breaching, slapping, deep diving), whether they were mother-calf pairs, or were in larger groups. We radioed their location to the boat team, who we could also see from our lookout point.

Other days I was on the boat, and those were the best days of all. Based on our own observations and on those radioed down from the hill, the skipper (one of the post-docs) would manoeuvre the 15-foot Boston Whaler into the vicinity of some whales. And then he’d cut the motor and we’d wait. I remember whales breaching so close that we got wet from the splash, and the fishy smell when they came up to breathe right beside us. I remember a calf with its mother, lying sideways in the water, as it looked up at us with one huge eye, full of youthful curiosity. One day, a young male whale swam under the boat. I could see his pectoral fins, like wings, either side of the boat. He remained perfectly still underneath us and sang. I felt his song more than heard it, as it reverberated up through the hull, up through my feet and legs, and up to my heart and head. I can still feel that vibrating sound in my body to this day, 25 years on.

My job, as a volunteer, was to keep my eyes peeled for whales, to help the scientists as they prepared to do their work, and then to take precise written notes of what was going on. Meanwhile, the real scientists did their work. Some took photographs of flukes (fluke matching is the primary way to identify individual humpbacks, as each fluke is unique). Others dived in with underwater cameras to film whale behavior. Microphones were dropped overboard to record songs and calls.

The days were long and, without a loo onboard, a moment would come each day when we’d have a mass evacuation into the sea. Anyone who needed to relieve themselves would jump into the 5,000 metre deep Pacific Ocean, knowing there were humpback whales and tiger sharks and who knew what else, in there too. I’d jump in but, the thought of the depth of the water beneath me and what might brush against my leg…or worse…left me with stage fright and no matter how much I needed a wee before jumping in, it always took longer than I hoped. I’d haul myself back onto the boat as quickly as possible and we’d be on our way again.

Each evening after supper (everyone took their turn to do the cooking), we’d pour over piles of photo albums, filled with page after page of black and white photographs of humpback whale flukes, trying to match up a fluke from one year with one from a different year. Did a fluke from 1982, with no other identifying notes, match one from 1994, this time with a calf and, therefore, clearly identified as female?

From those couple of weeks learning about humpback whales and about marine biology, my love of whales and of the sea deepened. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I pursued a PhD into the anthropology of the sea and how humans relate to the sea and acquire their sea-related knowledge and skill because of those two weeks, or that my postdoctoral research was about the relationship between humans and beluga whales, or that I became a sailor and took to the sea. That I got a tattoo of a humpback whale doesn’t require too deep a psychological investigation. For years, I had a recurring dream about humpback whales. At times of stress in my life, they came to my rescue and brought me safely to shore.

And so, when I woke one morning last week to the news that Lahaina was on fire, I was deeply saddened. My first thought was of the banyan tree but, as the days wore on and news of the fire grew grimmer and more desperate, with more deaths and more destruction, I thought of all the incredible people I met these in 1993 and 1995 – the marine biologists, the hippies, the Vietnam vets, the artists, the scuba divers, the sales assistants and waiters, the dancers and performers. They are in my thoughts, wherever they are now.

Autumn

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Autumn is in the air. Not in the middle of the day, when the sun beats down from a cloudless sky and the temperature hovers in the mid-30s (˚C). It doesn’t feel like autumn then. But early in the morning when I take the dog for her walk, there’s a discernible change in the air, a frisson of a new season, a hint of something different. It invigorates me and makes my skin tingle.

These mornings it’s cooler, the sun is lower in the sky and there’s a noticeable smell as autumn finds a chink in summer’s armour and stealthily, but inevitably, seeps through. The evenings are undergoing change too, the sky filling with massive billowy clouds in late afternoon, white, grey, ominously black. If we don’t get rain here – and often we don’t – we see it falling elsewhere, sheets of grey connecting sky to land, sweeping across the hills somewhere away in the distance. When it does rain here, it falls in huge fat drops, in showers that are fast, sudden, drenching, and over almost as soon as they’ve begun, filling the air with petrichor*, that heady fragrance of rain after a dry spell.

I get giddy with the turn of the seasons. Each offers new opportunities – seasonal foods to cook and eat, seasonal changes in the landscape to enjoy and wonder at, seasonal festivals and celebrations. I like the change of wardrobe that comes with the change of seasons. After a long hot summer of shorts, t-shirts, dresses and sandals, I’m looking forward to jeans, jumpers, boots and jackets.

Autumn, much more than spring or even New Year, has a feeling of renewal about it. Perhaps it’s because I have spent 37 of my 46 years in formal education, either as a student or an educator and because our year now revolves around my daughters’ school year. Autumn is a time for new books, new pens and pencils, fresh empty virginal notebooks, and the endless possibilities they present. It is a time for stepping up an academic level and the inherent possibilities for learning new things, making new discoveries, and growing intellectually and emotionally.

As I step out these mornings to take Lady on long walks through the countryside, the cool fragrant autumn air that fills my lungs also fills my mind with possibilities for how the remainder of the year will unfold, for jobs to be done and activities to participate in, for writing projects to start or complete, for classes to take and places to visit.

What’s my favourite season? The truth is, I don’t have one. I love them all. My favourite times of year are those in-between season times, when one gets sensory hints of the season to come. Those are the best times of year of all.

*Thank you, Jan, for teaching me a new word this week!

Watchful eyes

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As I walk to the top of the hill, I see the unmistakable long ears and angular head of a hare. She is big, bigger than Lady, who chases her off into the undergrowth, her lithe brown body quickly blending into the land. A momentary glimpse of my totem animal and she’s gone. But that glimpse gives me a profound feeling of privilege and awe. The next morning I’m still thinking about her, about our brief encounter, about how my sense of awe and wonder was matched by her fear and flight instinct.

I am lucky to live in a spectacular part of the world. Our little village is remote. There are few cars on the roads, we’re generally off international flight paths, so the blue sky is clear of jet trails, and the vast landscape is, for the most part, devoid of human-made noises. To walk through the countryside, along trails made by humans, sheep, goats, deer, wild boar, is to be immersed in both the natural history and the human history of the landscape, although the human history is the more subtle of the two.

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Lady

In April, after years of begging, I finally succumbed to Lily’s and Katie’s wishes to get a dog. Lady was born in February, on a plot of land not far from our house. She was the only bitch in a litter of six puppies. I fell in love with her on sight, when she was three weeks old, and we brought her home at seven weeks. Her mother is a Spanish water dog and her father, we think, is either a fox terrier or an Andalucian bodega rat terrier. She’s a wonderful addition to our family, very playful and lovable and full of energy.

Walking in the countryside with Lady has opened the landscape up. Lady and I have been walking 10km each day this summer – we walk for 3km each morning, and about an hour before sunset each day we set out on a 7km walk.

The trails I have previously associated with bees, ants, lizards and birds, and the occasional snake, now turn out to be rich with mammals too. Of course, I’m used to seeing fewmets (deer droppings) along the trail, holes dug by snuffling boar, and the prints of many different animals. With Lady along for the walk, however, animals hidden at very close quarters have now become visible. Lady can smell them. Or she can hear them. Or she can, by some other means, sense they are there. She gallops off at top speed, up hills, over rocks, into bushes. Of course, the animals she chases are too fast, or have a head start, or are on their home turf, so Lady, thankfully, doesn’t stand a chance. But suddenly I realise that, in a landscape seemingly devoid of mammals, I’m walking past them all the time. I’m now conscious of hidden eyes on me, and that gives me a wonderful thrill to know the animals are there.

One day last week, we were walking along a dry river bed, when suddenly, Lady dashed off towards the hill that rises steeply from the northern bank of the river. I looked up the steep hillside to see three wildcats, dun coloured stripes and long tails, racing up the hill. The next day, along the same river, it was a doe among the bushes, and the day after that, up in the hills north of Sanlúcar, it was a stag with majestic antlers. And last night it was my beautiful totemic hare.

As I’ve written before, I feel such a sense of privilege and awe to live, and have formerly lived, in places where seeing animals in the wild is not just a possibility, but a surety. Indeed, I’ve had the great privilege of encountering many wild animals over the years, not seeking them out, but simply as I’ve been going about my daily business – deer, caribou, polar bears, seals, beluga whales, common dolphins, wild boar, hares, humpback whales, orcas, minke whales, and even a tundra grizzly bear once. I’ve seen snowy owls, falcons, eagles and hawks, and I’ve had the great privilege to scuba dive amongst incredible and beautiful fish and turtles.

At a time when every single one of these animals is threatened by habitat loss, climate change and pollution, encountering them in the wild is a rare and precious privilege that moves me to redouble my personal effort to not only not contribute to their demise, but to make a positive effort to undo the damage we (including me) have already caused. The former is the easier of the two. My challenge now is to figure out how to contribute to the latter.

Freelancing, foraging and feminist anthropology

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A version of this article was, indeed, published by Green Parent magazine in October 2018.

Foraging: An immersive way to learn about nature

On the morning of the day my younger daughter, Katie, was born, I was out amongst the hedgerows with her big sister, Lily, gathering blackberries. We ate at least half of what we gathered, Lily’s seventeen-month-old face and hands stained purple with blackberry juice, and returned home with the rest in tubs. Two days later we were once again out amongst the hedgerows, blackberry juice staining the sling in which newborn Katie slept. At two days old, this was her introduction to foraging and she’s been at it ever since. By the time she was two-and-a-half, Katie could identify and gather wild carrot, fennel and mint, and recognised a handful of inedible plants.

Besides fantastic opportunities to put healthy, organic, wild and free food on the table, foraging is an active and productive immersion in the natural world. Through foraging, children come to understand ecology and local environments, to learn from and about nature, and to develop a sense of their place in, and obligations to, our planet.

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Foraging for clams in Brittany

As a nomadic family, we foraged for food in the middle of England, along the coasts of Devon, Cornwall, Ireland, Brittany and Galicia, and in southern Spain and Portugal. From trees growing in green city spaces to rural woodlands and open countryside, we have gathered almonds, apples, apricots, carobs, figs, hazelnuts, lemons, loquats, olives, oranges, plums and pomegranates. From seashores we have gathered clams, cockles and mussels, sea beet, rock samphire and wild carrot. We have gathered alexanders, asparagus, chard, fennel, lavender, mint, nettles and rosemary from woodlands, scrubland and walking trails, blackberries from hedgerows and camomile from fields. Lily and Katie have accompanied me as I’ve picked prickly pears and their dad as he’s gathered edible mushrooms.

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As humans, we are increasingly disengaged from the natural world. And the more disengaged we become, the less we appreciate the incredible world around us, or understand our place in it and our obligations to it. Providing our children with opportunities to be immersed in the world helps them to develop that sense of appreciation, understanding and obligation. Immersion helps us to become part of the world again as we learn about the seasons, ecological niches, how plants depend on each other, and the lives and behaviours of animals. When we engage with the world, when we come to know it intimately, we are in a greater position to care for it, and to recognise our obligations to it.

Among the most ancient of ways to engage with the natural world is through foraging for food. Our ancestors have been doing it since before we were human. Until the late 1960s paleo-anthropologists believed that language, tool use and group organisation – those cultural characteristics that make us human – were developed and honed through hunting. The earliest tools, it was believed, were those used to hunt, kill and process wild animals; the earliest forms of communication were in the organisation of hunting parties. But in the late 1960s, female anthropologists began to study the previously ignored lives of women in contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. And what they discovered radically altered our understanding of the development of human culture.

Rather than hunted meat being the mainstay of most hunter-gatherer diets, it is foraged foods – vegetables, tubers, fruit, nuts, eggs, honey, shellfish, grubs and insects – that are the staple and daily elements of the diet. From these observations of contemporary hunter-gatherers, a new theory of the development of human culture emerged. Rather than hunting tools being the first forms of material culture, it was foraging tools – bags for carrying foraged food, and slings and straps for carrying infants. (However, unlike stone tools, these leave almost no trace in the fossil or archaeological record.) Indeed, the organisation required to communally care for infants and young children while women foraged was most likely what necessitated the development of language and complex culture. Forget man the hunter. Human culture blossomed around woman the gatherer.

Our ancient ancestors were intimately acquainted with the world around them. They had to be. Subsisting on foraged food required a deep knowledge of edible and inedible plants, of where, when and how wild foods grew, of how their growth was influenced by the plants and animals sharing that ecosystem, of weather and seasons, and of how foraging practices protected or destroyed plants for future use.

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While we no longer rely on foraged food to survive, the practice of foraging draws us into the world around us. My family has discovered that the more time we spend in search of wild foods, the more intimately acquainted and attuned we become with the natural world. Not only do my children remember the location of the best patches of asparagus from previous years, for example, but they have learned, through experience, the environmental conditions best suited to this plant and, thus, where and when to look for it in new places. They have grown to know the seasonal changes that plants undergo and the other plants that share and are vital to the health of that habitat.

When we forage, our senses are caressed, challenged and enriched by the landscape. We walk up and down hills, through bright sunshine and dank shade, through woods and across fields, our hearts and breaths racing with exertion, feet slipping on damp rocks as we leap across streams or sinking into muddy tidal flats. Stopping to enjoy the sound of buzzing bees, our children learn from which plants bees forage at different times of year. They learn that other animals like the same foods as we do – wasps and birds on plums and pomegranates, the snuffling marks of a wild boar that got to the delicious asparagus tips before we did, the hollowed circles of grass made by a badger amongst the blackberry brambles, or our horse friend who makes short work of carob seed pods. And they can observe how wasps, ants, bees, birds and other small animals are linked to the life of each plant.

Such observations connect children to the natural world, allowing them to indirectly observe that the wild foods they collect are part of complex ecosystems. Further, they come to understand that they themselves are part of that ecosystem, just like the badger, the ant and the honey bee. They also learn that, to a far greater extent than any of these other animals, humans have the power to nurture or to destroy the environment. We teach our children, by example, to not take more than we need and to take only a little from each individual plant or area. Our children observe for themselves the destruction caused by wanton use and thoughtless disposal of plastics, metals and other industrial products, or by the needless felling of trees.

***

MTyrrell1

Lily in long sleeves and long trousers for the thorny work of asparagus hunting

Foraging is a deeply rewarding activity. We spend quality time with our children, engaged in activity together towards a common goal. The wild foods we bring home are transformed into delicious meals for immediate consumption or preserved or dried for use at some later date. When we return home after a few hours of walking, talking and foraging, we are often tired and grass or mud-stained, but our spirits soar from all we have seen and done, our bodies and minds enriched and enlivened from our immersion in the landscape. And with that immersion comes a stronger sense of care, compassion and empathy for the natural world and its many and varied inhabitants.

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My Friday book review…on Saturday…..via 1491

Born again minimalist

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I used to be a minimalist. I was even recruited by an environmental website to write a series of blog posts about living a minimalist life*. Julian and I chose minimalism when we chose to live on a boat. From that fateful day in April 2011 when we decided to radically change our lives by quitting our jobs, selling our house and buying a boat, minimalism became our goal. Our first symbolic act, that same evening, was to unplug the television, put it in the boot of the car, and take it to the dump the next day. After that, minimalism became a necessity as well as a desire. If our family of four was going to live on a small boat we had to get rid of most of our stuff.

During the summer of 2011, we radically de-cluttered. If we numbered each item we owned, I would make an educated guess that we got rid of over 80% of our belongings. We sold or gave away most of my close to one thousand books, we sold our excess kitchenware, clothing, toys and gardening tools. The things that were meaningful to us, but that we wouldn’t have room for on the boat, went into storage in my parents-in-laws’ houses. When we bought Carina and first moved aboard, we quickly realised we still had too much stuff and at the end of our first sailing season we downsized again.

Each year we have returned to my father-in-law’s loft, and have further pared back what we’ve kept in storage. Some things we simply don’t need any more, such as the cots, children’s beds and toys that Lily and Katie have outgrown. But we have also pared back items that we had stored out of sentimentality, but which now no longer seem so important to us. The pile of truly important material items has decreased over time. We also still have a few large items in my father-in-law’s garage, such as a sofa, a dining table and chairs, a washing machine and our bicycles. I think the time has come to consider selling or donating some or all of those items, if they have not already been damaged by damp or pests.

However, in our life on the boat and now our life back ashore again, the quantity of stuff in our lives has started to creep up again. One of the reasons we moved off the boat was because there wasn’t enough room any more. The lack of room was partly due to two growing girls and two parents who are larger than when we moved aboard, but it is also partly due to creeping quantities of stuff. We moved off the boat and brought all that stuff with us, and for four months we added to it. Our house was cluttered and it made me uneasy. It felt messy and unnecessary.

Early in the new year I watched both the documentary Minimalism and the Marie Kondo series Tidy Up on Netflix. Both reminded me that I once, not so long ago, shared these minimalist ideals and aspirations. And I realised two things. First, that I wanted to return to that simpler way of living and, second, minimalism is an ongoing project and a lifestyle choice. It is not something we do once and forever. In a world bombarded with consumption, we have to work mindfully to keep unwanted stuff out of our lives and to reduce the unwanted stuff in our lives, whether it sneaks in when we are not being mindful or it is once-useful but now obsolete stuff.

In the past couple of months, I have been keeping ‘minimalism’ at the forefront of my mind. The children and I have de-cluttered together and I am being more mindful of my consumer choices. 2019 has become my year to return to my minimalism. Unlike the first time around, I know it is more a process than a project, a lifestyle choice rather than a lifestyle change. I’ll let you know how I get on over the coming months.

*Sadly, this site is no longer available. However, I still have copies of all my posts on that site.

Snow memory

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I remember this time of year about a decade ago. We were living in rural Cambridgeshire, about four miles from Cambridge. It had snowed heavily overnight and the flat southeast English landscape was blanketed in white. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and go for a walk. I left by the back gate and headed across the fields. The land around our house was owned by Trinity College, one of the Cambridge University colleges. It was heavily cultivated and, although the fields were accessible, walking was restricted to signposted tracks or to field perimeters. As I walked, the sky grew more overcast and it started to snow again. After twenty minutes I was well out of sight of my house and the quiet country road on which we lived.

Instead of the joy I had anticipated feeling at being out in the snowy landscape, I felt unease. This walk along the familiar hedgerows was one I took regularly, and it was not uncommon for me to encounter a hare or a deer. Indeed, on this particular day I found fresh hare prints in the snow. But, somehow, I felt decidedly uncomfortable. I was on a circular walk and at this point I was equidistant between going on or turning back.

I was aware that I had quickened my pace and I was perspiring under my winter clothes. I had the sensation of being a hunted animal as I kept furtively glancing around. Suddenly, the reason for my fear became clear to me – polar bears! There, in the bucolic, highly-managed, symmetrical landscape of rural Cambridgeshire, something had subconsciously brought me back to the Kivalliq. It wasn’t simply the snow. I had been in the snow at least a couple of times since I had last lived in Arviat, and I hadn’t feared an encounter with a bear. But that day, there was a certain quality to the light, a certain texture to the air that tricked my brain into thinking there might be a bear around.

Despite being in a landscape where the largest carnivore I could possibly encounter was a badger, I found myself feeling the way I had that spring day seven or eight years earlier when I had walked out to Huluraq. Arviat was more than a 40 minute walk behind me and all around was the flat west Hudson Bay landscape, where the undulating snow-covered land reached a snow-covered finger, Huluraq, out onto the frozen seascape of Hudson Bay. As I turned to make the slow snow-hampered walk back home I saw two sets of prints in the snow – a mother polar bear and her cub. My blood ran cold. I was unarmed – although I doubt that, armed, I would have stood any better chance. I had no idea how old the prints were. They looked fresh enough, clearly defined and without an accumulation of blowing snow.

The walk back to Arviat was the longest of my life. I expected at any moment that the last sound I would hear would be the fluey-sounding grunt of a mother bear coming up behind me, turning me into a meal for her cub. I walked as fast as my cumbersome clothes and boots and the terrain would allow me. There had been other encounters with bears, some where I’d felt threatened and some where I’d felt awe and gratitude for being in the presence of such a creature. But no encounter was as frightening as that non-encounter that day near Huluraq.

And then, years later, what should have been a pleasant walk across a snowy English landscape turned into an anxiety-filled power walk, as I raced to escape from my subconscious fear. I realized at the time how ridiculous I was being and I forced myself to slow down, relax, bring myself back into the moment. But in a very short time I found myself once again anxiously speed walking towards my little chocolate-box English cottage.

I’ve often thought of that snowy day in Cambridgeshire and the subtle sensations that caused my mind and body to subconsciously make connections between past and present. We all subconsciously make these connections all the time as our senses trick us into time travel. The smell of a 2-stroke engine immediately transports me to the west coast of Hudson Bay; the theme music to BBC Sports Roundup puts me back in the busy little kitchen of my childhood at 5pm on a Saturday evening, me, my cousins, our parents, aunt and granny and the smell and texture of fried bread; tin-foil wrapped ham sandwiches take me back to the Canal End of Croke Park.

It’s not simply memory or nostalgia. Rather, it is a triggering of the senses that awakens reaction, muscle memory, feeling, sensation, emotion. Perhaps it’s the closest we get to time travel as we are transported backwards through time to catch glimpses of what were, perhaps, the moments that defined us. We may not have known at the time but those would be the moments that would remain, imprinted on our souls.