March

I lie staring at the darkness for some time, an hour or two, seeking a pathway for any words that I could give you. I am three days late with this letter, three months late with any essay. In the lightless search, I cry and lose faith, but then finally I chance upon a reason to rise and come down here and use what I have to reach out to you.

There is no distance that the words we make for one another cannot cover. There is no separation that such offered words can’t cross. And this is a thing I want; knowledge of this, sense of this. Truth of being – when there’s so little truth around us. A bridge out of the dark.

March – and winter’s held onto us, knuckle and nail, with every show of sunshine chased by brittle leaves. Spring burgeons only in the lee of still bare hedgerows and I light the fire each morning – some days two fires – with poorly functioning, unfeeling hands.

We are working to draw hope up from the ground. Not knowing whether or not we can stay, we keep building. Outside, with our two daughters, Fran plants a rose. Joy in the face of uncertainty, she tells me. It is better to build and have all that you’ve built taken from you than it is to never have built at all.

We began Walking With Goats, Fran and I – as both a process and a Substack – exactly two years ago now. A radical solution to the bitter springs of Wales and to the territorial disputes that wrapped themselves up in these months, when every scrap of life seems a prize on contested ground. Life emerges in the barren enclosures that we have worked so hard to build for ourselves, and which we maintain with all our strength, bent under the weight of the fence post hammer, lifting over and over the iron spike.

But beyond the fences it is green. This is no metaphor, just simple truth. Beyond the fences the grass grows long, untouched. In May the council will begin to cut it. Couch grass and nettle – iron rich itself – and bramble, which the goats will run for if they see it reachable beyond the pasture. These things will fall to the blade and lie in the heat of summer on the ground to rot, while the hay grows – hoped for – inside its fences.

We began Walking With Goats to chart the journey of trying to feed ourselves – and now we are replete with salads and purple sprouting broccoli. The last onions in their strings are softening and shooting green, canned pumpkin remains, the tup that we should be eating still sits fat upon the hill, a product of pity that eats more than his share of what is left and whom we must find time and heartlessness enough to slay. My mother is long into the process of resowing. In the polytunnel, her beds are lush with greenery and the tiny hairs of next winter’s leek shoots work with fragile efforts toward another year. Into the future, into whatever it brings.

Long out of potatoes, we build a new enclosure.

Asked what I do, I will sometimes say I’m trying to become self-sufficient. The response to this is inevitably: do you have land? The conversation complex then, I am seeking – as I have done in the darkness tonight – a way to answer that is not embittered. A way to believe without needing any security in the future.

Here is a record of land owned by no one:

There’s a great deal of it about.

What we are building in the face of uncertainty is a hay loft to house our inadequate crop: a wild flower meadow, nurtured for years by my mother. To construct this small barn, we’ve felled larch trees she planted. We will plant them as pillars next – for this temple to transition, to its yearly cycles, to abundance and emptiness.

I have made this letter open to all the readers of Walking With Goats. As I have said before, I wrangle with this platform, but nonetheless it has allowed me to speak to you tonight and for this I am very grateful.

I want to go on writing to you, but I am frightened of writing to you about a painful future. And I will not write anything that does not seem to me to be the truth. Soon, Fran and I will bring you a full episode, in which I will look further into the subject of the land and its efforts and ownerships – and in which I hope to find the alignments that I think make this blog worthwhile; the quiet orchestrations that grow beneath all fences.

It is with love and with thanks that I sign off now.

The birds are singing outside in a new grey dawn.

Today we build again.

R xxx