New beginnings and gratitude

First, cascades of love and gratitude to the lovely Lucinda at Whispering Earth who, on reading of the fire, emailed me to offer support and herbs to replace some of the ones I lost. A couple of weeks ago, a special parcel arrived, containing soothing herb teas, a delicious rose scented moisturizing cream, some tinctures and a mysterious oil whose true purpose will become clear as this post progresses. It was such a generous and lovely gift. I am still overwhelmed by the love and kindness of friends, those nearby, and those I have never met! Thankyou so much.


The snow drops are blooming bravely in swathes around the grounds of our new home, promising so tantilisingly the coming of softer Spring weather. In the talons of the east wind, its hard to forget this, and in the chilly outreaches of our new home we shiver with blankets and hot water bottles. It's not a cosy cabin, its the wing of a mansion, but we have one warm room which we cook in, knit in, play in, paint in, hang out in, and we are very happy to be here, despite the bone numbing chill.

Around us are acres of beautiful grounds, walled veg gardens, polytunnels, children (and other adults) to play with, community meals and choirs to attend, ...even our chickens have settled, integrating with the existing flock and laying boxes and boxes of eggs.
We've joined a community, a few miles from our land, and, after our three months in town, are feeling the healing balm of being again surrounded by trees, green plants, growing space, room to run without fear of cars and streets, the balm of being with others.


 More later about our new home  because there is more excitement....

More beginnings.
New tender shoots sprouting
A phoenix rising from the ashes.
Springtime promises of a growing,  swelling, surging Mother Earth.......
and well, me.

I'm half way to growing a new baby. 20 weeks in and getting quite a belly, soft little kicks, and jeans that don't fit, and morning sickness nearly passing......number 5...phew!
How did I ever think 2013 was going to be a quiet, calm year?

And the oil from Lucinda?

Phoenix rising

 
Days keep tumbling by, days with things to do, days with space to be filled, days of jumble and overflowing
thoughts, days to remind myself where we're living: where we were living two months ago, three months ago, where we'll be in two weeks. 
Friend's caravans, friend's cabins, a friend's house, our cabin.....and our new home waiting around the corner at the end of the month, new beginnings....

People mention Phoenixes quite alot at the moment, which is encouraging, as the other option is to sink into the ashes of our home and grovel among the broken plates and charred books and let our eyes and ears slowly fill with toxic choking grey dust...wallow in the sorrow and loss of our vanished home...

We must rise.

There have been days when rising is the last thing I want to do, when the weight of loss, not just for the fabric of our cabin but for the whole way of life it represented....is too crushing to bear, and wallowing seems like the only possible way, but there are little shards of light piercing the dark.

We have lost our home but not our friends and family.
Friends and family who have given us food, money and bedding, toys, books, art materials.
Who have rung up at just the right moment to invite me to coffee, when loneliness and sadness were just about to consume me.
Who have cooked meals and given us their son's old bed...and said any time you need......
Who have sent messages and words of support, love and hope.
Who have spent hours sorting second hand laptops out for us and hauling galvanised metal and bits of burnt house around.
Who have never even met me but still offer help...

We have lost our belongings but not each other.
We are changed, buffeted again by the tornado our life has become, but still here, still eating, drinking, singing even, laughing.....still living..

This is what I'm learning:

Loss strengthens us.
Loss plunges us into an abyss so deep and terrible that the only way out is to a better shining place. Our delicate tender selves, wounded and scarred, are irreversibly toughened; imbued with hard won wisdom and  a depth which opens doorways to our hearts.
Our hearts and everyone elses .
Loss strips away material concerns (ironically) and pares away the petty trappings of our fluttering lives, the aneasthesia of media, shopping, worries about what other people think, strips it all away and allows us glimpses of the shining core at the centre of everything, at the centre of us.

We sigh into this, and are touched by the sight of a delicate new moon or an apricot infused sunset, we can see it reflected in the harassed woman waiting for the bus, or the man who just pushed past us to get across the road.
We are all wounded. We all carry pain.We have all suffered, or will all suffer loss of something or someone we love.
But we do have a choice.
We can carry that pain bitterly and closely, twisted beneath our burning skin and become sick and miserable,  or we can allow the searing heat of our loss to cleanse and clear what is not needed in our lives; the armour we paste around ourselves, the shields, the judgements, the  comparisons, the guilt....and find our way back to ourselves. Our way back to others....especially to others...we are not alone.
 We need each other.
 We're not supposed to do it alone.
This is one of my biggest lessons
This is one I'm learning faster than I thought I would.

There are more changes and huge life events ahead of us in the coming months and I know I'll be repeating these words to myself many times, just to remind myself.

We're not supposed to do it alone.
And thankyou to you, dear readers for reminding me too!!!

Ashes

This post has been a long time coming. Its been trying to. I've been trying. Its been twisting and thrashing like a tormented snake that's been cut in two pieces and is bleeding in fragments on the garden path. Do snakes even bleed? Anyway, its this post that's been thrashing, desperate to be published....Me, I've been deep in a strange, lethargic torpor, which has precluded any creativity, save a rather rushed and lumpy doll named Jo for Leo's Christmas present.
Every evening I sit sullenly, thinking vaguely I should write something, every evening I do something else. Like go to bed, or wash up, or make hot chocolate, or read a magazine....or make a lumpy doll. There are so many things to do when you're feeling like you can't explain how you feel.

 But  you know, the relief I feel to be even writing this far is huge, it's as if  a part of me that has been sleeping for three months is slowly stretching, yawning, stepping out of bed and trying out the world again, even with the tip of a toe.

Of course I have been in the world a bit, I even went Christmas shopping once, I cook, I took Tansy and Leo to a local home ed group, I feed the goats and chickens (did I mention we have goats and chickens?) There's a lot I haven't mentioned.

Like the fact that our house burned down.

In fact I think I'd better say that again, just in case anyone didn't get it the first time, just to make sure I get it.

Our house burned down.

Not just a little bit down, or partly down, or in any way retrievable or salvagable down, but completely down.
It was built of wood you see, built by Hugh who worked every day for four months to make it.

It was a middle of the night waking to see flames licking round the woodburner sort of fire; it was a naked screaming grab the kids and run barefoot into the wood fire; it was a dash back in the dark to see if the phones and computer could be saved and no it was far too fucking hot fire; it was a drive down the track sobbing to escape the exploding gas bottle and leisure batteries fire......it was sitting in a fire engine wrapped in  blankets and realising I had my period and all my handmade pads had gone, it was drinking hot chocolate and eating porridge at our neighbours in borrowed clothes and shoes too big.....

It was that sort of fire.

The planners had spotted us you see. For anyone who isn't on intimate terms with the planning laws in England,  if you build an 'illegal structure,'  ie our home, to have any chance of getting planning permission you need to prove that you can not only earn significant amounts of money from the land, but you also have a 'functional need to be there overnight'. Now we did have our plans. Plans for goats, plans for cheese, plans for herb products, plans for a yurt based retreat for bereaved families. It's just that we hadn't reckoned on being fully operational quite yet, we wanted to finish building the house, let Fred have his own room at last, finish cladding the walls, that sort of thing.

 But the planners had other ideas, they spotted us, we got a letter, a visit was scheduled for two weeks hence. Two weeks to go crazy. Two weeks to not sleep for writing business plans and financial projections, two weeks to change our bedrooms into a barn to minimize the impact of our dwelling, two weeks to start a small holding, build shelters, sort fencing, buy goats, milk goats, drive the length of the county to bring back 20 rare breed day old chicks. Hmm, the chicks. Marsh daisies and Jersey giants. Very cute, rather smelly. Our very lovely planning advisor suggested using our newly acquired ex-bedroom barn space as a chick raising area. Do it the old fashioned way round the wood burner, a functional need to be on the property every night if ever there was one. Chicks need constant monitoring to ensure they don't get cold and die.Well they didn't get cold. Their pen got too close to the burner. We were lucky to escape with our lives.

The fire happened on the night after the planning officer visited. We relaxed for the first time in two weeks. We relaxed for the last time in a long time. I don't know if lethargy and inertia count as relaxing, it sure doesn't feel as refreshing.

We find things. Tarnished silver spoons; distorted reindeer cookie cutters; Leo's patched trousers, hanging inexplicably on a briar nearby; fragments of a blue and white plate which was my ninth birthday present; sodden charred lumps of books, beguiling half phrases leaping out of the ashes to twist our hearts in two; 'Little House in the Big Woods'..'all was cosy in the little log cabin as the snow blew around.....' ....'and Noah and all the animals wept salt tears because the unicorns were gone for ever...'

I think the unicorns did leave that night, I certainly haven't seen a whisker since. And there are no owls in town either, floating feather light in their ghost cloaks, no foxes screaming down the moonfilled valley, only street lights and garden gates and next door's illuminated santa.

I really miss our home.

Birthday boys

Its birthday time in our house. September is busy that way. Leo and his dad, Lily and her dad, Leo and Tansy's granny, Fred and Lily's step mum...yeah its complicated.....and busy!

We kick off with Leo and Hugh, who share the 8th and a love of boats and fishing. So guess what we did...grabbed the canoe, and a kayak for Fred and went out to sea again.

We had a late start. The birthday table for starters...laid out lovingly the night before with cloths and flowers, candles and presents, paintings and cards. Then there was the bowl of raspberries dropped on our doorstep by our lovely neighbour Ruth which inspired me to whip up an enormous batch of banana pancakes with cream. That took some time. Then there was the birthday song, composed by Fred and me while wandering round  the National museum Wales  in the summer holidays and performed live in the sitting room. And did I mention we didn't get up until..hmm about nine o clock?

Finally the vessels were strapped on the car and, as the veteran of one whole sea canoe trip I felt pleasantly excited rather than mildly terrified like last time.

The sea was calm and clear as a green marble and we canoed hungrily from Paignton to Brixham for birthday pasties with five turnstones and several gulls.

And birthday cake...

There were no fish biting this time, and the youngest birthday boy nearly slumbered over his fishing line. His newly acquired five years (is that right? My youngest child five?) not enough to carry him through the long paddle home! 

It's always strange to have the two boys share their birthday, working out a cake suitable for both, staying up late to finish paintings and birthday stories, trying to find a day suitable and acceptable to both. So far Leo has not ever had a party, his birthday activities centre around crabbing and water based activities, fishing puppet shows, boat shaped cakes etc.

It's also a strange time because there is always the knowledge of Lily's birthday just days away and what do we do about that?

I usually try to put it out of my mind while I prepare for Hugh and Leo, and then there are the days that follow when dove and angel cards start to appear  in the post and I start to think about the horse cake I made when she was two.

But for Saturday it was the boy's day

And two of these....seals for those may struggle to see...made their day!

All change!

Well, I've been wanting to share this with you for a while, but I couldn't tell anyone until I'd told the kids.....No I'm not pregnant, we're not moving house, but we are about to start something I have thought about and read about and wanted to do since I started having children nearly fourteen years ago........

We're planning to home school our two youngest, Tansy and Leo, for a trial period of a year, with the get out clause of jumping back into school if any of us emerges from the year with lasting scars...

Why the change? We've already moved from a state primary school four years ago when Freddie and Lily were nine and six, to a Rudolf Steiner School which everyone melted into as if they had never been anywhere else.  This is not the post where I will be discussing the merits of Steiner schools. Suffice to say that we have learnt alot about child development and how they learn in a heart centred, non pressured, nature orientated environment, and we have no criticism. Bar the fact that apart from the lovely Hereford and Stroud schools (and shortly Exeter) they are not free. As in they are fee paying.  Hmm. (Anyone work out one of the reasons we have been living in yurts and caravans and wooden cabins for the last, uh four years?).  And they take up lots of time .Kids only become full time at steiner schools when they are ten....which for parents  with more than one child means a bewildering array of different pick up times and lots of driving.

But really, the point is that, as we are living in the woods and starting to have plans to buy goats, chickens, and start all sorts of exciting new projects, isn't it better for them just to be at home and learn here? Because really, that's where kids have always been....until the Industrial Revolution pushed everyone down mines and into mills, and there was a sudden urgent need for mass child care and a compliant work force. Enter compulsory education. That's why schools as we know them were invented folks. And they still do the same thing, create a compliant worker (consumer) and provide mass child care so we can earn (buy) more.

We were very very lucky that the Steiner School did only one of those things, ie provide child care, but still....How many times have I torn my kids away from some wonderful imaginative game to hurry and dress for school? How many times have I curtailed a  story, or a meal or a walk in the woods or a trip to the beach or a visit with friends...because the kids have to get to bed to get up early for school? When Freddie was small, and at state school, I even remember dragging him in from the garden where he was drawing and labelling the vegetables in his notebook yes, you guessed it, to go to school. Where he screamed to stay with me and fell asleep on the carpet after lunch. Insanity.

There's the worry of course that I won't be up to it. That I can't teach my kids to read and write. Don't I need to be qualified? And when I sit myself down and examine that, I realise that my kids have learned to walk, talk, dress themselves, eat cleanly, prepare food, knit, sew, saw firewood, weave, ride bikes, swim, sing, dance, play, care for animals, garden....with ME. Or their dads.

Tansy could probably teach herself to write, she's already got her own notebook where she copies the label off the tahini jar!

I have things I want to do, too many creative projects fizzing away, and I am concerned about my available time being eroded, but, who knows, I may even end up with more time than before .I have bouts of patience and gentleness and great storms of impatience and annoyance..How will it go? I 'll let you know.

How about you? What's your experience of schools, for your kids..or even for you?

But someone might die!

Last weekend, something wasn't right. I woke up on Saturday with my day planned out. Admittedly it wasn't particularly thrilling....getting a mammoth laundry into buckets, catching up on craft projects, mending, a walk, some firewood... But I was happy to have a quiet day at home and felt content.


At breakfast, Hugh bounced in,
'let's take the canoe out to sea and catch some mackerel' he cried
Tansy and Leo dropped their porridge spoons with a clatter and started cheering and something in me contracted. I reasoned that it was my day's plans being disrupted, however dull!
Sandwiches were busily prepared and our canoe strapped to the roof of the car. I plodded on with my laundry, conscious of dragging everyone's mood down. Adult bickering commenced.

The car wouldn't start. After a lengthy effort with jump leads and a neighbour's car we were off, my mood becoming blacker and more morose the nearer we got to the sea.

'Can't we just canoe down the river as normal?' I may have said, a few times.

We parked up to unload the canoe with the intention of moving the car to a pleasant spot that doesn't cost £8 to be there.
We unloaded the canoe. The car wouldn't start. No money for parking. My back was having one its low days and I wasn't relishing carrying a big canadian canoe several hundred  metres to the sea. In a rather untimely way, I started to fret about suncream, which we had forgotten, on one of the two days this summer when it's actually been sunny enough to need it. I started to fret about carrying the canoe with a bad back, and about having to call the car rescue service at the end of a long day in order to get home.  I mentioned canoeing in the river again, until it was pointed out that as the car wouldn't start and we were at the sea, this wasn't an option.
Adult bickering continued, with renewed intensity.

I ran off to the cash point to get parking money and calm down. I was feeling really really anxious. I considered going off on some adventure of my own after visiting the cash point.  I felt unhappy and obstructive and I knew everyone was getting frustrated with me.

While I was waiting in the shop to buy a newspaper to get change for the parking, I idly glanced down at the headline on the local paper which sat on the counter.

'Record number of rescues by lifeguards this year off the coast of Devon......parents are being warned....the sea is a dangerous place....etc'
Boom! Of course. That was why I was feeling so anxious it was like I had a ball of wire in my stomach. I was afraid another of my children was going to die.

There's something about the sea, perhaps because I was raised by land loving, sea fearing folks, that scares the hell out of me. Its majestic, beautiful, inspiring, breathtaking, but my childhood was punctuated by drowning dreams and I've never been someone who would pull on a wetsuit and go tearing head first into an enormous wave. Unlike my seriously water obsessed-grew-up-a-minute-from-the-beach partner.

I will happily swim about in a very calm sea on a warm day, and I love collecting shells and I don't mind going on a ferry, but a little canoe, out to sea, with my children?

Visions of them being thrown from the boat and tossed about in dark stormy waves filled my eyes with tears and my heart with terror.
You see I have seen Death. Head to head with the terrible awesome finality with which it strikes. The speed, the shock, the suddeness, just another sunny day with the kids. Pottering about, eating pancakes, thinking vaguely about what to do next, washing up, then I'm in an air ambulance with my daughter in a coma, then I'm in a hospital ward with a dead daughter.

And I can't be the relaxed chilled mum any more who thinks everything will be fine and things like that don't happen to us only to other people and usually only in the newspaper or at least in another town.
Because they happen to anyone, any time without a moments warning.

But we're still here. We survived. But we are changed.
If some one is later than they said they'd be and hasn't let me know they're ok, I'm not very relaxed.
Walking on a street or a pier or a river bank with small, impulsive, quick children is hard for me and my shoulders drop when we are away from traffic, deep water, danger.

Back at the carpark, I tried, not very eloquently to say that I was anxious, but I was shown the flat, calm expanse of water ahead of me and promised a calm, quiet, windless weather outlook for the afternoon.

It was, in the end a lovely day, of which I took many photographs which unfortunately are on a memory card somewhere around Brixham harbour, being nibbled by fish. My muscles gradually smoothed themselves out, we picnicked on a beach with egrets and oyster catchers nearby, Tansy and Leo caught seven silver mackerel, and I swam in a beautifully cool refreshing and calm sea. It  wasn't dangerous, it was really really lovely and I've got to just keep doing stuff even though I'm terrified.
 Because I'm alive and I've got to live. And so have my kids

The alchemy of food

Some days I'm just plain bored of cooking! Do you feel like that sometimes? I love cooking and place (rather too much) importance on the regular production of delicious nutritious meals....but...sometimes I just can't be bothered.

 I'll be just getting my teeth into chopping a huge mound of ash logs up for the winter and ... it's that time of the day again. Or I walk into the house at the end of a long day out with cranky hungry children and not a clue what to rustle up, or we've all just snuggled up on the sofa with some knitting and stories (it's that kind of summer in Devon) and ....well exactly. Sometimes I wish we could all just not eat for a day or two, just so I don't have to think what to cook.

But then sometimes I build up to an enormous crescendo of baking, churning out bread pies, biscuits, quiches....just to make it worth turning the oven on. When I was a kid one of the greatest sins was putting only one thing at a time in the oven...I don't think I have  really ever grown out of it, and of course it does make perfect financial and environmental sense!! And about three quarters of the way through the enormous crescendo, where everyone has decided to get fully involved, dinner is still a long way off and my tiny kitchen counter is a jumble of dirty dishes, chopped vegetables coated in flour, and four unfinished baking projects, I realise I'm not having fun anymore. I'm flustered agitated, snappy and  flushed and I just want to throw everything in the compost bin and run into the woods. The words, 'I just need to get this finished now and would you please go and play?' have been uttered, sometimes not so nicely, and with little effect.

It doesn't feel very nourishing.

And neither was yesterday's dinner, a pale unimaginative pasta that felt like wading ankle deep through mud, with some over steamed cauliflower and tofu. That was sort of how I was feeling when I was cooking it and it showed!

So I was surprised today to be making pasties, having torn myself away from the ash logs and the sofa, and quite enjoying it. It was late, Tansy and Leo were fighting over cleaning the rat cage out, and coming in periodically to drop rat cleaning rags into the sink near where I was working. I was tired and a bit grumpy. Conditions were not favourable. And I was uninspired by the thought of little cubes of carrot and potato going into my pasties yet again. Things were teetering on the edge of spiralling downhill rapidly when I found an enormous bunch of chard in my veg box and started chopping it and singing all twelve verses of Green grow the rushes oh! You don't know that song? Tansy and Leo were involved immediately and all rat issues were forgiven and forgotten. But tell me just who were the Rivals and the Lily white boys? Or the Proud Walkers for that matter?

So the chard went in with some sauteed onions and some chopped celery....Hmm chard and goat cheese would be a better bet, a hint of nutmeg? A zest of orange? Some raisins and toasted hazelnut? Buttery short crust pastry. Suddenly I felt like I was creating a bit of magic. I was enjoying myself, I twirled Tansy round the kitchen...(mainly to distract her from her current wobbly tooth which was quite literally dangling by a thread and spitting blood everywhere) the spices and fruits married in the pan in a fragrant mellow nuttiness, the dough baked to buttery perfection, melting goats cheese..mmmm!

That's how to prepare food!
You know it's strange, everyone ate much more calmly tonight, everyone went to sleep quietly.

Have you ever seen the film Like Water for Chocolate? It was always one of my favourites, although I haven't seen it for years. I have always longed to cook quail in rose petal sauce with as much love as Tita did.