As a child the village shop sold 'pop', aka fizzy drinks, in big glass bottles. The label had Penrith Beacon on it, and flavours included dandelion and burdock. It was black. When you'd finished your pop you took the glass bottle back in exchange for 5p which was then spent on penny sweets from the rows of glass jars lining the shelves. On Saturday mornings, mum would send us over for bacon and eggs, or a slab of cheese, cut in front of you with the wire cutter. The eggs were from local farms and the bacon probably from a local Pig.
It's late April, and Sandilands is covered in yellow dots, the dandelion heads closed as the nightly temperatures plummet into frosts. A burdock, with it's big leaves is starting to grow and I remember that pop on hot summer days. The goodness of plants, laced with sugar.
People ask me what are you going to do with the field? Grow food, put horses on it, plant a wood, plough and seed a meadow, make hay? When you become a Land Guardian aka landowner it can sometimes seem quite overwhelming. All this greenery, growing.
The crab apple is waiting, blossom poise, to burst open, it's little red buds like cups of wine. The nettles inch higher, the hawthorn greens.
Some farmers are spreading muck, others ploughing, opening the earth in furrows and dicing the worms.
A land guardian is one who decides how things are done, ultimately, based on a connection and relationship with the land and all life's complexity.
I've taken a step back into a place of listening, to sink my own roots, creating a relationship. So here I am walking barefoot with curiosity, senses opening, experiencing everything that is growing. Rat's tail plantain, mouse-ear chickweed, red-veined dock, cow parsley, meadow buttercup, and many different grasses like meadow foxtail, sweet vernal, and timothy, different textures and colours; feathery, sharp, black and silver.
And building relationships needs time, something not afforded to us in the mainstream culture of constant accumulation, where even land is a commodity. So we need to intentionally make space to develop meaningful connections, to appreciate these complex relationships.
I meet up with friends, I overhear conversations in the supermarket. Folk seems 'meh', to use a teenage phase. Plodding along, step by step. And I think, if only we gave ourselves the time and space sometimes, just small windows, to drop into a meaningful relationship with our Earth, starting with lying on the grass and cloud watching, bird hearing, grass touching skin, and wind brushing toe.
To slow down, feel the heart beat of life, slowly pulsating. If this was enforced on us, how would we feel?