In this issue, you’ll find a personal essay that explores some of what I’m thinking and writing about at the moment (Devon, Zambia, listening, nuance) and why. After that, there’s some book and article recommendations, a poem, an unexpected lesson, and a photo from a place I know. I’d love to hear about your own encounters with place(s), and how it shapes you, and the questions you might be trying to live where you are — you can leave a comment at the end, and in a future newsletter, I’ll reflect on any thoughts and experiences that people share. Thanks for being here and helping this newsletter (and me) to grow.
My memories, from the age where memories begin through to when I left home aged 18, are framed by the imposing red Jurassic-era cliffs that rise either side of the beach in Sidmouth, in East Devon. This is where I grew up; a once dinosaur-trodden piece of Earth, where fossils are found, and where my young ears filled with seagulls, and river, and beach pebbles that shifted under my feet with a clinking stony hollowness. I grew up safe, in a small valley bound by the sea to the south, and by the red hills to the east and west. My world was small, but I studied the horizon year-round; the line where the sky met the English Channel. Just around the coast, that sea becomes the Celtic sea and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. I liked to think about how my horizon joined with other horizons. Books brought more distant horizons into view.
Today, I sit at my desk in a village in another part of Devon where the soils are also red, and where I now live with my husband. I am digging here – not for fossils, but for the bedrock of myself, and of the local, and of the faraway. Here, my horizons are hilly. Mid Devon is a rural and ancient place that looks much the same as it would have done hundreds of years ago. Some things are different – power lines and solar panels and cars now press themselves onto an antique landscape, and it’s not yet clear whether they are restoring or destroying it. But the annual metronome of the land still shapes people and farms and village and spiritual life. Lanes are narrow, designed for a smaller and slower age, and lined with deep earth banks and thick hedgerows. Right now, the hedges are waking up – the bells of white snowdrops rang the year into movement, giving way to a fanfare of daffodils and the quiet joy of primroses. Yellow’s delight persists in celandine, and is met by the green of pennywort and wild garlic and hawthorn leaf, and a hundred other green things that I can’t name. There is endless green around here, and I am green too. I unexpectedly got elected three years ago as a Green Party District Councillor. I do not like the tribalism of party politics, and I will not always be Green – it can feel exclusive and partial, despite its vision – but green is the colour which most closely aligns with my hope and belief in what’s possible.
Look above, between those two previous paragraphs. There’s blank space there, but the space I lived was never blank, it was red – as red as the cliffs of my childhood, as red as the soil of the landscape I’m now in, though far away from either of these places.
The soil in Zambia, and elsewhere in Africa where I have travelled and worked, is often some shade of red — rust, paprika, faded. In front of me the economy meets the landscape, scheming and growing and pushing its way in. I am at a tobacco farm near Choma in southern Zambia and it is harvest time. Crates of tobacco leaves are carried into the processing barns, and I follow them with Roland, who is farmer and guide. He grabs the handle of the huge warehouse door and pushes his whole body against it. Slowly it starts to roll on its frame, and as it peels back and my eyes adjust to the darkness inside, a world comes into view.
The light is orange-grey, like the night-time glow of a city trapped by clouds. Rows and rows of rickety tables stretch into the distance and there are people standing behind them. There is a gentle murmur of chatter rising and falling, breaking as it reaches me. A radio is on. Hundreds of eyes momentarily look up from their work to glimpse us, and then look down again to their hands, which are working smoothly, quickly, to sort and grade the tobacco leaves; muscles seeming to know the work without the intervention of the mind.
“Here, see these”. Roland shows me two leaves. “This one is good, it will be exported. This other is poor-quality, it will stay local.”
The best of the tobacco will be sent somewhere else, sold to companies and people who do not know this place, who do not know these people. Someone told me that the tobacco farmers earned one cent out of every dollar a packet of cigarettes is sold for. From that, they have to pay their workers. “Tobacco is killing us”, one of them told me.
From the grading barn we move to the curing barn. Before we walk through its door, Roland tells me we can’t stay in here for long. I think, perhaps he is in a rush. But then I step across the threshold and I understand what he means. My breath leaves me. The air is bitter and dry and hot, and it catches the back of my throat, shutting it down. My eyes tighten and squint. I look up to see something like railway tracks suspended in the great dark vaulted space above, and from them hang frames loaded with pegged-out lines of tobacco, quivering like papery eyelashes of the gods who peer down at this place. Water is being forced from the leaves to reveal their distinctive smell and colour. Drying, curling leaves as far as my eyes could see. The air is hot like the sun outside these walls, but this is a graceless man-made heat and it is so close and it is all that exists. The world outside is lost to me, with its light and air and life.
“I need to get out.”
Roland smiles, says “Yes, you can’t stay in here for long. It would kill you.”
We find the small door in the corner – had we really chosen to step through it? – and walk gasping back to life.
The tobacco farm lingers in my mind many years on. I close my eyes and conjure its faces, its smells, its oppression. But of course, it is more complicated than the finality of a word like ‘oppression’ suggests. Because though herbicides, insecticides and fertilisers were sprayed into the land, and though coal was used to power the drying barns, the workers’ standard of living improved with the regular work, and Roland helped them with their own small scale and subsistence farms nearby. Its smells and nuance remain in my mind, as with so many encounters and places and stories.
Today, I am in Devon, but I can travel back to Zambia – a place I have travelled to many times since 2004, and where I lived in 2009/10 – whenever I like, by closing my eyes. I do so now. Behind my closed eyelids, mixed into my fibres and memory, the dazzling gold sun softens to evening copper and pours out over the earth. The Baobab trees become peaceful giants walking the earth, and day gives way to night. Once in Southern Zambia, I camped under an upside-down hemisphere of stars, with elephant-sized boulders nearby. I could have been near a granite Dartmoor tor under a Devon sky. The incense of the night mingling with the soil-bound sun has its unique top notes, but the base notes are the same in both places: farms and ancient ways of life, communities facing change and challenge, something deep and old below fields and moor and savannah – down in the loam and layers, where time presses itself into rock and where people carry stories they’ve never lived but have always known.
“We used to know the seasons,” a farmer in Ghana once told me. “But now it is unpredictable. Soil blows away, crops don’t root. We are farming dust, not food.” My friend Jim, a farmer in Mid Devon, told me similar things last year: “The tractors are having to use GPS. It’s only April, but the dust is blowing, and they can’t see to make straight lines.”
The mind, apparently, works best in the presence of a good question. Devon and Zambia ask me questions, and I’ve been collecting them in the hope that the right question might unlock what becomes possible. Diarist Anne Frank said, "...the word ‘why’ not only taught me to ask, but also to think." Questions help me to think and to imagine. And what alters the imagination alters everything.
But I worry that I, we, many of our leaders, don’t know how to recognise the questions. And when we do, we seem limited in our ability to answer them in a language other than the constricted language of technology or growth. Where is the wisdom in the Earth’s civilisations? How do I listen for it now? Slowly, from the edge. By listening, by looking; at the exposing pace of knowing and being known.
Here’s a question that Devon has asked me: who, or what, should benefit from a river? – a swimmer, a fish, a community, a climate? I sat with this question once. I was considering plans for a hydroelectric turbine in the River Exe. In my notebook, I scribbled:
Pros: 1) Generates clean energy; 2) Environmental education.
Cons: 1) Prevents swimming; 2) Will kill Atlantic Salmon if they don’t use the fish pass.
Which is the more important consideration? I don’t know. As a local politician (more on that term in a future essay), and with experience in environmental work, it was tempting to act like I did know. There are people who vocally pushed their own partial answer; who were strongly for or against the turbine, and conversations felt tense. I wanted to hear the possibilities between the polarities, so we held conversations, bringing together various experts and viewpoints to help collective thinking. Like light dancing on the river’s surface, facts and nuance and ideas shone.
The plans are ongoing, and are still challenging, but in that one conversation I remembered that it’s possible to hold gracious and curious conversations on divisive issues – Devon and Zambia have both shown me this – whether between opposites on the political spectrum, or between different tribes, or between neighbours. Discord sells, and it often feels easier to feed it, or at least accept it, than to work to find another way. Doing so requires meaningful conversations and relationships, which require effort, and the acknowledgement that on our own, we hold only a small piece of the question, only a fragment of the answer.
Zambia asks questions too, like, why not make your aims also your starting point? If everyone is to be lifted out of poverty and given dignity and all the other things that the Sustainable Development Goals point to – if everyone really matters, then make everyone matter. Give everyone a seat at the table, not just the ‘experts’, and money, and other interventions. Listen to people; don’t do to ‘beneficiaries’. Zambia also asks me – in its soul-awakening light, and its expanse of space and generosity, as it swaps our sun for a skyfull of Milky Way each night – how will you share all this beauty? Don’t hoard it.
Author and educator Parker Palmer talks of the “tragic gap” between what is, and what we know to be possible. There is something about these red lands, and their challenges and beauty and injustice and kindness and everything else they hold, that helps me to see into that tragic gap – recognising reality, but not weighed down with defeat and cynicism; hoping in what’s possible, but not blinded by wishful thinking. In these red lands, scales have fallen from my eyes. I learn from what is and what has been, and see what could be possible if we want it enough: community development that is about loving our neighbour more than wanting to be a saviour; farming that supports farmers and community and nature and health; politics that is propositional not oppositional, that engages everyone and actually cares about them. I have been told I’m idealistic as if that was a reproach, as if there’s no room for both idealism and realism in one person. But I have touched those things, and I’m increasingly writing to try and point to some of the fragments of map that I have uncovered. I do not have a grand unifying ‘argument’. Instead, my noticings and essays are a witness to the lands that I have found myself in, and how they’re shaping me.
These noticings have come from hope and despair, urban and rural, Devon and Africa, place and planet, sacred and science, politics and poverty. I thought these were opposites, choices I had to make, needing to divide myself up into bits and pick one to pursue. But I look and see life in relationship with itself everywhere, seeking restoration and wholeness, and so I’m trying to live that way too.
These red lands teach me to be attentive to my place, to really look and listen, because as David George Haskell say in Sounds Wild and Broken, “listening is a moral and political act”.
And places extend in ever-widening gyres, reaching like viruses and supply chains and migrating birds to other places. These red lands surface a question I am picking at, turning over, trying to understand: how do I invest and root in the stories, dust and drama of this particular place in which I now live, whilst also carrying with me a wider sense of planet, fuelled by what I’ve encountered globally? The African concept of ‘Ubuntu’ roughly translates to ‘I am because we are’. These red lands show me what that really means, and how it might be lived right here and part of a greater whole. The essays I’m writing are me looking down at the soil on which I live, then lifting my eyes to the horizon that pulls us beyond place; they’re me standing in the ‘tragic gap’ — which is also a generative gap — and looking towards what could be.
Books and articles I’ve appreciated:
Essay — The Church Forests of Ethiopia, by Fred Bahnson (in Emergence Magazine). Nearly all of Ethiopia’s original trees have disappeared, but small pockets of old-growth forest still surround Ethiopia’s churches. They are living arks of biodiversity amongst the brown grazing fields. This essay (and there’s an accompanying film) gives a deeper understanding of how our fate is tied with the fate of trees.
Book — Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind, by Grace Olmstead. An exploration of the consequences of brain drain, and of the hollowing out of rural communities in Idaho. Grace has a substack newsletter too, called ‘Granola’ — I appreciate its richness and signposting to interesting things.
Book — The Perfection of the Morning, by Sharon Butala. In 1976, Sharon Butala left academia, married a cattle rancher and moved to southwest Saskatchewan in Canada. Her memoir is a meditation on nature and a personal and spiritual exploration of the roots of creativity. It’s about a search for a connection with the prairie that encompassed and often overwhelmed her. Butala is open-hearted and clear-eyed, and the atmosphere she conjures is captivating.
Essay collection — There are Places in the World Where Rules are Less Important than Kindness, by Carlo Rovelli
This is a book of essays by a world-renowned physicist. I enjoy the way he fuses science and art to offer a nuanced and kaleidoscopic view of life – touching on literature, politics, Africa, animals, atheism. The essays are curious, elegant, entertaining, voyaging.
A poem I like:
This poem speaks to me of wholeness, and connectedness, and restoring scattered things.
The Hidden Singer, by Wendell Berry
The gods are less for their love of praise.
Above and below them all is a spirit that needs nothing
but its own wholeness, its health and ours.
It has made all things by dividing itself.
It will be whole again.
To its joy we come together --
the seer and the seen, the eater and the eaten,
the lover and the loved.
In our joining it knows itself. It is with us then,
not as the gods whose names crest in unearthly fire,
but as a little bird hidden in the leaves
who sings quietly and waits, and sings.
Something unexpected I’ve learned in these red lands:
Elephants don’t like chilli peppers. In Zambia, I lived on a farm for a few months, and the people who worked there would string chilli oil-soaked rags around the fields, or mix chilli peppers with cow dung and burn it, to deter elephants from walking through the crops. This knowledge is less useful in Devon…
A photo from a place I know:
This is the edge of Dartmoor National Park, in Devon. I was walking with the sunset. Here’s an essay I wrote that features Dartmoor, and its layers, and my own layers.
Thanks for reading this newsletter. I’d love to hear about your own encounters with place(s), and how it shapes you, and the questions you might be trying to uncover or live where you are — feel free to leave a comment if you like, and in a future newsletter, I’ll reflect on any thoughts or experiences that people share. Thanks for being here and helping this newsletter (and me) to grow.
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