Hello and welcome friends, familiar and new. I’m Jan and I live in a house that we are slowly renovating in a forest in Brittany. I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation — writers, creatives and those seeking well-being, rest and hope in our fragile world. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. Let’s create a little alchemy together. You are so welcome here. My Sunday posts are always free and you may find it easier to read online as some email clients have a length limit.
In 2020, which seems such a long time ago, I began the year with the desire to ask of all that I was doing: Does it increase connection? I had no idea how much that question would be challenged in a year of social isolation and lockdowns. Post-pandemic, how we connect has become more and more urgent in a world in which fatigue, overwhelm, and loneliness plague so many.
Always, it seems, deep connection arises only when we change our perspective on time. Being rushed, fragmented and frenetic keeps us walled-off from one another and from the earth that holds us. This year, I'm trying to build in more times when I linger enough to truly listen and listen deeply in order to connect.
In the novel, Howard's End, E M Forster writes:
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
To live in fragments no longer, is to choose what we tend to. It's so easy to tend to the things that should loudest, to being busy with things that demand attention yet nurture little, if anything of depth.
In 2024 my question is what should I tend to and, more and more, my perspective is shifting to the slow and the quiet, to the plants that whisper wisdom, to the owl that calls into the night and into my dreams, to the loved ones and friends whose lives sing out to us, to the communities that nurture mutuality and belonging, to the suffering who need our attention and solidarity, who should not go forgotten, no matter how crushed.
Lingering to listen
To tend in this way I need sometimes to linger, taking moments when all I do is walk, read, muse... It's what I'm currently doing for a whole blessed week in hamlet on the headland beyond the village of Plougasnou.
Rocks
Sand
Pebbles
kelp
Pink granite
Sea
Sun
Sky under the evening sun whitening, the June flora along the shore, crowding the headland — elder offering great saucers of frothy cream, ox-eye daisies, tall and joyous, dancing together, foxgloves dripping magenta and mischief, pennywort towers and hairy-legged Queen Anne's lace. Walking the headland, the sea is on both side of us, there's fern and red campion, clumps of thrift — mauve frills swaying to the lilt of waves, plantain raising long stems heavy with seed.
Sorrel
Buttercups
Bramble
White clover
Honeysuckle
Dog rose
Valerian
Violet
When I linger with the plants, listen to the land, the immensity of my connection to all life is palpable. And with it, the certainty of how much it matters that we tend this earth, that we don't destroy our home or stay silent in the face of genocide. There is such abundance, such riches and they are for every creature.
Listening to connect
We know that all life is connected. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram says it with poetic fervour:
Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth — our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.
And when we listen to the earth, commune with the plants or non-human animals, we also love our own kind more.
I can’t save the world. Nor can you. Not one of us can. But together can make a difference and any one of us can have an effect for good whenever and wherever we honour and deepen our sense of connection.
Connecting to care
Whenever we show compassion; each time we pay attention and listen – to those suffering, to the earth, to our own bodies, to a friend who needs some small act of kindness, to whatever is calling us, then we shape the clay of the universe to be just a little better.
Compassion is radical, a sympathy so deep that it moves us to our guts. It requires attention: real focus, not a distracted nod in its direction. Compassion listens. And in that listening the connection enlarges the souls of all involved. Compassion is an act of resistance in the face of overwhelm — we don't have to do it all, save it all. We do the good that we can and this transforms the story of fear to a story of hope.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that the way to overcome fear and feelings of overwhelming powerlessness is to connect to others:
[Hu]man[ity] as such, her/his essence, cannot be defined because s/he always desires to belong to something outside her/himself and changes accordingly… If s/he could be said to have an essential nature at all, it would be lack of self-sufficiency. Hence, s/he is driven to break out of her/his isolation by means of love… for happiness, which is the reversal of isolation...
Connecting to unself
Connection is intrinsic to being human. It is intrinsic to all life. Despite what thinkers like Emerson would have us believe, it’s not self-reliance or rugged ‘self-made’ independence that is the mark of our spiritual or emotional maturity, but our connection; our kindness.
This in no way lessens the importance of our interior life and imagination, but rather calls us to take all that we are and learn how to face what is in the world with generosity and tenderness so that we not only cerebrally think we are connected to all of life, but feel and embody it. Connection is bodiful.
Our greatest hope, as a species and for this planet, is in connection. As Whitman put it:
Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
To honour the other and to recognise our connectedness is as deeply soulful as it is bodiful and demands a largesse that pulls us towards humility and flexibility. It requires owning that we are all made in the crucibles of community and culture and stand on the shoulders of those who want before.
Moreover, it predicates an unselfconsciousness of the type Madeleine L’Engle explored in Glimpses of Grace. Quite simply, we have to cease from thinking the universe revolves around us. We have to rid ourselves of hubris and instead give ourselves over to play, joy and self-forgetfulness. These are states that the writer knows, loves and seeks; states that allow us to glory in a sunset, connect with a child reading a picture-book, connect with the neighbour who needs help ... And connect with the language that flows through our writing.
As writers and creators, the sense of flow is intimately connected with the feeling of being beyond ‘self’.
Connecting to wonder
If connection moves us out of the narrow confines of ego, it also opens us up to experiences of awe. Wonder is an emotion that not only connects us to all things but also gives us a home, a sanctuary in the wide mystery of life. As Einstein put it:
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious, the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
There is a wild self-forgetting at the heart of connection that allows us to live with mystery and take solace within the enormity of life itself. As Diane Ackerman writes in An Alchemy of Mind:
I often resort to such words as sacred, grace, reverence, worship, holy, sanctity, and benediction, which I cherish as powerful feelings, moods, and ideas. I’m an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it’s also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.
Connecting to the moment
We need connection as artists and writers. We need connection as a species — not to overwhelm ourselves, but to risk being open and vulnerable, showing compassion and revelling in the sheer abundance of wonder in the universe.
And we find this connection in those moments when we pause, linger and live in the present.
It is only by calling past and future into the present of remembrance and expectation that time exists at all. Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.
writes Hannah Arendt in Love and Saint Augustine.
So much of life is swallowed in busyness or anxiety. We start to think of our inner life as separate from our body, our particular body as separate from nature, the 'nature' in the local park as separate from wilderness. We start to think there are lives that matter and lives that don't. Refusing to live in fragments. Taking time to pause, linger, listen, connect, is an act of resistance and the beginning of a different story.
And an invitation
Tucked away in the forest, the inhabitants of Restidiou Vras have their herbalist, Viola; they have skills and animals, homes and loved ones. But they carry their ghosts into an increasingly uncertain future and, as the inhabitants of the surviving twelve households gather for the longest day, they bring stories of loss, their resentments and fears, their hopes and secrets. Thirty-three adults and eleven children who know that a single day can change everything.
And in the forest, the humans are not the only voices. The trees and plants have their own stories of loss and resurrection, of abuse and forgiveness, of another way of living.
The event will begin at 7.00 p.m. BST on Saturday June 22 and will include a Q&A session with the online audience after the readings.
Cinnamon Press invites you to register so that they can manage the online space and to contribute a small registration fee of £2 which you can offset by using the discount code available during the launch against book purchases for all attendees.
I hope to see you there and you can sign up here
Lovely piece, Jan.