Author: Jim Hindle

Bearings

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You get to a certain age when anniversaries can whip round a little too often.  Still, some of them are grounds, if not for exact celebration then certainly a case for marking the occasion.  And so it is this winter, this January to be precise, when a private army of some 600 security guards appeared from the depths of the cities and unemployment queues, newly stationed in a disused airforce base charged with helping clear the nine miles of the route of the Newbury bypass.  The clearance involved that of several hundred campaigners in camps, ten thousand trees and other apparent undesirables such as six different species of bat, badgers and protected species such as dormice, nightjars and the rare vertigo moulinsiana snail.

It was the crunch and culmination of a campaign spanning decades with people camping out on the route for a good year or two prior to the clearance and became a flashpoint for the anti-road protests sweeping the country at the time.  I’d arrived almost a year and a half previously, had wandered woodland for days seeking a promised camp before stumbling upon semi-squaddie teenagers who brought me to the campaign office.  From there it was a short hop to helping set up a camp in Snelsmore Common that would be a mainstay for the campaign until the final evictions, heralded by the influx of security all those months later.

What followed was a good two years that indulged as much as I could wish for of experiencing life outdoors – from ‘benders’ (struck from hazel poles and tarps) on woodland floors to treehouses in various states of sortedness or dilapidation, rarely with heating.  It was a time of stoned ‘bimbles’ in the forest, of folk music around fires (I met a Welsh fiddler while busking and she and I ended up knocking around together for most of the ensuing campaigns), of midnight raids on supermarket skips, digger diving in quaggy compounds and hectic hitching up and down the land.  It was a time of almost excoriating beauty – of seeing places in their final days, of starlit walks through miles of winter trees, of reading Welsh mythology under cover to the sound of stoves and rain on tarps that sounded almost supernatural.

And then, of course, we saw it all destroyed.  It was clearly a no-brainer this was on the way.  What surprised was our apparent inability to do anything less than fall in love with the places we now called home, knowing all the while their days were numbered.  It was in a sense bearing visceral witness, as if honouring these places we now knew, as if remembering them could somehow keep a part of them alive.

That this had an effect is not to be wondered at.  But the jarring nature of treetop evictions in particular meant for many it was an experience that could never happen again.  It was one of the chief features of those times then that a lot of caring and sensitive people were drawn like proverbial moths to those protests.  In a sense it was kind of insane.  And yet there was an emotional charge drawn from it all; of outrage amid the common carnage; that here and now we would be counted, we would lift up our voice in a cry for the country and the world where machines seemed to matter more than woman and man, more than the moors and the woods and the peace we’d come to know amid the lanes and waterways of a corner of England that would soon be no more, which spoke too for so many other places.

Time can settle things to some extent, if not always fully heal them.  While many continued campaigning, getting drawn for a large part into the anti-globalisation movement of the late nineties where riots seemed foregone conclusions, others returned to their roots, to education, gardening, raising kids, to leading quieter but still productive lives.

For my part, after a summer walking and busking I headed home, practically dragged from the woods, incarcerated for a time again, forced to settle for life within square walls that nonetheless still held its compensations.  It was a gentle and forgiving time before, for me, the long-term impact of the protests to some extent caught up with me.

But a love for the land still endured, the road building budget had been massively cut back, as much due to economic necessities than protest and politics, although they doubtless played a major part.  Many places won a reprieve, not least for me the woods and hill at the top of my road that had helped sharpen my focus, attentions and convictions from the start and led me to seek out Newbury’s camps in a time that less than two years later seemed distant and more innocent at once, as does most of that decade, years on.

More than a quarter of a century on then, after a time of too much war, of personal and more universal attrittions, those times still stand as a beacon for so many involved.  This led to further protest, sure, and may have helped form a kind of foundation for much that was to follow.  But their emotional immediacy lent a particular charge that was beautiful and sometimes searing all at once.  If it seems naïve to talk of innocence, there was nevertheless something true, something with all the makings of a mass movement that drew in supporters from all walks of life. 

Today, in a country and world that can feel riven, we need such inclusion more than ever.   Whatever the will or the wish in certain quarters it seems increasingly unlikely that direct action alone will be the thing that can save us, even if protest can always play its part.  But what Newbury and those times may yet grant us is a reminder of emotional immediacy, where a life lived closer to nature, away from the membranes of mortar and brick can stir in us a better sense of what our true place on this earth can still look like, of how it can feel to be one with the land, how her every hurt is ours to bear too, how this can help inform every action and decision, large or small, a kind of newfound code for ecological conduct, not enforced by laws or decrees (though given due restrictions for the mighty) but by some kind of heartfelt response that treats the land and the landscape as a living thing, indeed as our closest connection.

Such degrees of engendered responsibility and the extent to which they can help us hold to account the overbearing, over-invested and ethically remote are perhaps the greatest gifts those protests can bestow.  We are all still setting out on that new path, out from beneath the comfort of the lintels of our old assurances.  We do not know, and never did, what lies ahead or what degrees of agency we hold.  We should not let that discourage us as we set forth, seek some kind of greater stride in our steps, take bearings to greet the new day.

Gaza

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It can seem hard at times to find some kind of fitting way ahead.  Hard, specifically, to find ways to respond with a degree of humanity in any way adequate for the scale of what is being played out, once again, in Gaza as I write.  It’s not enough to say we should have seen it coming, that the signs were there of the faltering process, that Netanyahu may have been in any case looking for excuses to return to the levels of bombardment we are witnessing again.

It speaks to particular pains.  It can seem hard to fully empathise with the Israeli situation for example when the retribution is so disproportionate, when the tally of lives lost or destroyed renders them now the aggressor, the perpetrators of seemingly perpetual war.  It’s hard in other words, when our newsfeeds are full of dead or starving Palestinian children, to consider Israel’s experience, how any other nominally Western nation might respond (and forgive the lack of equivalence; I mention it as a statement of what’s very much part of the problem) if hundreds of their population were butchered or kidnapped, not least when Hamas still do not recognise the Israeli state, are as far away from advocating or accepting a two-state solution as anyone in Netanyahu’s cabinet.  It’s hard to imagine, even as – or especially as – we see the given state in Gaza, how it may be to live in fear of rocket raids, of the psychological strain of being surrounded by enemies real or perceived, of how it must be to feel your country is under a state of perpetual siege.

You can point fingers quite squarely at Hamas then, even if we can wonder how any of us would react in the face of seeing countless friends and family lost, how it’s not hard to see how Israel’s bombardments might act as a perfect recruitment device.  But Hamas are historically simply survivors, the last players standing in a power struggle with Fatah that had gone on since at least the Palestinian elections of 2006, that they seemed to offer something credible in the face of the latter’s clear failures and corruption, that it was in no small part that many felt driven to Hama’s arms given Fatah’s acquiescence to demands from an unreasonable Israeli state.

And, if we can be mindful of the Israeli mentality, its stresses and long forbearance, how much easier is it to see the Palestinian side?  How much less can we wonder at their response after so many decades in an effective open prison where few could leave and daily conditions were harsh if not downright humiliating and the international community largely looked away?  Is it any wonder Hamas gained such standing and credulity in such a scenario, even as the ‘solutions’ they proposed played into the hands of the Israeli right?  Hamas and Netanyahu need each other in a sense, locked as they appear to be in a mutually antagonistic spiral.

In the meantime, what can we do as world citizens when marching and letters, even vigils, do not seem enough?  Where can we go with the knowledge that, far away, over vast distances of land and sea, scenes are being played out as bad as anything the last century threw at our feet, all the worse perhaps as we like to see ourselves as more enlightened these days, the spirit of the times supposedly lit up by greater grace and goodwill, where we foster conditions for healing, where we are meant to have moved on en masse as part of a greater humanity, a greater synthesis, as if Spring itself is meant to usher in a better age?  The ongoing onslaught in Gaza pulls such aspirations into greater light; if these sentiments hold any currency at all, surely they should be brought to bear with every effort we can muster to help end the suffering in Gaza, to help bring the hostages home.  The question remains; how can we respond at all to such horror with any degree of application fitting for its scale, with anything that holds any hope at all of cessation, let alone justice itself?

As charter after charter of international condemnation is invoked, as declarations of human rights abuses, constitutions of genocide, of war crimes come and go like bitter milestones on a bitter road, it’s easy to feel words are cheap.  Would America be less intransigent if not more positively proactive without a Zionistic hinterland that seems to believe this all a precursor to some kind of greater messianic immanence?  Could we stand a little taller in the UK if we cut off all arms sales to Israel, over and above some positive moves in this respect more recently?  Can the banks disinvest?  Can boycotts carry more teeth?  Or should we be looking a little harder at the roots of this conflict, the grievances held by both sides, advocate space for renewed diplomacy, do not surrender to policy negotiated from the barrel of a gun?

If it’s clear that Israel is currently in the grip of a recalcitrant right wing and that many in the global Jewish diaspora, even many Israelis, regard their policies as the worst kind of intransigence; if we can hold some expectation that Trump could find it in himself to be more genuinely helpful, that in itself carries the hope that, in better circumstances, there might actually be more traction for some kind of better way ahead.

If it is in any way enough to seek to get our houses in better order, to bear bitter witness, to strive for Gaza with every part of us in the knowledge that every life counts, perhaps we can try a little harder too to fathom why so many Israelis support such a scale of aggression and the nature of the micro-climate of that country’s press.  Perhaps we can seek to understand a little better how wrongdoing can be facilitated not just by the banality of any absence of response, but can be driven by historic and more current wounds being wilfully exploited.  If nothing else, it may carry lessons for the future.  It might just shine a better light on our collective here and now. 

Carry Them With Us

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

I thought, in a way, that we’d still have more time.  Another day perhaps to watch as the results piled up; more time to reckon the tally of swing states, to stretch out the race.  More time for will and further prayer if nothing else.  As it was, the news sat ready and waiting, squatting like a gargoyle in the rosebed of our morning newsfeeds, newly minted like a bitter coin, disbelief pregnant as a pause in the daily functioning of things.  It seems in the coming weeks and years we may have to get used to a much longer hiatus.

Given the quite obviously poor timing of the result in a world that so clearly can do with better news, it may be instructive to bear in mind that, after the vote, we have choices.  Not the choice as to whether we abide by democratic process, if we want to abide at all in any state of justification; whatever our stomachs may feel, we can’t ignore or override the vote.  But we do have choices as to other ways in which we can respond.

First and foremost, we can perhaps drop the adversarial stance; not from lack of justification but simply out of pragmatics.  It may be easier, in other words, on our collective psychologies if we view what seems to lie ahead as more of a kind of geological phenomena – more faceless, indiscriminate in its damage than a construct and outcome of a deliberate will.  It might just be easier to deal with if we see it as less a result of determined sabotage from near and far than a kind of high tide of the hand of history, where a demagogue crops up on cue – any one will do – in the face of a hailstorm of economic tribulation, where the masses are told simply what wants to be heard; that everything can somehow be put right with merely the will to believe and less reckless meddling from liberal elites who don’t seem to understand realities of putting food on the table.

We have other choices, not least simple will to continue, the will to not crumble, to not turn to the wall, to walk out defiant – not married to outcomes or even thinking of the road that lies ahead, but from a point of principle, in the knowledge survival will not lie in cowering in corners, in recrimination or deep diving on our scrolling phones.  That’s a choice that may determine a degree of dignity even if, or especially if, dignity may be all that we have left.  It certainly holds the key to whatever hope may remain.

That none of this may get easier as the months and years go by is something we can only steel ourselves for.  Whatever decisions are made, if the wire is wheeled in on our aspirations, as an attrition of newsfeeds and op-eds, redolent with apparent reality, grinds and clogs our sensibilities we will need more than simply bloodymindedness.  We will need stamina, a calling forth of resources, the will to believe that there might be more in us than we dare think.  Strange as it may seem, we can meet this moment mindful of not just a better sense of our potential but with a greater grasp of our humanity, of that which we are capable of.

We do not need reminders that none of this is a given, let alone that it may not be easy.  But we should keep an ear out for those that can help, those voices calling us on.  We may be surprised by their currency, borne perhaps by their necessity, like somebody calling us home from the dark.

Even as we dig in, we should lift up our voices, go forward unbowed even as we buckle down.  It is dark here as I write on this early winter English night.  I know it will be a long time before the inevitable Spring.  We can only do what we have always done: be mindful of the beautiful things even as we shoulder the wheel in hope of better times, mindful of our spirits, of the knowledge that, if the embers of hope be ever so small, we can still nurture them, carry them with us, still somehow keep them alive.  In spite, or perhaps even because, of everything that we may face, there is a great spirit flowing through these times.  Step outside: can you feel it?

The Veil of Trauma

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Recently, I sat down to re-read the Canadian poet Anne Michael’s testament to the life of Jakob Beer; translator, poet, survivor of the Holocaust.  ‘Fugitive Pieces’ is a book as much about love as it is about war – the things that can heal us, the things that can keep us alive.  I originally read it in a time of personal strife and the memory of its excoriating clarity has stayed with me ever since as one of the books that truly changed my life, as if, in helping document destruction, it also offered a path in how to put life back together again.

Michaels writes with a kind of harrowing detail about the Holocaust itself; the lives taken, interrupted; as Beer reads by way of escape about Houdini, he thinks of the Jews all over Europe climbing into bins, chests, boxes, under floorboards, behind walls to disappear; escape acts from discovery and capture.  She writes about the mentalities that facilitated and enabled such horrors – the dehumanisation, the labelling of one class of people as a subhuman other, where the treatment is justified as somehow the normal rules don’t apply.  When you believe your victim is more animal than man, a problem to be dealt with, an inconvenience to be ushered out of sight, normal morality flies.

Jakob Beer was smuggled to safety in the back of a car bound for a Greek island where he hid, as a boy, for and from the rest of the war, soothed to sanity by the narratives of his Greek protector Athos, emersed in a world of geology, poetry, archaeology, a thousand scraps of integral and arcane knowledge of polar explorers, ancient mariners, the aurora borealis, landscapes that lie hidden in time, one below or rising up from the other.  It deals with what masks things, reveals them, how meaning can be extracted from a stone.  It goes without saying his story from that time forward was a search to learn to live with such times, to somehow learn to be fully human in the face of the atrocities he lived through, in the face of such incomprehensible loss.

Amid all of this, it is inevitably, and quite brilliantly, a book about language.  How new tongues can put us at a distance from our past, how we can put them on like a new set of clothes, like a kind of invisible cloak, how we can be dislocated both geographically but also phonetically, which can make any eventual homecoming all the more profound.  Jakob, from necessity, became a kind of linguistic shapeshifter – his Yiddish giving way to his protectorate Greek, later to the English of his newfound home in Toronto.  It certainly fed into his work as a translator.  But if Michaels deals with the heaviest of themes, she can also have the most playful of touches, nowhere better evidenced than in her palindromes (“Yreka Bakery” of a friend’s establishment and “are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”). 

In an echo of Athos’s – and Jakob’s own – diving into layers of history; acutely personal and metaphysical by turns, Michael’s delves some precarious waters.  She documents how a man can be saved in every sense, can find his way back into a life truly lived despite decades of wading through psychological mires.  Of how our decisions can save us, of how we can truly embrace what life can place in our path.  Michael’s charts the trajectory of Beer’s excursions into the depths of his family’s past, gives some account of how we can learn to release ghosts, and parts of ourselves in the process.

But perhaps her greatest lessons can be more immediate.  She writes about the forces of history, the gradual instant, events and what leads to them as almost geological phenomena, where many years of gradual influence can amount in the occurrences of a single day.  She writes of how one generation’s trauma can be transmitted to the next. 

And so, this winter, as violence repeated itself with such terrible intensity, I found myself turning to such a work.  Not for perspective exactly, but from a kind of raw acknowledgement of horror, from wondering where to go in the face of inhumanity, from wondering if it is possible at all to be alive in the knowledge of such things and yet be human, to try and fathom how at all we can respond to such bloodshed with any degree of real depth of mercy in the face of the scenes we have seen.  

Can we learn anything at all from documenting historic atrocity and, more than that, the way out of it, the way in which a path can be found to eventual healing; a signpost perhaps of the long road ahead for survivors?  We can all be too easily caught up in narratives of victimhood; blame the other, identify ourselves as underdogs, fall into spiteful traps of ‘them or us’, fail to see the story from the far side of the fence.  

Perhaps acknowledgement of historic trauma can help somehow to find the way beyond it, that our criticisms are not compromised by lack of respect, of compassion, that we can still recognise historic hurt.  We can never forget the cruel tally of what happened in Europe which all told was not so very long ago.  If pain can ever have a purpose, it may be in its ability to keep the memory fresh, to help us not to repeat or to permit the repetition of history’s mistakes and tragedies.  Perhaps it can serve to remind us that any apparent other are really as close as our kin, our very own blood if we can only lift the veil of trauma to see clearly our mistakes, our potential, just how we might learn to let live. 

The Currency of Love

~ Jim Hindle ~ 1 Comment

In the late summer of 1157, troops mustered by Henry II gathered on the saltings south of Chester to make their way up the coast of the Dee estuary.  They were attempting to crush the most northern Welsh princes who had run amok, in the eyes of the English, during ‘the Anarchy’ of the reign of King Stephen.  Thomas Becket, then still chancellor, had consulted soothsayers about the best time to launch the assault but they can’t have been much good given the problems the expedition ran into – Henry’s accompanying fleet mauled when it put into Anglesey, the king himself ambushed with his army in Flintshire, bombarded in a narrow pass by rocks and arrows, a massacre only avoided by Henry managing to fight his way out of a thicket.

Eventually the Welsh sued for peace as Henry advanced into Snowdonia.  Becket was busy handling paperwork in Chester at the time and the chroniclers do not mention any role he played in the combat itself.  But some of them stated he reinvented himself as a warrior from the time of the Welsh campaign.  Their views speak of the inconsistencies of medieval life where it was far from unheard of for chancellors and other high-status clerics to don chainmail and fight.  Becket certainly played his part in a later campaign that culminated in the siege of Toulouse where castles, towns and large swathes of land were razed to the ground and despoiled.  He personally led a cohort of some 700 knights from his own household, taking great personal risk and endangering his elite troops unnecessarily, an impulsiveness which some said first showed itself when he fell into a millstream when hunting as a teenager, possibly while trying to impress his aristocratic friend Richer de l’Aigle.

It all speaks of the juxtaposition of roles and ironies of the life of the man who consorted great controversy during his life if not necessarily its wake.  Becket we know could be stubborn and wilful, not unlike Henry, whose story forms the twin lodestar of the then archbishop’s fate.  Speaking of both of their lives it is easy to judge or jump to easy answers.  Becket after all had had a profound galvanisation of belief when made archbishop, possibly borne of insecurity regarding his fitness for the new role.  We know it marked a turning point, that the worldly, even sometimes violent life of chancellorship was now behind him.

If he could be set in his ways, religious to a fault, in some eyes almost fanatical at times, we can say too his actions spoke of a very real courage.  We know for instance that, even if some of his intuitions could be overblown, he certainly came to conceive that, in obstructing Henry, he was fighting a very real autocracy, even an actual tyrant and that he personally constituted the Church’s best defence in a struggle for supremacy that formed one of the themes of medieval governments for centuries either side of his life.

If any of that sounds abstract, we can consider that his messengers were sometimes tortured, swathes of his family and followers, including babes in arms, were cast out of their homes in the middle of winter in a fit of public retribution by the king, a whole religious order that had offered Becket shelter was threatened with expulsion, his bishops were menaced with threats of imprisonment or mutilation to speed along negotiations and his final days took place amid a climate of abuse and paranoia where his properties and followers in Canterbury were seized and harassed respectively and he was accused of inciting civil war.  He didn’t flinch in the face of any of this and, when the time came, while he very easily could have hidden, he chose to stand his ground in the face of men whose capabilities and intent could not have been hard to surmise.  Perhaps he was tired of pursuit.  Perhaps he could simply see where it was going and probably had been for years.

In England, it sometimes feels we can be too disposed towards an ingrained cynicism, resent success or can be too willing to knock a good man down.  What other country would take its national bard and undermine his achievements by accusations of collusion and ghost writing, his national holiday hidden away on St George’s Day (the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death) as if he doesn’t quite deserve a celebration of his own?

Perhaps the same can be said of our treatment of Becket; that, where there is doubt, it can go against him, that notions of Saints in any case are about as credible as a moon made of cheese and the very essence of religion is the stuff of fairy stories better relegated to a simpler, recalcitrant age.  We are all the bold enlightened now and ought to have no place for superstition, castigate at every turn the high and mighty even if such grandness was never a thing that they sought.  

But perhaps, as belief systems go, we can remember that, for all our modern cleverness, the most important things cannot be cut and dried and comprehended in a solely intellectual way.  Love itself, the fabric that binds the very world together, is not a thing of equations, that the best and truest alchemy is one first and foremost of psychology, that we cannot comprehend our most intrinsic gifts by seeking to pull them apart.

Becket then can stand as an icon for a world we should not let slip through our fingers.  While it can feel at times we haven’t learnt a thing since the eleven hundreds, can we be lit up at all by the things which ought to provide foundations for our lives – love, fidelity and principles; qualities Becket so surely helped embody?

The story goes, the day he fell into the stream at Michelham, the miller – oblivious to his presence – stopped the wheel in its motion just in time to avoid calamity by sheer feat of serendipity, an occurrence that was meant to have instilled in Becket a greater sense of providence and faith.  Can we, even now, cultivate a belief in the more mysterious aspects of this world, the kind of mysteries that can underpin it all; a language not forgotten of the currency of love, the human heart, where discoveries only lead to a better understanding of the sense that it is all still much bigger than us, that we still have so much that we can learn?

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Copies of ‘The Shrine Way: an English Pilgrimage’ can be ordered at westmarch.co.uk

Rings of Reciprocity

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

A tree planting initiative activating children’s imagination and sense of stewardship is seeking supporters

It’s a muggy summer’s afternoon on a farm in rural Sussex and thirty children and several adults have gathered in a newly-mown circle round a central hearth, surrounded by rings of young trees.  When prompted, little offerings are made, the children are encouraged to come forward with silent or vocalised wishes for the forest they hope these young trees to be a part of.  There’s an air of excitement around the circle – these children have been here before.

What distinguishes this group from any other engaged in tree planting is that they are being co-ordinated and led by the Children’s Forest project – an initiative that has much more to it than simply putting the trees in the ground.  The project takes the children on a four-step journey of experiencing actual living woods, imagining how a future forest may look, articulating this with artwork, plays or poetry and letting this inform their wishes as they do the actual planting.

The act of imagining in particular is crucial for the project’s ethos – in this time of climate anxiety, children are encouraged to picture a healthy, abundant natural world and work towards it practically, in the knowledge that a strong mental image of an outcome helps to make its realisation all the stronger and more likely to transpire.  This approach also allows for creative imagination to activate future generational thinking.

Children’s Forest has been running for a few years now and is going from strength to strength, with a grant from an ITV fundraiser competition in particular helping fund the set-up of tree nurseries using seeds gathered locally.  There are now thirteen Children’s Forests throughout the land, from Cumbria to Cornwall, with most centred in the South East and Sussex in particular.

The project was instigated by Forest School teacherAnna Richardson who has spent the last twenty years working with children and as a teacher of bushcraft skills, specialising in the uses of plants for medicine and food, mentored by archaeobotanist Gordon Hillman. As a Forest School teacher she has worked with children of all ages from toddlers to teens, often in Steiner-based settings.  In these sessions there was always a great emphasis on getting to know a place and its trees; their uses for food, shelter, medicine, fire.

But the question kept on coming back to her: how could she and the children give back to the forest that gave them so much?  There was the obvious boon of helping children and participants value and connect with the natural world and thereby be that much more disposed to look after it, but what more could they give in a tangible sense?  After all, she noticed the effect on the land that they used – issues of wear of the vegetative life, compaction of the woodland soil.  Where was the reciprocity?

Coupled with this was the issue of land access.  It was not always easy to find land to run forest school sessions on.  But there were plenty of landowners – why might they not want to have children accompanied by adults on their land?  What was stopping them?

These were the practical considerations from which Children’s Forest was established.  But there was a philosophical element too.  Anna’s studies of ancestral skills informed her that all indigenous peoples carried a sense of belonging to nature and the need to care for it on a daily basis – it was in their interests to look after and to some extent help propagate the plants they relied on.  All this was built into their way of relating to the natural world.  It’s something she believes we consciously need to bring back into our culture today.

As part of this cultural shift, the Children’s Forest wants children to have experience of themselves as guardians and caretakers.  It provides an opportunity for a lived experience of sacred reciprocity – combining the need for not only ecological restoration but also cultural restoration as part of the process. It is quite clear that if we don’t restore our culture to one of nature connection we are going to carry on making the same mistakes – the two have to be worked on in tandem.

One element of cultural restoration the project incorporates is the concept of the Children’s Fire.  When each of these special hearths are inaugurated they are done with a pledge to consider future generations.  The first circle of each Children’s Forest is planted round one of these fires, the children making wishes for future generations as the fire is lit.  It helps to dedicate both the space and the participants’ purpose, adding a much deeper element that helps with the intention to work with the spirit of the place and keep clear the aim to serve the children and the forests yet to be.

As the Children’s Forest began to work with children to plant trees in the ground, a committed team have gathered to bring this project to fruition. This has enabled the vision and breadth of the project to grow with the hearts and skillsets of those involved, including permaculture teachers, nature educators, health care professionals, artists and woodland specialists.

To return to the role of landowners, CF actively seeks their participation in the process, asking of them an honourable pledge that they will protect the planted trees on their land and ensure the next owners agree to do the same should the land be sold.  In return, the forests are cared for by the children and their mentors, with aftercare such as watering, mulching, weeding and removing tree guards.  The children get a place in which they can be taught in and potentially return to in the future with their own children and grandchildren.  The landowners can be involved in the ensuing community which also includes the children’s mentors and parents who can return to the Children’s Forests on a regular basis.

The project is actively looking for landowners to host forests.  Suitable land is generally a minimum of an acre and surveyed to be shown as suitable for the tree planting, which takes place around a central hearth.  This area can be expanded over time.  As a diverse example, Leasowe Farm in Leamington has planted over 3000 trees with several local schools and adult mental health groups.Children’s Forest then brings together a Forest School leader and group of children either from a local school or local community group to help plant the trees.  Forest School leaders can also train with Children’s Forest at Facilitator’s courses.

There is great scope for working with sympathetic landowners and other individuals.  Biodynamic farms are great examples of this with two local Children’s Forestsin Sussex being run on such land: Sacred Earth in Horam and Colin Godman’s Farm in Nutley.  Biodynamic cattle are raised and the training courses are held on the latter.  Most forests are so far on private farms that have heard of the initiative through word of mouth.  There are now many independent projects working under their own volition and in their own way.

Biodynamic farms are the perfect environment for the forests.  As well as the farms’ emphasis on meeting the needs of their wider community in a way that encompasses more than just the provision of food, the intention of working with the spirit of the land and other influences are very much in line with Children’s Forest’s ethos, working as they do with an awareness of weather patterns and blessing the land and trees with offerings and song.  If that sounds abstract, such activities have a profound effect on the children, who come away energised and inspired.

Lulu Guinness of The Heugh in Lannercost put it like this: “I’m really lucky as a landowner to have an opportunity to care, to give something back and also to give to the future. It’s so much more than just planting trees, having this whole educational element where the children are really understanding the importance of tending and maintaining and being in relationship with the woodland is such a wider vision for bringing this land back into balance.”

Biodynamic principles of working with open-pollinated, heirloom and non-GMO seeds are also reflected in CF’s work, with a key element of their activities being the establishment of tree nurseries seeking to use local seeds that are inherently more resilient and suited to their immediate environment. Set up by permaculture teacher and nature mentor Pippa Johns, these nurseries can also be key elements in the involvement in schools – the planting of forests on school land can be problematic in terms of granting access to visiting participants in future years.  Any school can set up a tree nursery and they can be a wonderful focus for the children with the obvious opportunities to learn about the trees augmented by the element of lending practical help and engagement.

The establishment of such nurseries – CF’s ‘Forest from Seed’ funding drive mentioned above was one aspect of this – is an excellent example of the reciprocity at the heart of the project.  Early propagation and care of saplings holds huge potential for how humans can help foster tree life.  Accounting for grazing and pestilence, one oak will often produce very few other mature trees in its lifetime whereas, with the help of nurseries, trees that reach maturity can be expanded at the very least a thousand-fold.

Children’s Forest are looking for people who feel sympathetic to its principles to approach landowners, schools, home-education groups and nature-based educators to establish new forests and their supportive communities.  They are also reaching out to businesses and philanthropists with a passion for the welfare of children and the environment to help make new forests possible.  Also contact from those who can raise the profile of the organisation through media work or approaching high profile individuals and being sought.

Back in Sussex, the children mulch the trees.  It’s kind of a party; people play fiddles, flutes and the kids are in their element, splitting off into little groups to fill wheelbarrows of wet woodchip to place around each tree guard.  They planted this forest a year ago and this is one of many return visits to the site where they build up some sense of connection, some sense of their own instrumentality in the welfare of these saplings.  And they know that in the days after they leave school they can return here.  It fosters a sense of constancy that takes its cue from nature herself; a reminder that, in our care for her, we are living up to how we’re meant to be.

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This article originally appeared in the Autumn 2023 issue of Star and Furrow magazine.

Diminishing Voids

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

At times it can seem hard to know how best to place our efforts, even whether those efforts will ever prove fruitful, whether they are worth themselves at all. Above all the myriad things we may face, which do not need any rehearsal – a cost-of-living crisis where we scrabble to fix metaphorical roofs high amongst them – above all of this there is the knowledge of that great existential crisis of the climate, not so much an elephant in the room as a kind of collective howling at the door.  Is doing anything at all quite futile in the face of the scale of the challenge?  Are we all in the UK with our languid, moist and merciful, perhaps somewhat desultory summer archetypes of the famed relaxed dogs on the sofa while the walls this time adopt the metaphor, licked with flames of distant forest fires; so easy to dismiss with a click of a switch, so difficult to forget?

Perhaps it’s a question of choice.  We can choose for instance to ignore it all, to continue to ignore it, literally screen it out with a surfeit of devices and their myriad balms and distractions.  Or we can fall into embittered enmity; rehearse our woes while doing nothing to address them.  Perhaps the biggest choice is, knowing what we know, can we really not do anything at all – through despondency or lack of drive or just not knowing how on earth we can start to respond when perhaps all we need to do, if just for a moment, is listen?

Beneath the apparent disregard or callousness there’s a deep well of something else in all of us, a well that all the phones, the hours lost to films and mini-series or scrolling socials, the buzz of pints, the near oblivion from anything else we may throw down our throats or clog our consciousness with, there’s a well that none of this can dry or fathom – a well of true feeling, an almost insatiable hunger for life, true life; not a technological chimera or booze-induced haze or mirage, but a feeling of how we are all meant to be; clear, connected – in the most meaningful way – connected and sorted and free.

None of this is to say that any of these things are necessarily bad in themselves but probably most of us rely on them more than we could some of the time, and some people much more than that. But perhaps, just maybe, maybe; if we can drink a little deeper and more often from that well when the scramble for sustenance and sanity allows, we may be able to look at our various dilemmas with a kind of clarity that engenders some kind of meaningful action, a clarity that informs and reminds us that there are myriad people out there striving and endeavouring to help, that we can join with their efforts, augment them, strive to do right by the times.

If we can do so, prise open the door just about long enough, squeeze out of the bars of the cage, we may find out there lights in the darkness; pinpoints of distant semaphores or visual morse that can guide us, help us to do what we can; silent suggestions that there is still a way, that there are still things we can do.

One such suggestion, and I do not know how I first heard it – dropped like a pearl in my inbox one morning perhaps – is the initiative over the Climate and Ecology Bill.  This proposed legislation was introduced years ago now, but it was re-introduced to the ‘Commons this Spring and is set for further debate in a couple of months.

There’s a great deal you can say about the Bill – the clue’s in the title – but it offers above all two things; a constructive, pragmatic, if admittedly ambitious road map as to how we can get our house in order in the UK regarding the Bill’s twin concerns and how we as communities and individuals can get on board and contribute in a tangible, realistic and meaningful way.

You can read all about the specifics of the Bill at the national website; the 40 peers and 127 MPs of all parties already on board, the backing of eminent scientists, CPRE, the Wildlife Trusts, the Co-operative Bank and many other businesses, 30,000 members of the public. You can read all about its suggestions, its scale and its rigour and its hope.  What is perhaps more important is that any one of us, anyone at all can play their part in its promotion and – beyond the scope of wider goals of lobbying, whose only real limit is that of the imagination – it can be a very simple thing; as simple as writing a letter.

If enough MPs are contacted these next few months by sufficient numbers of voters it would stand in good stead not only the prospects of the passage of the Bill later this Autumn but also those of the domestic environmental agenda in general as we move forward to the New Year and the prospect of an eventual election.

It may seem a thin hope at times that any of this can address the true scale of the problem.  But it may be enough, just in time.  What is clear is that, when faced with the prospect of looking future children in the eye, when all that may need to be done may be still, if just about, within our grasp, there is no decision at all; just the surrender to effort, in the knowledge that we may stand a little more resolute, that we may win a little time for the next pearl to drop into our hands, the next sweet opportunity, in the hope our mutual lights may be seen across a diminishing void, that others may still find their way ahead.

Each New Leaf

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

850 years ago tomorrow, the 21st February, Thomas Becket, so famously martyred near the quire of Canterbury Cathedral by a clutch of violent social climbers, was canonised by Pope Alexander III in a reflection of the wave of shock and, later, devotion to his memory that swept the Christian world in the wake of his death.  Becket had been a controversial figure for much of his life, something later ameliorated by his posthumous saintly status.  His friendship with Henry II had turned sour long before his murder, probably since the king made him archbishop against the then chancellor’s wishes.  It was a move the king hoped would embed his man in the Church but Becket found a piety in the process that would propel him to great things.

One of the outcomes of his newfound contrition and the stature it somehow brought with it was an increased antagonism and alienation of not just his king but many of his countrymen as well.  Nonetheless many others flocked to him, his story becoming in many minds, perhaps not least his own, one of truth against autocracy.  Towards the end he had become a kind of living legend, a walking cypher for everything he’d come to represent.  Defined by devotion, his story’s conclusion beckoned all the more inevitably as he pursued what many saw as his calling – to defend the Church against oppression from on high.  That this championship was a die that he himself had partly cast was an irony lost to the crowd.

I spent a good amount of time looking at his life in the course of research for my book about the Pilgrims’ Way, that classic route along our southern hills.  His – and Henry’s – stories are central to the history of that particular path of course; Becket’s shrine a magnet for international pilgrims as his cult grew.  But many followed it too in keenness to trace, perhaps even emulate, the penitential steps of their scandalised monarch who made his way, though his route is uncertain, to his former friend’s resting place.

If I’m honest, I’m still sometimes surprised as to why the history of these two men held such immediate traction over me as soon as I began to read about it.  It was more than simply background reading about the history of this given pilgrimage – even if walking it remained the main event.  Was it because Becket’s conflict and conversion to a greater faith seemed to dovetail into questions that felt more pertinent than ever for me; my relationship to the Christian Church, how I might find a deeper sense of belonging within it, how I might find a deeper dimension of faith despite what you might call a former degree of circumspection regarding the merits of formal religion?

All of this certainly resonated and looking at his story became a means to help myself answer more personal questions.  But Henry too you had to feel for – how it all went wrong, the necessity of his eventual journey to pay penance at Becket’s shrine and how that itself may well have changed things.  His story takes its place among other instructive medieval sagas – one recurring theme of those times; however unlikely it may sound, is the apparent wrath visited on those plundering or otherwise disrespecting Holy Ground – just look at King John, or Eustace, or Henry’s own eldest son.

The story fascinates still in its reflection of piety and power – what can happen when either or both threaten to become all consuming.  Henry was a man who liked to get his way.  Becket sometimes appeared to pride himself on rising above – or against – his monarch’s will.  But within it all are other articles of faith; other questions, dimensions and tensions.  Were either men driven by pride?  Was there a kind of glory cloaked in self-deprecation?  Or a humility in striving to be true to duty?  Was Henry’s penance sincere?  We may never know, which is partly what makes the story so iconic; the light it throws on mortal men, the value of searching our hearts.

In some respects, Henry’s and Becket’s stories played out as prolonged tragedies; the hubris amid the reverence, the wrestling of different manifestations of might.  And yet the two men still impress by respective determination if not always necessarily their virtues.  What perhaps is more important for anybody wishing to follow in a literal sense in Henry’s footsteps by walking the ‘Way is that – whether through shock, veneration or the veritable cash cow of pilgrimage infrastructure in the Middle Ages – many pilgrims chose to walk this way and doing so today is act of sympathetic magic with forebears perhaps not quite as distant as we think.

Perhaps, amid the distant echo of former dramas, the instruction given by a king laid low by what all told was still the power of a spiritual intensity, of Becket’s very real courage as he could see all the more clearly just where his convictions were leading, the answers for us all still lie in wait.  Perhaps we can be closer to the ones who’ve gone before not by contrition or stumbling on our knees or keeping something going for the sake of it.  That is not to say some things do not have an inherent worth or that we cannot find, when all the flotsam’s stripped away, a kind of solid bedrock of belief.  But the things we need can still feel more immediate; to step out in the early April sun, to meet the track, to find a little joy in each new leaf.  We may find then that kings and prelates take their place amongst a rich panoply, where every pilgrim walks at one another’s side, where stories settle like the mulch and we find that with nothing but a bag and staff and sense of shared endeavour we are richer than we ever dared believe.

The Old Road and a New Path

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So after many months going through the process of approaching publishers, I have decided to launch a crowdfunder for the book I wrote about here earlier this year.  I intend to launch the campaign early next year and will be providing more updates closer to the time.

The new book was always partly intended as a means to break out of an apparent cast set by my previous writing, not least ‘Nine Miles’; my account of the British roads protest movement of the ‘nineties.  That does not negate the value of those times but as anyone who has read the book will know, those protests took their toll on many and for my part I have carried those scars a long time.  However much I hold true to what happened all those years ago, however much I believe in the power of protest, however much I believe that the spirit of those times can inform anyone acting on behalf of the environment and society at every level, it was always difficult, in some respects for me, to continue to – in any explicit or inadvertent way – advocate a particular means of action I am no longer in a position to engage with myself.  I can’t expect or encourage anyone to do something I am not able to myself and so some kind of change of tac has been in order for some time.

The new book is a product of that desire for change and that of several years of writing and research.  We all know the seriousness of the times we are in regarding the climate.  For my part, in so far as I have the space and capacity to do so, I have chosen to put my shoulder to the wheel of civic engagement: protest is nothing without the role of civic society.  The latter to my mind offers the best way ahead as we move forward to collectively tackle the crisis.  Protest and civil disobedience can certainly serve to up the anti and help stir us out of our slumber.  It is understandable that so many people may choose to engage in them.  But equally the message has got through to every level of society by now about the immediacy of the climate crisis.   We do not need, and it may well be counter-productive, to seek to set the way ahead by constant disruption, however understandable the wish to continue to do so may be.  And to my mind, defacing irreplaceable art really does not serve the cause.  At times like these, communication and clarity counts for a lot.  We should be realistic about that which we face just as a better sense of direction is always helpful.  But ultimately the need for mutual survival should inform us all.

Given the pace of change needed we need good catalysts.  For my part, to some extent, I always felt that that with Nine Miles I was preaching to the choir.  The new book is an attempt to help broaden the message and not continue to be defined solely by those things I took part in a long time ago.  I believe there is still time to turn this ship around but only if we can act with sufficient alacrity and pace.  Efforts like that of ‘Zero Hour’ – the cross-party campaign behind the Climate and Ecology Bill – hold great potential.  The campaign is one we can all easily play a part in, whether that part is sharing a link, setting up a local group or actively lobbying your MP.

Such are my thoughts in these times.  But – as figures like Greta Thunberg and others are quick to point out – it is not, and never has been, for one person alone to help carry these things forward.  We can all play our part, bolstered by the best elements of our collective history.  There may be a long way to go but, as I hope my new book – which after all recounts a tale of pilgrimage – can help show, we can meet those miles with pace and will and some kind of sure determination.  It falls to us – to all of us – to now do what we can, without a sense of any guarantee but bolstered by the moral need to do our best.  When all is told it’s always been that way, only now we can all see it all the clearer.

Thoughts for the Coming Winter

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It sometimes seems it’s all that we can do to keep on going.  That fateful Thursday several weeks ago news poured down like the actual rain.  Quite apart from the sad passing away of the Queen, there were many other things that became apparent on that momentous day.  You can say a lot of things about our new government and its reaction to our pressing social and environmental crises.  Whatever our response, whatever the need to challenge proposals, we can only hope that, economically, we’ll see increasing sense or a least a hastening of the day till we get a government worthy of the name. 

As for the energy crisis, some kind of corrective has been on the cards for years, which makes it no less galling how relatively unprepared we are for it by the unambitious scale of action this last decade or two.  But it doesn’t seem a completely irrational hope that we can still emerge somehow stronger or in a sense a little more honest out of all of this; living more within our means while rising to the challenge to source our needs with greater concern for the climate.  As we know, if any of this is in any way medicinal, right now it doesn’t feel like a particularly palatable brew.  But there may be some consolation knowing that our trials are not in vain.

With all that said, it’s worth considering at times like these that we always have options.  While not everything may be as we like, we can still take steps to attend to our psychology.  We should do what we can to not let ourselves be dragged down by the sometimes obviously quite sobering prospects that appear to face us this coming winter; recently at least, any rational analysis of the news has threatened to become quite overwhelming.  Perhaps the best thing we can remember is that, despite the habits we may have regarding news and media, saturating ourselves with updates and bulletins and articles remains just that – a choice.  If that sounds indulgent or callous or reckless, consider the words of Howard C. Cutler in his writings based on conversations with the Dalai Lama on the practical ramifications of a positive state of mind; “it is unhappy people who tend to be the most self-focused and are often socially withdrawn, brooding, and even antagonistic.  Happy people, in contrast, are generally found to be more sociable, flexible, and creative and are able to tolerate life’s daily frustrations more easily.”  Crucially for any crisis, experiments show that those in a better state of mind are more likely to help out others in need. 

And therein lies another choice – developing a practical response.  That means we can focus on what we can do – not paralyse ourselves with concern or despair over those things that may be beyond our control.  A calmer mind is better placed to look at given options, to be inventive in any given circumstance, look for the ladder at the end of any allegorical alleys.  It can give us the strength to continue, drive for change and better circumstances, to be more kindly disposed to those all around us, bolster our capacity for patience and compassion.

Is it too much or too fanciful to believe there is a counterforce to all our woes, some spirit or will out in the ether or within each one of us that seeks and can serve to ameliorate all this?  A force that wishes us to continue, a will to carry on? Is it too lofty a notion to attempt to meet any hardship with grace, to bolster ourselves with silver linings, the things we still can be grateful about?  None of this is intended as a call for happy-clappy, Maoist sunshine state mentalities that justify sticking our heads in the sand.  But we can seek to respond to these times as effectively as we are able, even if that just means keeping our heads above water.  Anything that helps us get through each day, overcome the difficulties we can, helps give us the wind in our sails even in apparent adversity, is not as abstract or denialist as it may sound.

We know all too well what we’re faced with this winter.  Recent announcements regarding general help with our energy bills head off the worst of what we might immediately have faced.  But we shouldn’t pretend that it’s going to necessarily be easy.  It may offer some relief to reflect that if we can hold fast this coming winter, we may be in a much better place come the Spring.  Weaning ourselves off Russian energy was long overdue in any case and there should be no doubt that current events are certainly catalytic for greater energy security – it’s a question of how we respond, how we make the most of this as yet largely unnavigated opportunity, whether we shoot ourselves in the foot or look at it as a chance for benevolent change; encourage the take up of renewables with ever greater alacrity and, yes, first and foremost insulate our homes.  For all the need for better policy on high there are things that most of us can still do; if downsizing and cohabiting seem tall orders we can still seek every avenue for greater efficiency, make a shift to green power wherever we can, lobby for government grants – such steps at least would represent some progress despite the storm of the crisis we face.

While not negating what many may be going through or the blistering injustice regarding the attitudes of some of the cabal apparently running the show, the old things still count; fortitude and bloody mindedness, helping out our neighbours, keeping heart.  We live in changing times; some things must be laid to rest before we can bring in the new.  The kind of transition we face will be determined by our capacity to strive for every avenue of renewal, to think creatively, to seek to bare the world up as our culture transforms; with force of will, resolve and single-mindedness.  Perhaps it’s best to concentrate on that which lies immediately before us – to bolster and harbour and strive to endure in the knowledge that a brighter day may somehow lie in wait if we can just bring it to bare.