March

Crows, slow emergence and the why of writing. Spring equinox newsletter

March sunrise over the field

March is the harshest month. The blossoms are out and the woods and hedgerows are coming back to life, but I always find the transition from winter to spring quite brutish, the change from cold and dark to hot and bright and back again, the feeling of being blasted by bitter winds (both literally and by the global news cycle), the tenacious upward push of it all.

The river bursts its banks often. The village now has its own inland sea. For months now the fields around the cottage have been a pallette of grey, brown, rain, mud, repeat, and sometimes my daily walks have been a slog. But I don’t mind the cold. White blossom on bare branches, crows roosting in tall trees. Grey, heavy skies. It suits my mood. The crows follow me around, cawing and circling above the fields and rooftops. Sometimes they follow me into my dreams.

It’s the first blue skies that discombobulate me. The feeling that I should be skipping around outdoors while inside I’m still hunkered down, deep in winter. The winter feels safe, a place I can hide. I’m never quite ready to emerge.

Still. There are blackbirds and sparrows nesting in the garden and the few bulbs I got round to planting in the autumn - tulip, narcissus, crocus, muscari and snake fritillary - are shooting up, eager to meet the light. I went to my second funeral of the year yesterday. So many of us remarked on the beauty of the day, how lucky we all are to see another spring, how none of us ever really know how many we’ve got left. I start thinking about what seeds and vegetables I want to grow this year, unfurling slowly, dreaming into summer.

Creative slowness and the inward road

I like hanging out on Substack. At its best it’s like a bunch of kind, nerdy analogue kids sharing cool stuff with each other and trying their best to survive in a digital world. Sometimes I struggle, though, with the way the platform, like all platforms, is designed around a model that demands consistency, output, fast engagement and visibility. So much creative work happens in the dark. Listening to your own inner drives and cycles is a skill set that is undermined by the pressure to produce rather than create.

My process is slow, like my writing. I’m a slow reader too. I don’t like being rushed. The world moves too fast for me, it always has. Writing is one of the few places where I can go at my own pace and where no one else can tell me what to do. I’m stubborn like that (Taurus moon, perimenopause, undiagnosed neurodivergent and generally tired).

I often feel unsure of myself. Entering midlife I have started to think that this is something I won’t ever ‘overcome’, but that it is rather a part of my wholeness that is worth celebrating. I am conscious that I carry fears/wounding around visibility and using my voice and am on the whole a pretty private person, which is a curious position to inhabit as a writer of poetry and personal essays. I am not a big-deal author and my social media following is very small. At the same time I am 44 now, committed to this path, and lately my practice has been more of a quiet, inward one. Good for growth, not so good for “growth”.

It is a brave and generous thing to share your creative work at all. But recently I have had to reconfigure my practice around being less online. It took me about a year to wean myself off the addictive dopamine cycle of write – share – receive instant feedback that informed my writing practice for several years (back in old Medium days! Does anyone still write there?). This has been rewarding (at times, absolutely delicious) creatively, but almost entirely without external validation. Meanwhile the Notes app has been a fun way to feel part of a community and get a little dopie fix from time to time. I don’t know yet if a lot of what I’ve been working on will ever see the light of day, although I hope that it will. This is a position of deep vulnerability. I think it’s also partly the point.

Through the lens of staying in one place, Josie George writes about the pressure to create something new rather than staying with what is old and familiar:

“We live in a culture — and our creative culture is as much to blame for this as any other — that pushes for constant novelty. It doesn’t want old. It doesn’t want repetition, or to wait, or have to make do with what it already has. It doesn’t want to sink deeper, it wants to move on.”

Maya C. Popa recently published an excellent series on the craft of writing, in which she advocates for slowness and patience as ways to actively improve as a writer:

“I believe in the role that inwardness plays in cultivating beautiful, significant writing that honors the mystery of being human. I think that time is essential for all writers to develop and articulate their own questions, to think clearly and ambitiously, to access and discover the depths of their potential.”

The why of writing

There are many different ‘whys’ to writing. We may write for creative self expression, to grow a following and reach as many readers as possible, for money (ahahaha) or for what the writing might reveal to us about ourselves. We may write to process and better integrate our inner worlds, to be in reciprocal relationship with the world around us, or simply because we love it and can’t live without it.

Perhaps you want to write books, publish in literary magazines, self publish, gift your work to friends and family or be an Instapoet. Perhaps your goal is simply to improve on your own terms and write for your own pleasure. I suspect that for many of us it’s a mixture of these and more. It is natural that we are vibrationally drawn to other writers who share a similar ‘why’ to us, and we can always respect each other’s whys, especially if they’re different to our own. It takes all sorts. My only advice would be to locate your true North and shoot for the moon.

I’m at a cusp moment currently. This feels fragile and tenuous, just as the world switches from winter to the expansive energy of summer. The deep winter work I have been immersed in has been a good reminder that being in process, whether or not that process is visible to others, is a vital and worthwhile part of any creative practice. In a world obessessed with productivity, growth, quantifiable gains, robotic extractivism (as in, actual robots) and profit-driven madness, taking the slow, meandering road and committing to your own creative path is truly an act of wild resistance.

You have heard it said a thousand times before: trust the process. Like JC says in this great piece on pace, “if you’re going to take the work seriously, it’s worth taking the process seriously too.”

Name change

I’m changing the name of my Substack. For reasons I won’t go into here, we have had to give up the back field that we have rented for the past five years, and which I wrote about in the epilogue to The Honey in the Bones. I fear that the farmer will soon come and mow down five years of gentle rewilding, oak saplings, wild flowers, mice and shrews and birds that nest in the scrub and countless insects that have made their homes in the long, unmown grass. I am sad about it, but trying to remember that I can’t control everything.

I could write about the powerlessness of renting in a part of the world where property ownership is the dominant religion, or about the ecologically violent nature of old school farming in Britain. But I don’t want to write another piece about grief and loss (I did enough of that last year, lol). The field was ours for a short time only, like everything, and in that time it gave me so much hope and inspiration. I hope I gave it a chance to breathe, too.

And nature is mightily resilient. The trees and hedgerows and mycelia within the soil will (I hope) remain, we will still have access to the land even though we won’t have any say in how it is managed - which, honestly, we never really did - and our large back garden will still be a messy home for creatures great and small. Every day I am reminded that any safe home is a blessing.

It feels disingenuous to keep the name ‘Dreams from the Field’ now that we are no longer stewards of the field. It was always a bit of an iffy name, based on my relationship with this small plot of land and following from an ancient Wordpress blog I hosted called ‘Tales from the Seed’. So I’ve decided on a new name, which I’ll announce shortly. I hope you’ll stay with me after the change!

For aforementioned reasons, I’ve been showing up here more as a reader than a writer recently. If you’re still here though, thanks so much for sticking around. It is truly a joy and a privilege to be part of a global, creative community of humans who share their art so freely and with such generosity of spirit. Every read, like, comment and subscriber truly keeps me going on the often solitary road of being a creative mum.

Nettle tea

There’s a simple daily ritual I do around this time of year to support the difficult transition from winter to spring. I gather fresh stinging nettles, cleavers, the early leaves of lemonbalm, mint and whatever else is sprouting in my garden, steep them in hot (but not boiling) water and let the plants work their magic. Sometimes I let the nettles steep overnight to make a stronger infusion. A squeeze of lemon lifts the flavour.

Nettles are incredible plants. As well as being physically nourishing, cleansing and tonifying, they gently support our body’s subtle systems, helping us to create strong energetic boundaries and building internal strength. If you have any Northern European ancestors, they would almost certainly have used nettle for food, dye and medicine, as well as in weaving and basketry. Nettle connects us to our past as well as to nature.

There is so much magic available to us.

Happy Spring Equinox!

Love Caroline x