growing with the Oak trees
stars collide
On the eleventh of July in a sleepy hamlet in mid-West England the sun intensifies, the ground bakes, the leaves wither and a man and his daughter sit around a cluttered table in a country kitchen.
‘Can you bring me my reading glasses?’
Dad begins to paint the ever miraculous runner-beans in my parents wild garden.
‘They’re in a black case. No not that black case, that’s my driving glasses, put that one back where you found it’.
The reading glasses stay temporarily hidden. camouflaged against an array of water bottles, Dad’s medication, remnants from breakfast and forgotten cups of tea, half full and cold. This level of clutter would usually send me into a tidying frenzy but I’m getting better at ‘letting it be’. I sit here and write.
It’s a full moon.
I realised with a start yesterday afternoon as I sat in the sweltering garden eating biscuits with my Dad that I hadn’t seen the moon for days. I’m 11,000 miles away from my coastal home in Australia where hearthfires are being stoked and my loved ones are wrapping themselves in jumpers and scarfs whilst I break a sweat walking to the fridge.
I haven’t seen the moon because in English summer the sun rises at 4am and sets around 11pm, hours after I’ve retired to my bed.
I told Dad I was missing the moon. He looked at me quizzically.
‘Well, that’s easily fixed.’ He said, ever practical.
‘Just lie out here at midnight! The moon is opposite the sun. Of course you’re not going to see it in the daytime’.
I thought about setting an alarm for midnight and then decided against it, but I woke up anyway. My Dad - sleeping downstairs as he recovers from the first round of chemotherapy is calling. I adjust his sheets and take off the heavy duvet. I walke outside and the luminescent moon, La Luna, Soma, Chandra greets me.
‘You’ve missed me’, she seems to whisper into the night.
‘Here I am!’
When I first moved from Sydney to the remote far South Coast one of the first things that changed was my relationship to the moon and in quick succession, the relationship to my own menstrual cycle. For the first time in my life I started to track how I felt at the beginning, middle and end of every 28 (ish) day rotation. I started to get curious about when I was bleeding and what the moon was doing. I started to notice the feeling of ovulation. Sometimes my cycle would sync with the moon, I would bleed when the moon was dark and ovulate when the moon was full and rejoice in this harmonic pattern. Other times my cycle would jump and stretch or contract and again, I’d rejoice.
I started to excavate the gifts of creativity and intuition that were more readily available to me when I was bleeding and celebrate the almost explosive energy that propelled me forward mid cycle. I started to realise that when the progesterone and estrogen dropped, I was less tolerant, less social and less interested in intimacy. Instead of resisting what I always assumed was some kind of decline, I accepted and made peace with these less palatable parts too.
All of this awareness came from physically looking at the moon. Every day, every night, as often as I could I’d make a point of standing, neck craning towards the luminous glow. The more I noticed her, the more she noticed me. She’d wink at me from above the studio in the early mornings. She’d rise, resplendent from a silky ocean and my jaw would drop. Every time I drove to and from teaching; past the boardwalk and the marina, she’d be there in all of her phases. Ever changing, yet ever present.
Last night as I crept out to be with her I whispered thank you to my Dad for waking me. I whispered thank you to the moon for reminding me who I am.
I’ve been here at my parents house, my birth house for two weeks now and England is in the grips of a heatwave.
Even the trees look thirsty. The self-proclaimed ‘Emerald Isle’ is turning brown.
To paraphrase the kids, the heat in the UK hits different. It somehow feels much hotter and more oppressive than a summer in Batemans Bay. Probably because I cant just jump in the ocean and then sit in a cool cave with my lover.
I’m a long way away from any ocean clean enough to swim in.
The river Wye winds through the Herefordshire valley but my parents tell me they don’t swim at the nearby Bredwardine Bridge anymore because of pollution from neighbouring farms. I spent many happy weekends here as a child splashing around, skimming stones and watching people braver than me jump from the road into the rapid current.
It makes me sad to think about the destruction of the waters. So I stay at home and pour a watering can over myself.
After lunch Dad and I sit in the garden in the diminishing shade. There is a lot of silence. I’m thinking of things to say, but there’s also part of me, the wiser part, that is happy to simply sit in the garden with my Dad and watch the butterflies.
Eventually I ask him about dark matter and the universe that is expanding at a much slower rate than we’d expect.
He tells me I could read Richard Dawkins or look it up on YouTube but I tell him, no, I want to hear it from you. Even though I’ve heard him speak about cosmology many times. I can never hear it enough.
He gives me a short history of the universe. He describes the violent forming of the Earth from Iron, Carbon, Nirtgoen, Gold crashing together and creating and bigger and bigger gravitational pull.
‘Have you heard of the periodic table?’ He stops to ask.
‘Yes of course, I say. We studied it in Chemistry.’
I dont remind him that I got a U in my GSCE Chemistry because I decorated the exam paper with Slipknot lyrics instead of answering the questions.
The teachers contacted my parents when they found the paper, concerned about what they saw as disturbing words.
‘Oh that’s just the strange music she’s listening to at the moment. It’s all over her walls too. It’s just a phase’
They were right. A few months later I stopped hiding from the sun, let the black hair dye wash out and replaced the oversized Marilyn Manson hoodies with low slung jeans and halter tops. ‘I’m too tanned to embrace the gothic life anyway’ I said, but the real reason was my boyfriend who I did it all for had dumped me for one of my best friends.
All of this drama was far more enticing somehow than the periodic table which contains the building blocks of life.
I rebelled against Science at school. There were too many ‘facts’. I wasn’t interested in facts. I didn’t care if something was proven. I was interested in creating worlds, not defining them.
Back in the garden Dad tells me about the gravitational pull that increased until these elements bonded together, forming this very earth I’m curled up on. He tells me about self separating cells and the asteroid belt. We talk about Elon Musk’s plans to colonise Mars and the fact that our Sun is expanding, so inevitably, in a billion years or so Earth will be wiped out.
I think about countless planets like earth, spread out around the galaxy. I think about them forming, expanding, hosting life, existing for a while, self destructing, exploding and becoming space dust once more. The life death life cycle at play again.
In the heat of the late afternoon I go walking for inspiration. As I pass under the old railway bridge, now more ivy than brick I instinctively look to the right. A faint path carves its way up a small hill. I have a memory of being here as a child, when this few miles square was my entire world and I could only explore independently what I could reach by foot. Small feet at that.
I follow the path into a shady glen, surrounded by Hazel and Elm and the giant oak. I have a special affinity for the oak tree. gnarled and ancient. When I was born my Dad found a tiny oak sapling in the field at the back of the garden.
Every now and then he’d remind me, here’s your oak tree. The same age as you!
As I grew from toddler to pensive child, from child to surly teenager, from teenager to erratic adult the oak tree grew with me.
Around the same time I left the UK my Dad cut the tree down to make space for my brothers bike jumps. The tree grew back. Dad coppiced the tree to support new growth and now she grows in different ways. She’s not like the other oak trees. Her branches shoot in all directions and are varied and non-linear. Maybe this is what happened when I left for Thailand. I grew in new ways, unexpected ways, different ways. I started to grow new branches and travel less worn paths. I let go of my childhood and stepped into me.
At the top of the railway bridge I sit on an exposed Hazel root and take my shoes off. Fat flies circle in the thick air. The weeds shrivel into the hard earth.
How many times did I sit up here as a child? Enclosed in my own world. Happy in the company of trees and wood pigeons and the occasional hedgehog. Life is so much simpler in the forest.
As I walk back dreaming of the glass of water I’ll gulp down in the cool house I think about the plants. They cant just grab a drink of water when they want. They cant seek shade. They are where they are, for better or worse.
Tomorrow I’ll begin the dauntingly long journey back home. To the arms of my husband, my studio, my friends, my life. Two trains, three aeroplanes and a car ride and I’m there. A world away, yet always so close. Just behind the curtain.
~
thank you for reading. It means so much to me.
I’d love to see you at my yoga studio in Batemans Bay, or at one of my trainings in Canberra, Sydney or Bali.
With love, Clare
