Draining the bog

Wind a bit on the wild side last night, and a dramatic thunderstorm to stir the spirit. Our new cabin, aka 'The Great Hall', is so well-insulated we had to open the windows to hear the gale roaring in the trees. After 12 years of living in a caravan we haven't got used to being safe inside, separated from the elements.

I spent last weekend digging ditches to the south of the cabin in the hope of draining the great squodgy sog of wetness around it, which we've been steadily plodging into a mudbath since the cabin was habitable in December. There's nothing quite so satisfying as digging up from the stream, turf by turf, getting muddier and muddier, and eventually taking out the final divot.

One last heave of the spade and the backed-up water gushed through, torrenting down into the stream and away. The ditches ran with water for days, and now after the downpours of last night, they're running again. It's gratifying to see, and I await spring with interest, hoping that as the grass grows in, the ground might turn out to be a bit less marshy than before.

When I lead creative workshops, one of the main metaphors that I use is the idea (which I first encountered from Julia Cameron) that our creativity is like water. Inside each of us we have the potential for a vast reservoir from which art can flow, and we should feed that reservoir at least weekly and preferably more often, with good things - treats, sensuous experiences, play, fun, excitement and beauty. The creative process happens when this water flows from the reservoir down our stream of consciousness. But this stream can easily get blocked up with detritus, with doubts and fear, with boredom and overwork, with demands and failure to be understood. To make creativity feel easier we need to work to keep the stream of consciousness free-flowing. Scribbling long-hand in a notebook daily is my preferred method. Perhaps there are others that also work - meditations of other kinds or physical labour where the mind can run free.

Digging the ditches, I pondered the metaphor. There was something happening, as I dug, that was connected to my own creative process. The ditches form a herringbone of short canals, an extension to the existing stream. This wasn't unblocking the main channel, but it was about seeing another area where I was bogged down, and freeing it up. It required pretty serious structural change. It caused a short-term flooding torrent. And it has created an as yet unknown potential.

It's no coincidence, surely, that Top Left Corner, the community arts company I helped to set up last year, is winding up. I've been feeling overwhelmed (bogged down) for months, by the work that the company required. And now, the company will end (structural change), there is a flood of final activity and who knows what the future will bring. Meanwhile, creatively, I'm feeling more energy than I've felt for ages - a sense of new creative areas opening up, a huge sense of relief.

There are risks, of course. The problem with the drains that I've dug is that they cut through a highly organic, peaty soil. We are not supposed to drain peatland as it stores carbon when wet and when it dries out the fibres in the peat can decompose, releasing the carbon they contain into the atmosphere with all the attendant climate change risks that means. Plus we don't like making interventions like this on the croft, which we are trying to manage in as light-touch a manner as we can, to help woodland regeneration and ecological restoration. Was this too heavy-handed an intervention? Will planting some trees make up for the damage? How do we tell?

Likewise what may I have lost by the death of Top Left Corner? What's the price of freedom? Quite aside from the financial risk to myself of being once again completely freelance, what will the knock-on impacts be on the cultural climate in these parts?

Is there more stormy weather in the forecast?

All fired up

Over the past year or so I have interviewed lots of artists and craft makers (mostly but not all from Assynt) and written profiles of them. I love getting the chance to visit their work place (whether that's a studio, shed or living room), hear their life story and find out about their creative process. Meeting someone who makes their livelihood from creativity is always an inspiration. In return the artist gets some publicity, a bit of exposure, a chance to explain what's behind their work, and often this leads to more sales of their work. The magazines, ezines or papers who publish the pieces I write about these encounters get some reader-friendly copy about an interesting person, usually with great visual content, and so they're happy too. Readers get inspiration and a behind-the-scenes view of an artist at work. Everybody wins. It's an ideal day's work.

One of my recent profiles was of Fergus Stewart, a potter based in Assynt who makes beautiful and functional ceramic mugs, teapots, drinking cups, vases, crock pots, bird feeders, all sorts. He's also a passionate advocate for how the arts can play an important role in rural economies. He is a community-minded man as well as a highly talented artist and it has been a pleasure to win a commission to write about him in Ceramic Review, the prestigious and beautifully designed ceramics magazine. An earlier, shorter piece was published on Northings, the ezine for Hi-arts.

What most excited me about finding out about Fergus' work was his process of firing pots. The clay bit is kind of interesting, particularly the skill involved in creating elegant forms with such a maleable substance, and I am sure that glazes could fascinate me if I found out more. But the kiln is a total thrill. It is magic. It is a dragon. Fergus becomes a wizard when he fires his pots, feeding the belly of the beast with fuel for its blaze, creating not just a hot box with pots inside, but a fluid cascade of fire, like a recreation of the heart of the earth. Within the kiln, white ghostly shapes of clay are transformed to glittering stone. It is pure creation.

I ask most artists I interview how their environment influences their work. As a nature poet, I think of my natural environment as the primary source of inspiration. Fergus is fascinating on this topic. For example, he has started making bird-feeders because of wanting to give something back to the natural world, and he designs them to offer not only food but protection from predators and competitors, with each feeder designed for specific sizes of birds. He thinks ecologically. He sources wood for his kiln from sustainable sources and it matters to him that burning with wood means that he is using a renewable fuel. This kind of thinking really gets me excited. There is so much more to learn and say about how the arts and the environmental movement can complement each other and work together.

I have lots of Fergus' pots at home - a teapot, drinking cups that are so elegantly shaped to fit the hand you can't believe it until you've tried them, and several bowls. I eat breakfast, soup at lunchtime and salads for dinner, and drink tea and wine out of vessels made by a real person, close to home. It's so satisfying to know that the money I spent is supporting someone nearby to be creative. Fergus teaches too, and I've bought pots made by his students, glowing with pleasure to be supporting the handing on of an ancient craft. This is, I believe, genuinely sustainable consumption.

Erratics

Over the past couple of years I have been doing a project called 'Assynt: Fire, Ice and Stone'. It began thanks to a Scottish Arts Council writer's bursary, which enabled me to get off the environmental campaign trail, stay at home in Assynt and devote myself to writing. The general plan was to walk to all the many piles of stones in the area that are remnants of buildings or signs of human occupation, and then write about them, while thinking about the big elemental forces (particularly fire and ice) that have shaped the landscape and the lives of people who have lived here for millennia.

There are also stones that are nothing to do with human activity, but still tell intriguing stories, particularly the boulders that were picked up by glaciers during the last ice age and dropped again, often in incongruous places. There are bits of Canisp on our croft, for example, about 10 miles from where they 'belong'. These enigmatic stones are called Erratics and I have a very, very short story of this title in the new edition of From Glasgow to Saturn - scroll down to the bottom of the page, mine is the last and least story on the fiction page. I'll be interested in any feedback.

Losing focus

I have just discovered that I am an ENTP personality-type, according to the Myers-Briggs system of psychological character analysis. This means I am an Extrovert-iNtuitive-Thinking-Perceiving kind of person. Apparantly this means that I am 'quick, ingenious, good at many things....' and 'apt to turn to one new interest after another.' Spot on.

This is, I realise the diagnosis of why I have faltered when it comes to writing this blog. What's it about? What's the focus? I am interested in so many things - which of them should this blog be about?

I spent the weekend with a bunch of writers, one of whom blogs a lot, and she encouraged me to stop worrying about what the focus is, and just write what makes me buzz. So perhaps cybercrofter will broaden out a bit and, hopefully, the result will be that I'll post a bit more frequently in future.

Hibernation

It's that time of year. Long, long nights, and during the day the sun is low over the horizon. Even the hazels have given up any attempt to photosynthesise. It's time to stop, take stock, rest.

letting light in

under the lichen-garlanded hazel

there is space to lie back and look up

through the lattice of buds and branches

waiting their long winter wait

pausing before they erupt into catkins

taking time out letting light in

being between ending and beginning

Pigs

One of the neighbouring crofters keeps pigs. They are wild boar crossed with something more domestic and are free to roam a huge area of regenerating woodland, where they rootle around, turning over the ground, creating good seed beds for new trees. I like pigs. I like meeting them in the woods. I enjoy watching them down at the shore of the loch, munching on seaweed. Their sounds make me laugh.

A couple of days ago we heard that the pigs had broken through their fence and were loose. They're not quite so funny when they stick their snouts and trotters where they're not welcome: a pig can make its presence felt pretty quickly in a garden as those stubby noses are the closest animal equivalent there is to a plough. So we've been keeping our eyes peeled.

A couple of days ago, one big sow was spotted on the road, leaning on her snout, dazed and docile. We wondered if she was ill, but the verdict was that she was just tripping on mushrooms. It's that time of year; fly agarics are popping up all over the place.

The next day we were sitting eating at the picnic table when we heard that tell-tale snuffly grunt-grunt-grunt. The big sow and a piglet were heading towards us along the path, ears flapping, tails twirling, eyes twinkling. They had no doubt smelled lunch. We managed to stop her in her tracks, persuade her to turn round and return down the path. I sprinted ahead and opened the gate for her and she obligingly trotted through, joining two more piglets and another sow on the road. Presumably she promptly told them all about the munchies to be had on our croft. We left them where they were to go and phone their owners and finish our lunch. By the time we returned they had scarpered.

They showed themselves to the sound of a bucket of pigfood, and no, they didn't look at all sheepish. They were at the top of the croft, which has now been well and truly ploughed. It will be interesting to see if the tree regeneration benefits from their intervention. We discovered later where else on the croft the sow had been before she came for lunch: a lovely old aspen grove, which used to have a particularly beautiful understory of mosses and herbs, looks like someone has been in there with a rotovator. We have returfed where we could and it will recover in time. I am thankful they didn't make it to either of my garden plots, neither of which have pig-proof fences, at least not when it comes to pigs with determination, which these definitely have. (Something else with big feet has been in one patch, but it wasn't a pig).

We've often pondered whether we should deliberately bring some pigs onto the croft, to see if they could make some inroad into the huge areas of bracken that limit tree regeneration. They didn't touch that area in their brief visit, and it is interesting to observe how little impact they have made on the bracken on their home croft. As long as there is vegetation to plough into within the shelter of woods, they seem to prefer that to digging on open ground, and they seem to prefer turf to bracken. I would too, if I were a pig. Digging bracken must be hard on the snout. This all makes me understand that if we want pigs to tackle the bracken zone, they would need to be fenced in. Some other time, maybe.

The pigs have returned home and the hole in the fence is mended. For now.

Trimming trees

In 2001 we shifted our old caravan into its current position and since then it has become completely engulfed by trees. A hazel has grown up right in front of the big window and birches overhang it on all sides. It is marvellously sheltered from all winds but at this time of year the trees are weighed down with foliage and after heavy rain branches drape wetly across paths. With the arrival of visitors imminent, yesterday, we realised that they might not appreciate a soaking every time they stepped out of the door, so we asked politely if the trees would mind shedding a bit of greenery, then set about trimming them with secateurs and loppers. It grieves me to cut living vegetation from trees; dead branches or even dormant wood in winter is far easier to prune.

Around the croft spaces are appearing under trees that have now grown high enough to form a canopy above head height. At first regenerating birches, willows and hazels form thickets of leafy twigs that occupy all the space they can, presumably to try to shade out all competition, but once they achieve sufficient height the birches at least seem to give up on lower branches, letting them go leafless and then be blown off in storms, so chambers of unoccupied space begin to appear and it becomes possible to walk among the young trees. This space seems to be offered by the trees to undergrowth and fungi and it feels welcoming to animals like us. I wonder if something similar is happening beneath the ground. Has a thicket of roots deepened, and are underground spaces opening out, similarly inviting to subterranean life?