Launde Abbey
I have spent my first week at Launde Abbey, Leicestershire, learning the difference between quiet and silence. Silence is an absence; quiet is a presence. Here, the quiet is a living thing, a restorative peace that the community here dedicates to being present with God.
I have attended prayers in the beautiful chapel with Christian people, and despite my deep ambivalence toward organised religion, I cannot deny the divinity here. It is as present in the antics of the squirrels as it is in the prayers for evening, woven into the soul of the place.
The Fellowship of Harmony
This sabbatical is only possible because I have the support of the Coral Foundation. As a Fellow, I am here to have the necessary space to write but I am also here to inhabit the intersection of climate, creativity, and citizenship and to explore it in relation to the work we do at East Marsh United.
In the East Marsh, we inhabit a landscape of concrete and nature deficit. It can be hard to find a connection to the natural world where there is just 2% canopy cover and most people do not have the skills, the energy or the time to cultivate their own back gardens. But here, in a valley in Leicestershire the environment does the work for you. It brings you into immediate and effortless harmony.
Earlier today, I sat in the woods and recorded the birdsong: Robin, Blue Tit, Chaffinch, Jackdaw, Great Tit, Wren, Greenfinch, and Wood Pigeon, all within just a few minutes. I then watched two squirrels quarrel in the heights of a giant redwood before going their separate ways.
There is a profound lesson here for our work in Grimsby. You cannot separate the health of a citizen from the health of their habitat. The snowdrops and aconites are pushing through now, not because they’ve been managed, but because they are held by a healthy soil.
The Art of Shedding
The internal work this week has been as wearying as the weather. My unconscious has been on overdrive, delivering traumatic dreams that feel like the backdrop to the long work of the past decade. I have always had nightmares and because I am alone here, they are harder to deal with. But they are useful, they are processing difficult things and offering symbolic and archetypal ways to understand events that have happened. This is a necessary part of the creative process, to confront the difficult things and present them in a way that has meaning beyond their difficulty.
I have also shed 7,000 words this week. These were words I wrote in September when I began to write the book.
In September I was pouring out a great deal of rage and grief. It was an essential purge, but it wasn’t the story. By condensing down to the essence of what that writing was saying, I’ve found the heart of the story and the right structure to take it forward. I am finding a way to tell the story of a powerful us, a collective that has grown in the crucible of action, building as we go, living forwards, learning backwards. I am asking questions about resilience and courage and how to be fleet of foot in the eye of a storm.
Solitude not Loneliness
I am solitary, but I am not lonely. I have shut out the noise of news and social media and stepped out of my ordinary daily reality into what I feel is a third space, a mundus imaginalis where reality has shifted and is different, just for a while. I am holding Billy and all my dear ones in my heart but I am not indulging in missing them; that would not be a good use of time and I will be back home before we know it and the third space will dissolve. I have to make the most of it while I am here and able to do so.
I find this writing much harder than fiction. It requires a different kind of organisation and structure. I’ve been writing in chunks for two years but now the scaffolding and cohesion is moving into place. I can see it and feel it taking shape, emerging, like the sheep in the fog outside my window. It is being in this place and having this time that is allowing the book to come through.
Gratitude
I am grateful that I have this luxury, privilege and opportunity. It feels deeply precious.
Josie Moon 