Terri Windling's Blog, page 221

Food Revolutionaries

Saturday was Food Revolution Day (sponsored by the Jamie Oliver Foundation), with people all over England joining together to celebrate the beginning of the growing season and to promote locally-grown foods, and food education. The folks at Chagfood, our local Community Market Garden, participated by hosting an Open Day, so we trundled along to visit the newly planted fields, with Howard's mum, brother, and nephew in tow....

I've written about Chagfood in a previous post -- and about Samson, a Welsh-cob/Dartmoor-pony cross, who helps to plough the fields and haul boxes of produce into the village:

Ed Hamer with Samson

Samson ploughing, with Ed Hamer & Chinnie Kingsbury

Food is important in our household...and I say that as someone who spent my youth basically living on popcorn and coffee, god help me. But art-making requires mental clarity, steady reserves of energy, and the physical strength for long periods of concentrated focus...all of which become a good deal harder to maintain once the blush of youth has passed (especially for those of us with medical problems to complicate the matter). As we climb into our 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, all that age-old, boringly practical advice takes on fresh relevance: we actually do need good food, good sleep, and good exercise to keep those interior motors humming. When we ignore these things, and run ourselves down, art-making suffers. Or slows down. Or stops.

Sometimes when young people ask me for advice about embarking on careers in art professions, they're surprised when I put "take care of your health" (i.e., don't live on popcorn and coffee) at the top of the list. But creative work takes stamina. Concentration takes stamina. And the natural stamina of youth, alas, simply doesn't last forever. If we're in the arts for the long haul (and we are, aren't we?), then we need to do all we can to make sure these good bodies we inhabit will last a long while and serve us well. Good food. Good sleep. Good exercise. There are no shortcuts.

And if the food is local, organic, and delivered by a horse named Sampson, so much the better....

Howard, and me, with Samson

Howard and his mum

Photo credits: The pictures of Samson with Ed & Chinnie, and the lucious pictures of vegetables, come from the Chagfood blog; the photo of me & Samson was taken by Howard; the others were snapped by me on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, here in the hills of Devon.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Above: the great June Tabor performs a gorgeous version of The Joy Division's "Life With Tear Us Apart," along with her frequent collaborators, The Oyster Band. June is one of the finest British folksingers of all time, and I could listen to her smokey voice forever.

Below, June performs "Strange Affair" (by the brilliant Richard Thompson), accompanied by guitar master Martin Simpson. Simple and stunning.

From the more traditional end of June's repertoire, I also recommend her stirring rendition of the Border Ballad "Hughie Graeme." Alas, I can't embed this 2003 video, but you'll find it here.

The power of story

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns discusses the art and the power of storytelling in the video above. The team that made the video discusses the subject further in an interview in The Atlantic.

Stories and wildflowers

"I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom." 
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous."  - Bill Moyers

When I pierce the skin of a Devon morning, here's the equation I find within:
Bluebells + stitchwort + campion + sunshine + faithful canine companion = magic.

And that's my story today.

On taking creative risks

"I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow." - Julia Cameron

 "The most important thing is that you love what you are doing, and the second that you are not afraid of where your next idea will lead." - Charles Eames

 "It's not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating they have to be about change." - Miles Davis

 "In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?"  - Igor Stravinsky

Love of the land. Love of home, family, and friends. Love of life and art itself.

A quiet moment for remembering

The song above, Kate Rusby's "Underneath the Stars," goes out to the Kemp/Leaman family, to Hussam Elsharif...and to any of you who have also lost a dear one recently.

May their souls go gently.

Illustration by the Danish artist Kay Nielsen (1886-1957).

Mothers and mermaids...

Above: a thoroughly magical little video for Katherine Langrish's thoroughly magical mermaid novel, Foresaken. Kath says:

"The idea for Forsaken came from the classic poem 'The Forsaken Merman' by the late Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, which in turn is based on an old Scandinavian ballad. It tells the story of a merman who married a human woman, Margaret. They live together happily under the sea and she has children by him - till one day she hears church bells ringing and feels a sudden longing to go and pray in the 'little white church'. The merman agrees to part with her for a short while. But once on land she never returns to the sea, leaving her husband and children to grief for her. In Arnold's poem the merman says:

Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white, sleeping town;
At the church on the hill-side—
And then come back down.
Singing: "There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.

"The old belief about mermaids was that they had no souls. In order to preserve her immortal soul, Margaret is ready to desert her husband and children. Was she right to follow her beliefs? Or wrong to cause her loved ones so much pain?

"In the original legend, the merman clambers into the churchyard to try and find his wife, but when he looks into the church, 'all the stone images turned their backs on him'. When I read this, a shiver ran down my spine and I knew I had to tell the story again - but this time, I wondered what would have happened if, instead of the merman, one of Margaret's own mer-children went to find her?"

The video was shot on location around the Farne Island. The voice-over is by Polly Carey, and the music was composed and performed by Richard Hughes of We Are Goose.

Hillside enchantment...

"It is quite possible to leave your home for a walk in the early morning air and return a different person – beguiled, enchanted."  - Mary Ellen Chase

"This is our goal as writers, I think: to help others have this sense of wonder, of seeing things anew, things that catch us off-guard, that break in our small bordered worlds. When this happens everything feels more spacious." - Anne Lamott

"Instructions for life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."  - Mary Oliver

"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, I will answer you: I am here to live out loud." - Emile Zola

Yes. To all of it. Yes.

A spring morning at Bumblehill

"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning"  - J.B. Priestly

"Earth, ourselves, breathe and awaken, leaves are stirring, all things moving, new day coming, life renewing."  - Pawnee prayer

"The grace to be a beginner is always the best prayer for an artist. The beginner’s humility and openness lead to exploration. Exploration leads to accomplishment. All of it begins at the beginning, with the first small and scary step . . . .

"Wherever you are is always the right place. There is never a need to fix anything, to hitch up the bootstraps of the soul and start at some higher place. Start right where you are."  - Julia Cameron

"Whatever you do or dream you can do – begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Attention is like sunlight and water for a plant. What we pay attention to will grow."  - Thic Nhat Hahn

Pictures above: The cherry tree we planted last year in glorious bloom near Howard's studio (the little green building at the edge of the woods). And a furry black garden sentinel / studio muse.

Tunes for a Monday Morning

Today's tunes come from Matthew and the Atlas, a British alt-folk group from Aldershot, Hampshire. (Many thanks to Jennifer Ambrose for her recomendation earlier this year; I'm now deeply in love with this band.)

Above: "Within the Rose," a magical video featuring paper-cut animation by Neil Coxhill.

Below: A live performance of the beautiful song "Come Out of the Woods."

Want more? Have a listen to "I Followed Fires" and "Fisherman's Wife." A free download of the latter (in exchange for joining their mailing list) is available here.