How to Catch a Mole: Wisdom from a Life Lived in Nature

by Marc Hamer

It is easy to damage the quiet fragile things carelessly, to break and maim without even noticing.

There are intertwining rhythmic cycles that thump along: a weekly mowing of the grass; a yearly pruning of roses; trimming the wisteria three times a year; the annual laurel hedge cut in August; picking apples in the autumn when they tell me they are ready; waiting for the frost before I prune the fruit trees; digging up and storing dahlias after two frosts, then replanting them when the risk of frost has passed. Making compost, planning flower beds, choosing plants and buying seeds in the winter. Planting, weeding and clearing, managing annuals, biennials and perennials, and trapping moles in the winter and the early spring. The year is marked and celebrated in quarters at the solstices and the equinoxes, and these points mark out the year for anybody involved with nature. They are the beginning points of the seasons. Rhythms, long cycles and short ones, interweave, driven by the ever-changing weather, the duration of daylight and the temperature. Every point is the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. Each autumn I rake the red leaves from beneath the same maple tree and put them on the same compost heap. Except, of course, they are not quite, not exactly the same leaves, the same tree or the same compost heap as they were last year. The moles I catch in the same tunnels are not the same moles that I caught last year. These overlapping and intertwined cycles cannot help but take me inside myself to whatever is there on any given day. All I can do is reflect. M...

inspires me to write

I AM COLD like a spider this morning. It is still very dark.

My slow eye transitions from monochrome to colour vision. I think I can see it happen. There is no colour in the world until the daylight comes.

A touch of pink in the grey air and I start to think about coffee, and the thought drives me from my bed.

I have a relationship with tools like this: I feel that all the things in the world that I touch are touching me back.

my life is too short for me to hurry.

I had to work to depersonalise the moles, because if, as I believe, all living things have equal value and we are all the same, then I was killing myself.

when the gardens are resting.

Life is rarely as neat and tidy as we would like. I prefer it that way. Reason is just one of the many important ways of experiencing the world.

I drive the ‘A’ roads that coil through small towns and villages and tie people’s lives together

My memory for the names of things is not what it was: it doesn’t seem important for me to try and remember. The answer will come of its own accord, or it won’t. Words have a different existence to the things they name: they live in different places, have different lives.

I left no dust behind, no trails, tried to leave no memories in other people’s minds.

The seasons travel at around 2 mph from south to north. If I kept walking north I could have been forever in spring.

The only permanent things about man are his waste. Natural things decay. There is a bittersweet state of existence that all natural things go through, a stage when they stop being what they were and start being something else. I think I am at that point.

In the north of England and Scotland they do not ask where you live, or where you come from: they ask, ‘Where do you stay?’ as if living somewhere were just a stop on a journey, as if we were all travellers. Here in Wales is where I decided to stay. It is the dip in the bed that I roll down into when I am tired, the place where my woman and my children know to start looking for me. But in reality, we are all travellers.

The world runs on fiction.

Five or ten hours of walking was five or ten full hours of taking each step one at a time, breathing and seeing and hearing the wild things or the wind or the rivers that wind through the woods that reach into the air that flows in and out and in, to blood and pumping heart and muscles that move me along and through it.

We can sleep face to face and not touching, but breathing each other’s breath over and over until there is no oxygen left between us, and one of us has at last to turn away or die.

I CAN’T THINK of a better place to spend my last hours. I watch a seed spin and fall from a tree onto the frost: it has no meaning – then the robin sings at my feet again as I walk, and the sun hits my back, and slowly I lose my train of thought, and become happy again.

I am invisible to wildlife because I smell like them. Birds and insects land on me. I take ladybirds home nesting in my collar. I like to be invisible.

Nevertheless, I have taken the memory as mine and use it as my own.

Life is so full of mystery, answers are so few, I do not trust them. I prefer unanswered questions. At the end of the answers there is usually a person who enjoys the power of appearing to know. I have come to like things that are left unfinished. It’s the question that shines the light, that seeks. The answer’s often just a dim reflection of the vastness of the question. There are no answers that satisfy.

This is a small life, and everything comes to nothing in the end. I like that. I like the idea of smallness, and the wonder of basic human things.

In these hard and empty hills where all there is to do is to fight and love I’ve learned to love to fight I found my wholeness in learning not to seek it’s here in the wind that blows me like a crow to my chosen place my friend rook, the cleverest of all the creatures teaches how to fight without fighting he lets go in the strong wind he plays and blown about looking ragged and broken he lands to rest then up he goes again. I have heard that wind can drive you mad not me, I’ve taken off...

In my pocket a pencil that was once five inches long, now just a stump. Blunted, writing my story. Nothing is ever finished. I think it will soon be time for me to pick up the worn blade honed on the worn stone, sharpen the old stump to a point, and start to scratch a new chapter, a new life.

all the small things die then live, then die again and feed and build the blanket layers on this rocky stone of earth and in their living and their dying and their living and their dying and their eating and their feeding and their dying and their breeding and their growing, they build this rocky stone of earth

We are a fearful species.

I like these words: ‘trip hook’, ‘mumble pin’, ‘catching loop’. They give me a sense of tradition, a feeling of connectedness with the ancient history of this craft, a sense of some kind of ‘belonging’ in a world that works hard to take that sense away.

BUDDHISTS SAY THAT life is full of sadness and the only way to live with it is through compassion. They say that we should feel both sadness and joy in everything we do. There is a joy in being in this field, being like the hawk or the hedgehog. There is a sadness in it, too, in the journey from the place where we start to the place where we end. Mine is not a journey that goes anywhere or delivers anything of any importance, it just goes. Like a poppy it emerges, flowers and fades, then dries and turns to dust. Compassion is born at the interaction between joy and sadness. Compassion for your own life, forgiveness for your own mistakes, is the foundation.

Things cannot be made as they were, but they can become something else. They can be re-made. All things are impermanent, and everything wears down to dust. Everything has its end and each thing carries the beginning of the next thing. Healing is not about re-making things as they once were, healing is about acceptance and forgiveness and love and growth and beginning again. Scar tissue is an inevitable part of life.

Beauty is a balance between sadness and joy, and is created in the moment, in the relationship between the viewer and the thing viewed. My life is full of this. Such feelings are never in the past or the future, they are only ever here in the interaction between you and this moment.

a patch of rain so small that I walk into it and out the other side looking back I see it still there over the meadow

The pottery fragment I picked up earlier is still in my pocket; it makes me think of family, me, Peggy, our children who are away and have lives of their own. Fragmented parts of something that was once just one thing. It is triangular, and shaped and sized almost perfectly to fit between two of the three big creases in the palm of my left hand. Again I am struck by how often nature repeats itself.

I have learned the skills to let go without feeling loss.

IN BRINGING OUT these tarnished memories there is a temptation to polish them up, rub them on a sleeve and make them bright again. But they are old and broken with bits missing, and I don’t want them any more.

the farms are now just people’s gardens.

ANOTHER MORNING. DAYLIGHT, and waves crashing against the window, a three-inch fog of bouncing grey felts the horizon and confused car alarms call for each other across flooded gullies. Steaming up the streaming glass with a mug of hot chocolate, I press my face to the window. The cat brushes against my ankles, mewling for attention. I am watching blurry bright colours moving through the rain and pondering the possibility of going out. Maybe I will just stay here watching. I can watch for hours, days. There is one month to the winter solstice, the shortest day. I should perhaps eat, and I wonder how I will fill this day. Perhaps I will go and walk in the fields. Much later.

The small things, the tiny, tiny interactions, are the journey.

Nothing is complete, nothing is perfect and nothing is ever finished. I have developed tender feelings toward the unrelenting drive toward entropy that I take with me. It is everywhere and in everything.