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

by Marc Hamer

Facts do not set you free, they trap you into a constructed view of reality that is final.

The only truth is here, and here, and here in the three seconds before it becomes a reconstruction.

I could tell this story with myself as the villain or the hero, innocent bystander or agent provocateur, and each time I’d be telling a form of the ‘truth’.

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

sometimes embracing chaos because we think it is beautiful, and sometimes destroying it because we decide that it is messy.

Ownership of things that appear permanent gives us a sense of permanence. We feel ourselves immortal because of our possessions and the mole coming in and damaging them, taking them away, challenges something buried deep within us.

No living thing is ever perfectly symmetrical, and imperfection is where beauty is found.

ONE OF THE gardens I work in has a vast flower meadow, and every year I cut this down with a scythe. I use a scythe because it is quiet and doesn’t pollute, but mainly because the wildlife has a chance to escape.

I feel that all the things in the world that I touch are touching me back.

A reaper with a scythe traditionally leaves the last sheaf of grain standing in the middle for the spirit of the crop, ‘John Barleycorn’, to hide.

my life is too short for me to hurry.

Naively, when I first began to teach myself about gardening I thought that it would be a nurturing, pastoral and sensual occupation, mostly about flowers, lawns, fruits and trees. I soon learned the pests were part of my job, too. I had to deal with moles, slugs, greenfly, wasps, rats, weeds and many other things that were just getting on with living. For some people much of gardening is about killing things.

Killing can be, but rarely is, peaceful and kind. Violence is never either. The countryside is full of both.

Witches love moles as familiars, perhaps because they are dark and secretive.

A mole’s nose has very specific vibration-sensitive organs, and in the star-nosed mole these have developed into twenty-two pink fingers that look and move very much like a sea anemone: they can detect, catch and eat their prey faster than the human eye can follow.

Perhaps it is hard for humans to write stories about being alone.

Living moment to moment with no thought or feeling, no ideas or obvious mental process going on, just instinct, an awareness of the field, but not a separate awareness of myself being in the field.

Words have a different existence to the things they name: they live in different places, have different lives.

I go quiet inside; the silence seems to pour out, filling any cracks or flaws in the perfection. Once you experience this feeling of simply existing you lose the need to ask why you exist.

I decided that I would do what I was good at, which was walking, and that I would do what I enjoyed, which was wandering about and looking at things and trying to figure them out.

Gender is fluid, but I’ll pass his nonsense on for what it’s worth.

I don’t like to call living things ‘it’: that would create an uncomfortable distance between us.

The character of living things changes when they are in groups. I am disconnected from groups; I do not trust them.

As a gardener I do not dig any more: I hoe off the weeds and top-dress the gardens in the autumn with compost just as nature does with falling leaves and grasses. This keeps the moisture in and the weeds suppressed; it allows the worms to break up hard soil and increases microbial activity, allowing life to expand its range, and lets air and water into the soil.

Moles do not live in molehills; most molehills are just heaps of their household waste, soil and stones, piles of waste that are not visited again unless the tunnel collapses.

In the north of England and Denmark archaeologists sift molehills to look for fragments that moles bring up from underground. They are seeking evidence of previous civilisation without disturbing the site: they call it ‘moleology’.

The only permanent things about man are his waste. Natural things decay.

all natural things go through, a stage when they stop being what they were and start being something else.

there is a freedom in having a regular place to return to – it takes away the need to think about it and allows a person to rest.

A feeling of belonging brings with it a desire to build something to mark one’s connection, and then, having built – a garden, a house, a career, a tunnel system – one has to protect those things from intruders, violently if necessary.

We try to create an illusion of permanence, but there is none.

I was born to vagrants, my grandparents Scottish, Irish, Manx and Lancastrian. Soldiers, railwaymen and mill girls who travelled to find employment or escape from poverty, or just because they were bored.

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.

My sense of identity came not from any place where I have lived, but arrived when I became a gardener, and realised that my home was simply the outside, the countryside, wherever it was. When I step off the carpet or the floorboards and onto the ground, I know who I am.

half a dozen blackbirds or more they know nothing they make no plans for the future yet they prepare for winter

the simple perfection of things being just and only what they are.

To be able to rest is perhaps the most important physical and mental survival skill that I have. Tiredness is lethal.

Truth is only ever in the experience.

We talk constantly about our daily lives and concerns. In so many ways we need each other to be able to know what is real and what isn’t.

I feel a physical excitement when I step out of my van with my bag and put a foot on the wet green earth that is almost sexual.

At some point on a long walk you stop being who you thought you were, but you don’t question it because the questions stop too. I became for a while just steps and breathing. Walking and resting.

The homeless of all species are predated.

There is no avoiding sadness in life, although it seems that happiness is easier to avoid.

I am just another animal, another tree, another wild flower in the meadow among billions of others, each unique in their own way, each just like the others in other ways, each one just another expression of nature trying to survive. There is something deeply magnificent in being just ordinary.

It is good to be old, and good to be slow, and have nothing left to fear or gain or lose – I can just dance if I want, and sleep if I want.

sadness is the price we pay for love,

Perfection is always brief.

In decay I see the beginning of growth, because that is how I choose to see the world, because it makes the world elegant and poetic; because I have no religion; because I am a gardener and I see it every day.

It’s the question that shines the light, that seeks. The answer’s often just a dim reflection of the vastness of the question.

A tool responds to the way it is used.