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

by Marc Hamer

Really I want to forget. Forgetting is freedom and forgiveness but more than anything it is a process of immersing myself in what is happening now.

Gardening is not nature: it is using the laws of nature and science to impose our will on a place,

It is a human process, and the tools are simple and brown and honest. I have grown old with these tools: they are handmade of wood, steel and stone, and they have grown old with me and have moulded to my hand. I have a relationship with tools like this: I feel that all the things in the world that I touch are touching me back.

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.

He is a smooth velvet sausage.

lol love that for that mole

However, many factions in England, Scotland, Ireland and further abroad were supporters of the deposed James, and this gave rise to the Jacobite toast to the mole, ‘To the little gentleman in black velvet’, which is still occasionally heard today.

In quiet moments like this, there is a sense of completeness: nothing else is needed to make them whole and perfect. I start my work, looking down the field. 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.

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

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

Here I am myself, an animal like the others: I have no behaviour that I must explain, nobody to explain it to.

I have enjoyed having a territory of my own: 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.

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.

the changing seasons change everything everything cancels out everything else the sound of everything at once is silence the colour of every colour at once is white.

I have in my time deliberately tried to die, but I am still here, and life has always won on its own terms, so I stopped trying to make the choice for myself. It seemed that it was not my decision to make, and I began allowing life to happen. It feels much better that way. I learned it from the birds, who just flew and nested and ate and made new birds, and the hedgehogs, who just shuffled and ate and made new hedgehogs, and they all died and went back to mud in their own good time.

I lost my self-importance early on and do not want to differentiate myself from the world around me. 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.

My leaf-capped boots leave footprints in the frosty grass, and I’m thankful to be old; I can rest and take my time and it is okay. 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.

I remember to accept the not-knowing because it is unknowable, and to let my mind clear, the thoughts pass, and allow myself to be filled with the quiet nature that is alive with possibility and fertility. I think of it as ‘going primordial’, back into the soup that I came from. There is something sacred in putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, for a lifetime. To eat, walk and sleep.

Moles have a primitive brain: smooth, without corrugations or wrinkles,

Compassion is born at the interaction between joy and sadness. Compassion for your own life, forgiveness for your own mistakes, is the foundation.

The small things are the things which in their millions make the world work. The craftsmen, the traders, the men in white vans who bring stuff and fix stuff; the people in the factories who knit my jumpers and weave the wool to make the tweed for my trousers; the farmers – the individual men and women who care for and grow the things we eat and wear, who look after the landscape for the love of it.

These moments of perfection Look! Here’s another! My life I hope A golden leaf that fluttered by No more or less important Look! A blackbird eating berries in the tree! Watching the sun rise Life goes on. And then it stops Do try to watch it!