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

by Marc Hamer

All the facts that I recall easily are just high points and low ones, bits remembered only because they have some emotional impact or connection to something seen or remembered. They are like a string of pearls: tarnished pearls that have been shut in a drawer and rarely taken out. As I pull them out and look at them some of them are missing, and life seems like mostly string without a pearl in sight – and then a cluster of them appear, tangled and out of sequence. There is no certainty there, and yet, I will try to unravel the strands.

Often I do not disturb myself with language and I just look and enjoy.

What things seem to be matters far more to me than what things actually are. What they actually are is unknowable. I don’t like that prison of hard and cold facts. 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. 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.

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.

Gardening is not nature: it is using the laws of nature and science to impose our will on a place, and for some people this need for control goes to extremes.

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.

By the time I’ve got to a molehill its maker has usually finished what he was doing and moved on, and my life is too short for me to hurry.

I didn’t enjoy killing, so my methods had to be efficient, detached, fast and technical. 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. I didn’t look at them. I became good at disassociating myself from their deaths.

Reason is just one of the many important ways of experiencing the world.

For some people much of gardening is about killing things. This has always been an area of conflict for me: my favourite places were the wild ones where I had no killing to do.

nature repeats itself and uses what it has to fill any gaps.

this gave rise to the Jacobite toast to the mole, ‘To the little gentleman in black velvet’,

When I am out in the countryside, walking or hunting, I become solitary and leave my man-nature behind. I become a different kind of creature: something more fluid, free, adaptable and instinctive.

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.

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.

I remember him saying once that I was ‘too stupid to come in out of the rain’, and thinking, ‘But the rain is interesting’. I was a dreamy kid.

I don’t know how far I walked because if you are measuring you are not walking.

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

the atheist sees that everything is connected and that’s the true wonder

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

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.

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.

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.

I cannot break the feeling that all I am is a network of transport tunnels, an alimentary canal with a support system that allows it to move around so that it can feed and reproduce.

it’s a story that I have heard several times, but never from anyone who has actually seen it. The world runs on fiction.

Not knowing is for me the best of all possible worlds; it contains a sweetness and a playful willingness to accept change and to enjoy the multi-layered, million-petalled flower of life without having the compulsion to know what everything is.

at the edge I remember to remember to have compassion and I feel connected again

Truth is only ever in the experience.

They wander blindly on the grass for a while looking for food. Most of the young will be eaten by birds at this time. The homeless of all species are predated.

Nature produces millions of everything and it fills in all the gaps. Nature doesn’t care about a single individual; it is easy to just make more, billions more.

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.

Nature does not care about our safety. To be comfortable and safe I have learned to be aware, and to do this I have to quieten my internal dialogue, to trust my body to tell me if something is wrong. To do that I have to listen, and be alone.

Peggy said we are doing it back to front – that we should have loved each other passionately at the beginning and it should have faded away by now into grumpy middle age. That is nature’s way of preparing us to be separated, she said. Then she got sad, and she said that sadness is the price we pay for love, as her eyes teared up and her pretty face cracked at thoughts of age and death and one of us losing the other.

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. To walk this field and look for moles, to pay the bills, to spend our days and nights together.

Growing older is a process of shutting down. 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 is simple, and perhaps obvious, that it was almost unbearably beautiful and equally unbearably lonely. That night left me with the understanding that these two feelings do not conflict with each other. Like the overwhelming and unbearable, yet ultimately borne feeling of grief at losing a loved one.

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.

Towns are fun and exciting, but they are dangerous. People want things, they crave experiences.

To catch your mole, buy three half-barrel traps. You will need at least three. Buy the best and most expensive ones that you can find. Killing a living thing should not be cheap or slow.

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.

If life is love, then so is death I fall in love constantly.

Some things can only be expressed through interaction with others; without them there can be no humanity. Only humans show compassion. I am tired of spending my days alone. I am tired of this labyrinth, this solitary walk.

We can stay out all night if we want. We never have to go home again. There is a new freedom that feels so familiar. The familiar feeling of walking a path through the countryside with nowhere to go, nothing to achieve apart from just to exist in the moment and absorb the greatness all around.

I still do not know what kind of a man I am. I don’t think it matters any more. There is no certainty, only experience. Perhaps everything is just an excuse, and in the end we just choose to believe what we want to believe.