It is good to work. The rhythm and lift of a scythe or an axe. The weight of hay on a forks end as you pivot the handle with a palm and lift it into a loft. The spade as it cuts bright slabs of clay from the soil. The turn and pitch and sway of a body, The choreography of the work. The land you shape shaping you as you work it.
I remember clearing ditches with my son in a sling. The storm had swept mud and stone into the drains. Great bursting rushes of water that scoured debris from the hills. I took to the lane with my infant son. Sleeping, held tight to me as I worked. The deft and rhythmic lift, pitch and dip again of the shovel, it’s ring like a bell.
It’s been a while. Since hard work. My arm is healing – I’d broken my wrist harvesting firewood. It’s good to be out in the autumn light. “Keep up with the shovel” the physio says “it’s good for you.” She gives me exercises to do with hammers, buckets of feed and firewood. I’ve missed the work of the farm. As winter draws in and the dark gathers round, the useful work of the outdoor world is what helps keep me sane, happy, healthy and well. The work good for the body. The light and simple rhythm of achieving things good for my mind. The light itself enough at times to ease the difficulty from winter. Though it can take time to let it in.
It’s work I’ve done for a decade now. Bringing myself into whatever brightness winter holds. Watching, understanding, year by year that it s this, being under the blue, or black, or steel gray sky, in the world, amongst the light and the green and the living things, doing the work of my hands. This bright light, this work, this sense of usefulness, this keeping in touch with the half wild world of the farm. And the tiredness it brings. And the sense of usefulness. All this is what keeps my mind sane, happy and healthy through the winter. I have missed it. But it is enough to step into the light and make your work in it for the light to soak in past the skin and be inside.
Some call it Shinrin-yoku. Forest Bathing. The time spent mindfully in nature. Connecting, quietly, without trying, to a sense of things. The sounds, sights, touch, taste and smells of the natural world seeping in. Connecting you back to the world evolution honed you to. For me, it is to spend time in something bigger than myself. The woods, the fields, the hill, the stone walls, the wild things. I spend time in it, and it spends time in me. And I am a happier version of who I am when I can do so often. And so. To work. In the fields, the woods, knee deep in the stream. In amongst the orchard trees. Where I can hear and see the wild world around me.
Todays work has been building and filling large compost bins. Old pallets strung together with baling twine, filled with piles of cut rushes from the fields, old hay, manure from the shed, woodchip the phone company left on ditches after butchering the hedgerows. There’s grass clippings too, the cuttings from the raspberry beds. Overgrown cape gooseberry from the garden. Bracken harvested from the verges which will crumble to a beautiful black fertility. Some sheeps wool which will hold the water in the soil well. Our old compost heap gets emptied in too. We will have, hopefully, 5 or 6 bins, some ready by spring. And we will build a no dig garden from this winters work.
It’s satisfying. The work is hard. Which is good. And the closed cycle of it is satifsying too. Taking from the farm to feed the farm, and feed ourselves. The rushes, which I need to clear from the pastures (though we will keep a lot as habitat), recycled with manure from the sheep, grass from the lawn, garden cuttings, and the organic detritus of our lives, going to make compost which will grow fruit, vegetables and grains which we will feed ourselves and our livestock. The waste from which goes to make more compost. We could burn and spray and petrol and oil our way out of our rushes and weeds. We don’t. Better to recycle, upcycle, sidecycle our waste into fertility, opportunity, and vegetables.
The bracken and wool have me excited. New uses for the produce of the farm are something I’m hungry for. It makes a beautiful peat free compost. Something we have use for in Ireland. There’s a group in Leitrim (Mountain Meitheal Northwest) using wool as the foundation layer for cross country tracks along the Leitrim Way. It brings a smile to my face.
We fill the compost bins one barrow at a time. Layers of things. There are people who are more careful. Who estimate this, weigh that in the balance. Our ratios of carbon and nitrogen are rough and ready. We layer whatever is to hand hoping heat, and time, and weight will work it’s magic and make from this ramshackle thing a cubic metre of rich black soil to build our new gardens with. I test the heart of the heaps with a thermometer. 56 degrees C. That’ll do.
It is good work. My arm and wrist twist and bend, flex with the weight of fork and shovel. I can feel some strength slipping back. Flexibility too. And, though it fees like it will be some time before I am planting trees, laying hedges, fences, and harvesting firewood, it feels hale and happy and healthy to be doing useful work. There is only so much walking a man can do, no matter how much he loves the wonder of the world he walks through. Usefulness, for me, and the sense of it is the best protection against the dark and wet of a NorthWestern Irish winter. If I can be in the light and doing good work, I am happier.
The children come and help. The tulip poplar in the yard is letting go it’s leaves. A bounty. The children rake and scrape at the lawn, filling barrow after barrow, forking it into the new bins. Climb in in their wellies to tramp down the compost so we can fit more loads. We fetch firewood together, go to cut the raspberry canes with secateurs in hand, then we move the sheep. The old retired ewes have mined out the quarry field of anything they can eat. Now we are done with the rams and the farm is cleared of them, we can put them back with the flock. Content, up on the hill they will graze and, eventually, find one another. The children count ewes, and count, and count again. Spying the last cosset hiding i the hawthorn on the hill they get the count right.
It is a good life for them. And for me. Hungry with work we turn our back on the day to sit and eat.
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