The air that I breathe

The wet windy landscape shining like a polished coin, glittering with rain and sunlight. I feel like dancing when I see the leaves whirling about and the bare branches gleaming with wetness, something juicy and alive and vital in the day.  Another way of describing gratitude, the bliss of being able to live fully and rejoice in what is  there right in front of my eyes –

The wind had dropped and the rain had ceased by the time we went out for supper last night, the street and fields smelling sweet and damp, innocent somehow. How I wish I had a little idiot-proof camera I could use to take snapshots and download to share with you. A spider’s nest in a curled brown funnel of leaf, mauve lavender spires reeling against the high  blue of the sky, wet leaves like splashes of  yellow paint on the brick pathway. The things I like to observe and wish I could share.

Always thinking back to the English photographer Howard Sooley’s images of  Derek Jarman’s ‘garden’ under cool English skies, that soft dampness everywhere, the flinty greys and washed greens and blues. I loved something there that I could not define, nothing obvious. I would look at rue flowering acid yellow next to a rusted spade on shingle, and think: that is how it really looks. No bumped up colours, no prettifying, no tricks. The quiet beauty not everyone can see. The loveliness deep down, in the most ordinary of places.

When I was once asked to write a gardening column, I began by writing about compost. Compost is one of the great enduring passions of my life. I love to make compost, layering it like strta of ingredients, a dirty brown wedding cake full of goodness, stirring the pile and plunging in  sticks to measure the heat at the core, the fermenting and seething cauldron of compost alchemy. I like recycling grass cuttings and yarrow stalks and egg shells and the wilted outer leaves of cabbages and precious leaf mould. The process by which things rot and decay and metamorphose into  rich friable humus is one of the magnificent unsung mysteries of the universe. Mulching and laying down compost and enriching the earth and encouraging earthworms and  searching for earth worm casings to insert into compost makes me much happier than  falling in love. The miraculous nitrogen-fixing properties of chopped-up nettles! I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it.

Needless to say, the editor stopped me from writing about compost after my third column. He said  he could not bear to look at  any more pictures of brown dirt or read me waxing lyrical about waiting for rot. He wanted me to write nice things about roses (those gorgeous irresistable  water-guzzlers) or nicely mown green lawns. ‘Lose the lawns,’ I would order my readers. ‘Make compost in bins, go organic, save water, recycle, learn something about permaculture, grow your own herbs and vegetables, keep poultry,  plant berries for birds, flowers for the bees. Save the world readers, one forkful of compost at a time!’
 
The editor stopped me from lecturing readers too. ‘It’s just gardening, Mary,’ he would say exasperatedly. ‘ It is just a hobby, wanting a nice pretty garden. You are not mandated to save the earth.’

‘We are all of us mandated to save the earth!’ I would say fervently as he rolled his eyes. ‘Who else will do it if not us?’

But of course he was right – people cannot be browbeaten into submission and I myself do not like to be told what to do by a writer madly truly deeply in love with compost. So I wrote about  the beauty of overlooked weeds instead. A reborn tree hugger, my editor would say despairingly.
 
I have never seen a garden I did not admire and my enthusiasm for the efforts of local gardeners was what saved my column. They loved to have me come around in saggy tracksuit pants and  a floppy straw hat and peer into their compost bins and watch them tie up rows of runner beans and commiserate about mildew  or whitefly on tomato plants. They wrote in to the magazine to scold me or praise my hands-on garden knowledge and correct all my mistakes and the editpr was gratified by their interest. And I would sneak in  references to compost all the time, just to remind all of us that what really matters is the unsung beauty of fertile soil.

Just another thing we take for granted. Like getting up in the morning and being able to remember going to bed the night before and  having a clear mind and open receptive heart and work to do and no apologies to make for the unremembered hurts and no shame to cloud the horizon. Shame always reminds me of sour compost, something lifeless, the dead hand clutching at one’s life, a toxin in the bloodstream, the shadow that follows one through the long day. Shame is the air I breathed and choked in as an alcoholic, stale and pointless and unavoidable.  Now I gulp in gratitude like oxygen.