This camp felt like a turning point for me, and I don’t know that it was the camp itself that did it…
I arrived for the second week, in time to say goodbye to some of the people who were only there for the first week, and there was a disjointed feeling, then in the first day or two I put my back out. Early in the summer I’d broken a rib and missed several weeks of yoga class, then moved my very heavy tent around a few times, but bizarrely it was the flicking of a teabag at the compost bucket that made it ping and caused the agony.
I spent a day hardly able to move, and felt really useless and down (which I’d been feeling a bit anyway). My thoughts went to “how can I contribute to a community when I can only walk hunched over a stick? Thankfully some very strong pain-killers led to an apparently miraculous recovery.
I was still in a fairly low mood, but the weather was glorious and we got on with some of the arduous task of preparing for incorporating Malwen as a Charitable Community Benefit Society, deciding what our charitable objects will be. We gathered and trimmed hazel poles ready for bender-building (the trimming is called snedding, a lovely new word to me) and we were visited by the goats, who munched eagerly on the hazel leaves that they could now reach. We walked in blazing sun and delicious shade to the river, we cooked over an open fire, and saw the full moon over Poppit Sands beach.
One morning I went to spend time in the Oak Grove, and sat for a long time communing with the trees, eventually feeling called to go sky-clad and fully feel the flow of energies between earth and sky that I shared with the trees. In the meditation that followed, I received a new wisdom.
For a long time, when focusing on the roots, I’ve thought about extending way down to the molten core of the earth, a powerful visualisation that links with fire and draws great energy. Now, I found myself thinking of the trees drawing their physical needs, water and nutrients, from the earth immediately surrounding them. It seemed the trees were telling me to focus on my own sphere of existence, to draw sustenance from the land I’m on, without always needing to think globally. I also had a vision of linking the breath to the seasons, so that every exhalation is akin to the trees shedding their leaves in Autumn, letting go of what was once essential and no longer serves.
It doesn’t seem much when set down in words, but, combined with other work I’ve been doing, seems to have powerfully crystalised something in me, and was reinforced by our walk in the amazing ancient temperate rainforest of Coed Tŷ Canol.
Since then, I have felt more connected to the land than ever, my mood has remained very positive, and I have had energy to get stuff done that I’d been severely lacking, and this is what I have taken away from the camp.
Blossom
Brithdir Mawr, September 2024
