Field Sensing
On attuning to uncertainty and meditative stewardship
Temperatures rise as this strange little isle enters a second heatwave. Unusually, I dealt quite well (as a semi-ginger, freckled creature) with the first surge in temperatures. One might even say that embracing the heat became easier, made possible by a new love of straw hats and a resolve to be less British. However, in the dip between extreme hot weather spikes, I find myself fading somewhat.
Washed out from a few weeks of new activities (some of which were delightful), I attempt to hang on to the newfound sense of stillness which has grown alongside a nervous system on a journey of recovery. After an unusually sociable five weeks or so, I find myself in what an old counsellor called ‘a restorative phase’ - i.e. disregulated and unable to carry out regular life activities, work for many hours, or be bright and breezy in myself. Dips happen, the well of grief pulls us back down. Sometimes all we can do is wait for the waves to pass.
These spells are a good reminder to take one’s own medicine: writing, meditating, playing with sound, movement, making art and grounding at home. Autistic or AudHD people sometimes struggle to express a full spectrum of emotion and feeling, with bigger emotional dips going unsignalled or unnoticed because of very successful masking, inability to express/externalise ups and downs of emotion, or both. I think this is part of why I love poetry, making audio and introspective tools like meditation so much. They give me time and space to express how I really feel, to channel emotions and experiences into a rhythm or cadence, to explore wider themes that connect back to the collective. Guided meditations and visualisations offer company through the inner landscape, gently taking us by the hand and whispering with a kind voice, “look, over here”.
As collective aspects and world events promote greater and wider uncertainty, how do we attune to shifting inner and outer landscapes? How do we begin to mediate between the outer world and what feels so strongly like isolation, when the issues and times that affect us all are shared? Overwhelm is such a common aspect of all this. Where do we go to when our vibrancy and agency feel dialled right down?
I offer these questions as an accompaniment to a new two-part walking meditation I would like to share with you. Some weeks back, Andrew Howe and Molly Brown of The Landing Project invited me to join a group of artists (including Jean Atkin and Paul Wakelam) at Bettisfield Farm. Molly and Andrew have been working with owner Jane Mellings to interpret the farm through creativity, and make new connections between art and agriculture. We were all invited to help test out a toolkit being created by The Landing Project, and come up with our own creative responses.
My own response came (as always) in resonance with my own inner state at the time, which if I remember rightly was a day of feeling deep grief and being very grateful for creative companionship. On walking around the farm, I made some connections between the word root ‘agri’, researching the wildflower Agrimony as a sideline.
Initial responses, prompt cards from Molly and Andrew, and my observations of the farm led me to write a two-part meditation titled ‘Field Sensing’. Andrew and I decided to collaborate (for the first time in far too long) and the final voiceover was woven with Andrew’s sound recordings from Bettisfield. Playing with ‘sacred field action’ initially as a title, I moved towards ‘Field Sensing’ to suggest attunement rather than action. As a term, ‘field sensing’ can be first attributed to the poet Gary Snyder, and has since been used by artist Anne-Marie Culhane.
These Field Sensing meditations are intended to connect the listener to fields real and imagined, guiding you on a sensory journey through the land, ecology and some of the cultural/systemic issues present in our everyday landscapes. You can do them walking or sitting in a field, or at home in whatever position you’d like to rest in. Here are the tracks below, also available on Soundcloud). Do listen with headphones for full immersive effect
Field Sensing (Part 1)
Field Sensing (Part 2)
Feel free to comment or get in touch if you’d like to share your experience of these visualisations. Did they orientate or ground you in any way? My hope is not to offer prescribed solutions, but to open portals of attunement within these challenging times. Taking Marshall McLuhan’s infamous point that “the medium is the message”, one of the aspects of my research is to question the role of soundscapes, meditations and podcasts within a digitally overwhelmed world trying to heal.
“Electric speed mingles the cultures of prehistory with the dregs of industrial marketeers, the nonliterate with semiliterate and the postliterate. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.” - Marshall McLuhan
A return to long-form and lo-fi could be part of the healing remedy I attempt to play a very small part in, creating and sharing media which helps us to attune and become our own media lens. The world places such vast demands on our attention that we must somehow begin to filter and select. All of the themes I explore here are topics within Slow Media, a movement I have attached myself to in recent months. On that note, I will close for now, leaving you with a few excellent findings from the last few weeks:
One for the pot
I’ve been listening to Heledd Wyn’s excellent new podcast Invisible Ecology, a podcast exploring culture, place, memory and the hidden systems that shape how we live. Treat yourselves to a listen and Heledd’s soothing tones. The reading pile is looking fabulous, with two books I can’t put down. Recently I attended a walking book launch at Booka in Oswestry led by Kim Willis, Author of No Fair Maidens: A Wild Journey Through the Lost Goddesses of Britain. This book was swiftly promoted to the top of the pile as I journey with Kim through lesser-known goddesses, a new sense of connectivity woven throughout the British Isles, empowering new trajectories for women and a rousing call to action. The second page turner of this month is a book I’ve been meaning to get hold of for a long time by Terry Tempest Williams. Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert is a meditation on the colour red, so omnipresent in Terry’s home state of Utah. I’ll leave you with a quote from this stunning work, for anyone who (like me) needs a little zing to carry them through the next heatwave. Wishing you summer vitality and easier attunement. Stay cool friends…
“I want to write my way from the margins to the centre. I want to speak the language of the grasses, rooted yet soft and supple in the presence of wind before a storm. I want to write in the form of migrating geese like an arrow pointing south towards a direction of safety. I want to keep my words wild so that even if the land and everything we hold dear is destroyed by shortsightedness and greed, there is a record of beauty and passionate participation by those who saw what was coming. Listen. Below us. Above us. Inside us. Come. This is all there is.” - Terry Tempest Williams