On repetition, wild service, imagination
& natural ink-making in Wales
Soundtrack for this post: a tiny tinkling stream under Stanage Edge
I need to press send on this post before anything else distracts me.*
On Saturday night it was the ethereal white-silver glow of the Northern Lights after midnight, witnessed in divine aloneness across the Peak District, and a fireball meteor too (what a sight!). And then bluebell friends. They’re insanely wild this year, I’ve never seen such an abundant display in my local ancient woodland before.
I’ve been hanging out with the local wrens (their song…), herons, deer, curlew and the odd tawny too. These kin are my medicine friends, keeping me grounded, and reminding me of who I be in this world. Like those bluebells and the wrens singing I feel like I’m finally coming alive this Spring after a long recovery from the head injury sustained in Summer 2022. I’m living and breathing every moment of all of these happenings.
All these wild blessings on my doorstep. All this green and deep violet-blue and all the bird songs. I have to pinch myself that I’m in this world when I then witness the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people by the IDF, bombs on repeat, 610,000 children trapped in Rafah, all the Palestinian people trapped inside Gaza with no infrastructure at all. The genocide. The ecocide. And. And. And. I’m not sure what to say anymore because I’ve said it so many times.
Yet I know repetition is powerful stuff. Demonstrate. Repeat. Donate. Repeat. Boycott & divest. Repeat. Witness. Repeat. Cry. Repeat. Write to employer to divest. Repeat. Wear my keffiyah. Repeat. Write poems. Repeat. Pray. Repeat. Watch and share posts. Repeat. Find your people. Repeat. Keep talking about Palestine and Gaza and colonialism. Repeat. Wave the Palestinian flag. Repeat. Make liberation a thread through all our/my work. Repeat. Care for each other and get good sleep. Repeat. Support the student solidarity encampments. Repeat. Believe that Palestine will be free. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
This is rest of my/our life repetition stuff.
I want to know what’s happened to all the birds in Gaza. Are they still repeating their songs too?
I keep asking myself especially when I’m tired or fatigued, how am I repeating my solidarity with/for Palestine? Even in small ways? I keep thinking of my Mum and Dad – they were never meant to be free having been born as subjects of British colonial India. They must have dreamed of freedom too. Repeatedly. And they were lucky enough to make a certain type of freedom in their lives at the cost of leaving their homeland for England.
***
Engaging our imaginations and being repeatedly creative is resistance and a practice of freedom, especially in a world where poets and artists and songwriters and journalists are being killed and targeted. Us creative types are dangerous. Here in the UK arts funding is being repeatedly slashed and arts and humanities departments in higher education are being reduced or shut down.
Us creative types are dangerous.
Keep imagining and creating. Your poems, your words, your art matters more than ever.
Last month my beautiful friend and artist Carole Shearman captivated my imagination by teaching me how to make natural inks. I’d long desired to learn how to make inks out of foraged and wild elements. Carole is a wild-at-heart artist, spending her summers as Artist-in-residence on Ynys Ennli for the last twenty years, where she makes and creates art works from wild and found materials. This is where I first met Carole in 2021, in a session learning to spin wool.
This gloriously intense week of making inks is part of my Creative-in-Residence (Peak District) commission for the Black Nature in Residence project created and curated by Dr Sheree Mack. My project is a mash-up of walking/being, book-making, hand-made papers, natural ink-making, and a community workshop all held together by a new poem-creation.
Making natural ink is alchemy, and also a mystery. You never know how the inks will arrive themselves into altered-being. What shade or colour they will be or whether they will refuse your concoction-making and become a barely visible shade of something barely visible. When I played with these inks using sticks or feathers to write or make marks I felt feral, free, finding yet another way of connecting to nature around me and within me. I felt my body reacting, cells tingling, imagination on fire. I felt a bit scared.
These inks, these wild and sentient colours are dangerously free. Making art and buying art materials can be/is expensive and inaccessible for many. And many are full of chemicals and ecological violence. Be radical, be free. Make your own colours instead. It’s so easy. And so is paper-making too to plop your ink onto.*
Thank you to chief alchemist Carole for these learnings.
Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You.
Edited by Nick Hayes. With a chapter on healing by me!
Top right: reading at Nourishing Soils in Manchester. Bottom left: Nadia Shaikh & Amy-Jane Beer carrying the Wild Service tree across London. Bottom right: yours truly having a surreal moment on a train signing copies of Wild Service
I need to keep my ancestors close, remember their original ways of being in
kinship with all beings, natural and free. The spaciousness of sleeping on
roof-tops under the Milky Way. I need to feel the hot pulse of land inside
me, re-order my cells with big sky and barefoot again. The only way I can
do that here is to escape the city, to come to The Edge, to breathe and
unbelong from all the places I’ve never belonged.
Somehow whilst still madly concussed last year I managed to write a chapter (with a lot of support from friends, thank you – community effort) for the Right To Roam anthology ‘Wild Service’. It was finally published last month. I’m still pinching myself and wondering if this is all real? I’m in the company of some brilliant authors in this book – including super-talented artist Bryony Ella, who is an ‘an interdisciplinary artist working somewhere in the liminal space between science and spirituality’ and super-brilliant ornithologist and environmentalist Nadia Shaikh (she also reads the whole audiobook, north-eastern gorgeousness) – who are inviting us to think differently and creatively about how we can be of service to nature.
In England, ‘we only have a right of access to 8% of the land, and uncontested rights to 3% of our rivers.’ That means 92% of the land of England is NOT accessible to us and 97% of rivers are NOT accessible to us. England is mostly enclosed. By rich landowners. Perhaps some of the same rich landowners whose ancestors severed my parent’s land or stole people from Africa. And we/us are crammed into the cities and elsewheres.
But our imaginations are not crammed! This book is an act of resistance and of service. If we are crammed together we can imagine and resist together.
When I remember my true nature, I’m no longer a mechanised,
controlled human being. I’m the living miracle of my ancestors hard-fought
freedoms, living their dreams of freedom here, because I am not able to
over there. I’m bringing them with me with every step.
I’m a mangled geography of happenings across times.
Other happenings:
Upcoming workshops in Sheffield/Peak District with Dal
Saturday 8th June in Peak District ~ Nature-allied writing & Zine-making workshop: a day of nature connection, walking and making zine-pages! For POC only. Part of my 2024 nature writing residency for Peaks of Colour. Book here.
Saturday 15th June in Sheffield ~ (un)interrupted tongues: a 3.5-hour creative zine-making workshop for POC exploring themes of the 1947 Partition of India, borders, migration and remembrance. Book here.
Sunday 14th July in Peak District ~ Love notes to nature: a full day workshop – in collaboration with WOC Azadi Collective – of nature-allied community, walking, conversation, healing, creating and word-making as part of my residency with Black Nature in Residence. Transport support available and lunch too. For WOC, non-binary/trans folx. Please email hello@dalkular.com to book your place.
Sharings…
Thursday 24th May 2024 ~ Black Feminist Friends BFF#4/Ultra-Black Fish: By No Means Strangers to Ourselves. A reflective writing workshop with Foluke Taylor and friends. For Black and POC identifying women/non-binary folx only. Book here.
To read ~ Community words: a poem from Cheer: At some point we will heal that drought. Last year, Cheer came to one of my workshops and wrote this beautiful poem. You can also hear Cheer reading it too, really recommend Cheer’s audio.
*I did get distracted again and again and again…two weeks after starting this post, and with the bluebells now saying see ya later, I’m finally pressing send.
Great news on the book Dal - so happy for you! Shocking statistics on land / river accessibility. Reminds me of my last solo retreat which I took in Nottingham. I was walking the land (there was no signage, nothing). A woman on a horse came galloping full-pelt towards me and pulled her horse up in front of me somewhat aggressively and demanded to know what I was doing. I didn't flinch despite half a ton of horse rushing at me. 'Walking', was my response. There was no other person anywhere. 'We can't have all you people (all you people?) tramping the land'. I looked around, shrugged and said I couldn't see anyone else. She demanded I leave and I advised there was no signage and with that in mind wished to resume my walking. She asked how long I'd be...'as long as it takes' was my response. I refused to be intimidated by her and stood my ground and in doing so, found that I tapped an ancestral link to the enclosures act and standing for those who didn't have a voice then. Even now I'm still angry. She left but was clearly unhappy at not having been successful in her intimidation.
Thank you. So wonderful to read your writing. Congratulations on your book collaboration ❤