Attending to the Ripples

A river story

Dear Friends,

This story was written at a time when we spent much of our lives on a narrowboat on the river Avon, my wife recovering from cancer, myself recovering from a career that had, well, careered out of control. The boat was our retreat and I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. We sold it last year and I miss it, especially now the summer has arrived. The story is about slowness, recovery and humility - learning to bow before the simple things. I hope it provides you with a little peace and stillness as you read it. There’s an audio version of the story for paid subscribers (scroll down to the bottom).

Next week we’re back in the borderlands, visiting bats and castles . . .

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It’s almost a month until the paperback release of my book Two Lights.

I’m excited to be sharing a more affordable, accessible edition. Hardbacks are beautiful things, but if your shelves look anything like mine, they’re mostly filled with well-loved paperbacks.

When the hardback first came out I had a much smaller readership and the book didn’t get much attention. But this time around, I’m hopeful we can give it a second life - with your help.

If you’ve read Two Lights, would you consider leaving a short review or rating online? Even a few words can make a big difference in helping the book find new readers. Amazon (no purchase necessary) and Goodreads are great places, but reviews on StoryGraph, BookBub, or LibraryThing are also really helpful.

If you write a newsletter or have a blog, I’d be delighted if you’d share your thoughts there. It doesn’t need to be long and formal, just a few words can go a long way in helping the book reach more readers.

Every ripple helps!

Thank you for reading, supporting, and helping my work for the wild find its way in the world.

J

In the past months I’ve learned that everything I need for day-to-day living can be kept in a space of approximately 8 square metres. Living on a boat has enabled me to see my limits. I know how much gas I use to cook with, and how much electricity powers my equipment, which consists of 1 small fridge, 8 led lights and a couple of water pumps. They can be maintained easily with a series of car batteries and a solar panel to keep them topped up. I’m not ignoring the vast connections that reach out from my tiny home on the river: the networks of machines, pipelines, containers, ships and trucks that mine, process and deliver the fuel I use; the farms and factories that grow and process my food; the infrastructure that removes my waste. However, I think for the first time in my life my footprint is getting smaller.

It’s ironic that narrowboats have become a way of living off-grid. They were originally built to increase the speed of goods and raw materials across the country during the industrial revolution. At that time they were the grid. They had long hulls which could carry many tons of cargo. Each boat had a tiny, shed-like structure at the stern, just big enough for an average-sized person to lie down in, but often they were homes for whole families who lived precarious, itinerant lives. We keep a large water can on the boat, a copy of the ones used on narrowboats a century ago. It is ornate, with a wooden handle and hinged lid, its surface decorated with red, green and yellow stripes. Overlaying the stripes are hand-painted patterns of coloured roses. Our boat is traditionally designed. The stern doors have flowers and castles painted on the wooden insides, and bright diamond and checkered patterns outside. The original tiller-men and women had few possessions. They were viewed negatively by the rest of society. The artworks they decorated their boats and utensils with were an expression of their uniqueness, a riposte to the denigrations of town folk. These days the decorations on narrowboats are disappearing. Most new vessels are plainly painted, their interiors built Ikea-style, replete with stainless steel double ovens and wide-screen TV’s. Even the traditional names of boats, which were hand-painted onto the side panels in ornate fonts, are being replaced. This morning we were passed by a gleaming new machine named “4-Play”.

The human spirit delights in embellishment. It wants us to throw our branches and leaves into the sky, to glisten and rattle like the poplar trees we’re moored beneath today which shake and rain with every breath of wind. It doesn’t want us to complicate our time on earth acquiring, competing, tending to invented obligations and routines. Live simply. Create. Be part of things. That’s it.

The boat has become the best place for me to create. The bow is a (minuscule) painting studio. I need so little, some paper, pencils, a bottle of ink. To feed the work I need a few good books, a place to walk and, most of all, a place to stare, which the river provides infinitely. Last night I sat on the bow watching the light fade, the surface of the water transforming constantly, each ripple carrying its own ripples, fanning out and drifting. Little glazed cups of air rose in scatters while fish cut the surface making sharp splashes. When the wind died back the sky took over, clouds and stars painted across the surface. The bats came out and the astonishing complexity of the universe expressed itself in their flight. For the first time in months I could actually see.

In the months before I resigned from my job I believe I’d forgotten how to see. It was not a physical blindness, but a form of profound sightlessness created by the chaos that builds when your days are lived simultaneously statically and at pace, your eyes constantly stimulated by images on screens, your inner vision seized by the demands of work taking on an urgency that appears to be a modern requirement. It got to a point where my eyes could no longer rest on any single thing. The scroll and the jump-cut took over. The things that had always slowed me down weren’t working. I almost stopped walking at one point, having realised that the activity was no longer a form of meditation, but instead a facilitator of the endless rumination that it once fended off. I covered miles and miles with my feet, witnessing almost nothing with my eyes. When I did look up everything had become a blur. The skies that explode with light over my home valley for most of the year had gone dim. Even the birds seemed to be shadowy and indistinct, as if I was looking at them through a fogged window. It was the river which brought my sight back.

On a late April day, a few weeks after I’d left my job, we moored in a place on an almost 180 degree bend in the river, next to a huge Lammas meadow which is the summer home to several pairs of curlews. It was the first warm night of the year. The sun set straight in front of the bow and the wind dropped to almost nothing. I sat staring at the water. At first I was looking through the scene, caught up in a whirl of thought. Then the trees and sky started to appear, cut into quivering pieces which slowly grew, merged and smoothed. The world reappeared. My attention came back. I’ve been trying to increase it ever since.

This morning I woke and opened the shutters to be greeted by a mother mallard scurrying her newborn chicks between the narrowboats, tiny stripes of frantic fluff bobbing over the ripples. Canada geese appeared along the wall next to the lock-keepers cottage, 100 of them at least. They took turns to peer down at the metre drop to the river, hesitating, as if they were on the north face of the Eiger. Then they closed their eyes and belly flopped into the water, inelegant, drunken dancers, the goslings last, flipping almost 360 degrees before they crash landed. A tern appeared over the boat, swooped down to eye level and drifted away. I swear the geese were clapping.

I’ve just worked out that I’ve spent 17 years of my waking life, a third of it, staring at a computer screen. That number would probably be double if I hadn’t been part of a generation which used paper and pencils at school, and didn’t have mobile phones . The first computer I worked on professionally was the size of a car and cost a quarter of a million pounds. Operators worked in shifts so the company could maximise their investment. I was on the night shift, in a darkened, almost silent studio for 8 hours at a time, still as an evil hypnotist’s victim. I’m still under the influence. When I was working my last job, I had the company’s laptop on my desk, connected to a second screen, and two mobile phones next to those so I could check websites on multiple browsers and apps. When the working day ended, which it never really did, I switched to my own laptop to write, or develop my own website, photography and artwork. The phones stayed on. This was just the hardware. I used multiple softwares and apps, which all had a variety of windows, dashboards, menus and tabs. At any one time I could have 20 windows on the go, flicking between them continuously. There were websites in the US, UK and EU to monitor, social media channels, news and software sites, email and chat apps, video conferencing tools. My attention was simultaneously seized and shattered. There are tens of millions of us working in this way, spending our lives looking at windows, knowing there’s nothing on the other side.

The word screen is old, its root going back to the Proto Indo European languages. For most of its life it has referred to a source of protection, from heat and cold, wind and rain, from the eyes of others. And yet its oldest source is the PIE word “sker-” , which means to cut. Screens cut us off from the world, physically and mentally. In our culture we’re obsessed with this separation.

A little distance along the river from where Masquerade is moored there is a sort of floating shanty town, a stretch of the river bank belonging to a farmer who has allowed boat owners to build their own custom moorings. Each boat is attached to the bank via a tangle of scaffold poles pushed hopefully into the silt, then built on. There are wooden decks and sheds, some made with fencing panels, others with bamboo poles or left over materials from building projects. Window panels and doors are roughly fitted. Inside the structures there are deckchairs and mouldering sofas, cabinets and tables, cupboards filled with tea cups and sherry glasses, plastic ornaments and metal signs. Some owners have crammed in fire bowls, which, when lit, lick the flimsy wooden structures. All of the moorings are carefully screened off from their neighbours, tiny spaces scissored up. They’re walls built on silt, which is, perhaps, a metaphor for our culture.

Since giving up the day job I’ve been trying to radically reduce my screen time. This is proving difficult. I’ve been advised that writing with pen and paper is a more natural process and lends itself better to creativity. It has a ritual quality. You can use beautiful old pens, laid paper, scented candles. I’ve tried it many times. A sheet of paper with one of my poems or essays is indecipherable, even to me. For every 50 words I write there are probably 100 changes. I end up copying out what I’ve written on consecutive pages, but each one ends up the same - scribbled over, crossed out, lines running off tangentially in all directions, little scrawls and doodles, even insults to myself. When I think I’m finished I type it up on my laptop, and then rewrite it again, this time in a nice clean environment, like a hospital ward for thoughts. However, aside from the writing, I am managing to wean myself off . I’m spending at least half my time drawing these days. It’s an elemental process. I’m doing my best to get out of the way, to let the images create themselves, like shapes emerging out of water. When I finish a picture I wash it in the river. It’s exciting. I’m starting to make my own tools for drawing, picking up interesting twigs and shaping them to create different kinds of marks. I’m collecting jackdaw feathers which fall from the tree above our house, and swan feathers that wash up near the boat. I want to make my own inks from bark, flowers, crushed up stones. It’s a process which I’m falling into more deeply by the day. Perhaps in a few months I won’t feel so separate from the world.

Today I’m starting the day in the kayak, following the tern I saw earlier, heading upstream. From the middle of the river the world is screened off by high reeds and overhanging willows, which I’m paddling up to, ducking into the cave-like spaces beneath them. It’s twilight in there, a little spooky. There are spider’s webs densely woven between twigs, like cocoons, big as bird’s nests. As I peer at them I can see the debris inside, the broken up exoskeletons, wings and legs. In the shadows beneath, the water is soupy, bubbling, everything breaking down. As I dip the paddle blades they almost disappear. Something is being made. Even the herons, creatures of the shallows, are unable to see through it. Only the terns seem able to peer into the depths. Two appear over the trees, youngsters, but already expert fishers. They criss-cross the river heading downstream, flying over my head, hanging between the upbeat and downbeat of their wings as if waiting for the hand of a puppeteer. They seem butterfly light, moth frail, the most fragile of birds. Until they dive, turning on the tip of a primary feather and wheeling down to fold into spears and split the river. They reappear a second later, shivering off the water to climb back above the trees. And then they’re gone again, little kites, little conjurers, away to pluck fish from between the narrowboats, leaving me to the splash of the paddles, the knock of the skeg, the glare .

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I’m walking again. Across the water there is an area of closely mown lawn, a clubhouse, and a long jetty. A strange boat is moored there, a type I’ve never seen before, something between a Canadian canoe and a Venetian gondola. It seems very out of place on an English river. As I’m examining it the clubhouse door opens and a group of paunchy men of my age walk down to the lawn. They line up facing the river and begin to do stretching exercises, guided by a large, bearded man dressed in alpha male black. I leave them to it. I find a spot under the bridge and watch the swallows, four pairs of them. Time slips away. Damselflies land on my boots, a good sign I think.

Walking back to Masquerade I spot a heron in the reeds. I think it’s asleep, stone still, its neck pushed into its torso like neatly folded cloth. As I watch it I hear splashing downstream, fast and rhythmic. The heron straightens and flees in a tatter of feathers. I hear a deep voice, shouting. Around the river bend the strange canoe appears, moving fast, manned by the group I’d seen earlier, all paddling hard. I wait, camouflaged by the high reeds, and watch them pass. The men are bent over their paddles which they are stabbing into the water as if they’re soldiers in battle. They’re pouring sweat, grimacing, panting like overheating dogs. At the back of the boat the man in black is standing at a long tiller, barking instructions: “Dig deep! Push harder! You’re not pushing hard enough! 1! 2! 3! DIG!” Watching them exhausts me. I feel the shivering in my chest that starts before a panic attack. But very quickly they’re past and the fury that they’re projecting through the water and air starts to fade. Until they turn round and head back. “Dig. Dig!” I walk as fast I can to get out of range. The birds have stopped singing. They’re also stressed out. Half a mile upstream I’m passed by two men on paddle-boards. Again they are bowed over their paddles, staring into the water (though they surely can’t see it), pushing hard and sweating. It’s what I came to the river to get away from, this striving. I don’t think there’s a single place on these islands where you can avoid it. Even the remotest mountain summits are all being occupied by people getting their breath back after their latest conquest. The act of bending over your work used to be associated with slavery or the near slavery of the worst factory jobs. Now it’s a sign of achievement. As the two men pass an ambulance comes into hearing, just over the bank, sirens blaring.

Narrowboats cruise at 4 miles per hour. When we’re cruising we put the engine only slightly above tick-over because that is when it’s least audible, when the boat is the least stressed, when we’re the least stressed. The boat creates the shallowest wake at that speed. Ducks and swans overtake. It makes us smile. I’ve noticed that most narrow-boaters don’t look very fit, but they seem to laugh a lot.

I’m reading Chinese classical poetry. I’m fascinated by the image richness of the poems, and of their stillness, how they seem to come out of, and go back to, silence. It’s something I’m trying to find in my work, though I’m not striving for it. I don’t believe it can be found by striving, only by waiting, listening, watching. The Chinese symbol for the word bow shows a pictograph of a hand, next to the symbol of a mouth placed close to an ear. A bow, therefore, is a “hand whisper” . The ancients used this ritual gesture as a basis for their spiritual practice, going quietly and with humility about their lives. The bow is the opposite of the bend. It is an act of reverence. It is also an act of healing, and can be the beginning of a return to balance. Healing begins with a whisper of the hands.

Thanks for reading!

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SIDETRACKS

Every so often, I’ll be sharing a behind-the-scenes note for paid subscribers: how a piece came into being, where the image or story began, and what it taught me along the way. These are more personal sidetracks, meant to offer a deeper sense of the paths beneath the work.

This week’s note is about Attending to the Ripples, how this story once belonged to a book that was never written, how it nearly ended my writing career before it ever really began. It’s a story about failure, rediscovery, and finding the thread that leads back to the work. It will be published this coming Wednesday,

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Our boat Masquerade was a beauty. She’s still cruising the waterways and you might bump into her one day if you’re beside the river. I’ve posted some photographs below to show the slow boats in all their glory!