My intentions for walking the Little Avon River from source to mouth – 25th July 2019
Intentions for a River Journey
Today I am setting out to walk the Little Avon River. The River was a place of solace and adventure for me as a child and this walk may complete a long-held, but never accomplished, childhood dream to travel to the River’s mouth. The River begins as many springs and points of seepage in the Cotswold Hills, meanders through farmland, towns, common land and an old forest ‘generously donated’ to the Wildlife Trust by the Badminton Estate in the 1960s, and eventually opens out into the muddy waters of the River Severn. All of this was once the ‘Vale of Berkeley’, essentially a fiefdom of a feudal overlord.
I am underprepared for my adventure and nervous. Part of my trepidation, most, in fact, is around encounters with other human beings. The little map-gazing I have done suggests I will pass many sites of potential human interactions. I do not like conflict. Nature is usually a safe refuge from the two-leggeds and their opinions of right and wrong.
I have three intentions for this journey. I hope I shall not have too visceral an experience with the third and can instead focus on the first two.
Returning
I ran away from this place when I was nineteen. I did not really stop running for 15 years. I ran because back then home was a place of fury and survival. With its spiralling tendencies life has brought me back to these lands. I am now blessed to have the loan of a tree house – built between four young ash trees – as a refuge in a wood that was my favourite place in the world as a child. On the map it is still marked as a field but trees were planted here when I was five years old. The trees have grown and now stand as a young woodland, erupting with life.
I too have grown in many ways since I left, seasoned by a multitude of other places, peoples and cultures. Yet all the worlds I have encountered have not shaken a kernel of myself which is wounded, and which does not know how to belong.
Mythologists speak of the incomplete initiation. A person goes out into the world alone seeking an initiatory experience. Essential to the process is their reception upon return: greeted by a village who recognise the initiate as changed by their experiences, who recognise that they come bearing their gift to the world which must be nurtured, a person may thrive. Our culture has forgotten this process. It is said that if there is no homecoming, no acknowledgement by the community of the change and the gift, that a person may continue to seek initiatory experiences, may be unable to rest, to lean in. May not, perhaps, know how to belong anywhere.
Something resonated for me in that. But what if there is no village waiting? No community of people attuned to recognise the change? When I first came back here I stood atop a hill looking down at the land that had held my growing up; I suddenly saw it as if for the first time. Through new eyes I saw it as unknown and beautiful. The woods have grown and changed and so have I, and I was struck with a question. Could the land itself be that witness I had not had?
But the return also demands that I look slant-wise at what I think I already know. To re-see the known and in doing so find that so much was always unknown. I want to explore it as such, remove the lens of familiarity and regard it from a new angle. A reciprocal regarding then.
So it is with this in mind that I set out to walk the whole length of the River. In the River. A different vantage point, one more finned and feathered than booted and path-bound. To know and to be known by it anew. To be witnessed as returning changed. To listen to parts of myself that were never heard. Find the parts I have abandoned. And perhaps along the way pull out some of the thorns that block my heart, leave to rest some of the torments I’ve carried. Shed some skins.
The speaking land
The second intention I carry is to try and open my heart-ears to the land and its beings. As an oral storyteller I seek words with which to tell the stories that the water and the place may hold. On a trip to Canada I met a wise elder, a Quw‘utsun storyteller called Robert George. He told me, ‘People say oral culture can be lost, but I don’t think so. It is all there, with the land and the ancestors. You just have to know how to listen.’ So this is part of my clumsy beginner’s effort to try and remember how to listen, to ask the river and the land what it might like us know. What it thinks about the state of affairs. What requests it might have of me, of us all, what stories.
The rabid consumerism which is killing our cultures, our peoples, our Earth mother and her other inhabitants is both a cause and a symptom of the deep disconnect of people from the animate world. Facts about climate change have not and cannot bring about the changes we need to enact to prevent devastation. Many people still relate to the wider world as a series of objects to be used and consumed. Perhaps it takes heart language and emotional connection to place, the perceiving of the living world as animate and seeking encounter with us, to really awaken action.
So, my dream, wish, responsibility even as a teller of stories is to try and help enable a process of re-enchantment with the world for others. So that they may wake up and remember their place in this beautiful web. I hope the river and the land will accept my clumsy tongue’s offerings in this regard.
Trespass
My animal soul feels hemmed in, curtailed and choked in much of England. It always has. This creates a slow-burning fury within me: that I cannot, as a two-legged, just wander freely on this earth, to meet her in her natural wild state, in my natural wild state. To breathe freely, easy from the anxieties of this modern human world and remember that I am no better, nor more separate from earth, than Shrew, or Cormorant, or Otter.
Barbed wire, designed to rip flesh, cuts up the landscape. Signs blare ‘Private’. ‘No entry’. ‘No, camping, no fires’. ‘Trespassers may be prosecuted’. Often there is no longer a need for signs; the cop in the head tells us just as loudly we are prohibited. How can people possibly awaken to the reality of their place among many – and dispel the illusion perpetuated so long that ‘god gave man dominion over all’ to fuck with the earth, drill into her flesh and rock, poison her waters, kill life, colonise her peoples – when they are not allowed to have a regular, unrestricted relationship with nature? I don’t mean to simply march obediently along a predesignated path, but to sleep beneath the Stars, awaken to the sound of Fox barking at night or the heavy dew of morning, to see Deer wade a river not knowing she is witnessed. To tread the Earth barefoot and just be for a while, outside linear rationality and clock time’s tyranny.
Many people have forgotten how to just be in a place; forgotten they are one among many, who include Raven, Oak, and Bear. Because the illusion that a person may own the earth – this great, happy accident of the cosmos – has taken everyone in its grip thanks to a legacy of brutal repression that has benefited a few, devastated many.
So it is with an awareness of this that I set out to walk. To claim my right as a living being on this earth to tread her ways and her waters. To meet what life shows of itself along the path. To reclaim ways of knowing this earth that have been smashed out of us by holy notions of the soul being a solely human domain, by Descartes’s rational mind, and by the prioritising of capital over life.
I have not researched carefully the laws of trespass or how they may apply to a riverbed. I have not researched who thinks they own the lengths of River and her Fish. I do know that one family’s estate has held ‘ownership’ of much of this land since they became feudal overlords under the Norman conquerors in the 12th century. They ‘own’ the riverbank I sit on as I write this.
I do not want to know more of those matters today. I will only carry them as a heavy bag of worry around my neck which will drag and despoil my journey.
I have shared all of this with the River, invited her to share her insights and stories and asked permission. I believe it has been granted. I will continue to dialogue and will carry each day two questions: one of the River, one of myself. I pray I will be received and unraveled.