Weather Report: On Beauty

Leaning in and working with beneficial culture

Read this post to learn the background to ‘Weather Report’, the book.

I began a course with

Dougald Hine

¹ this past week, ‘Pockets, Patterns and Practices’, and among many other riches he introduced the concept of a ‘vital compass’ - to pay attention to when and where we feel most alive and to ask if we can lean into it further? This aligns so much with the work I’ve been doing on Marion Milner’s book, A Life of One’s Own, and also the daily noticings of beauty in my own book, the journal Weather Report. It’s as if I am bringing things into focus now in a way I hadn’t been equipped to previously. I decide to lean in…

1. Cultivating Culture

I type this with fingers stained yellow from turmeric and feel a glow all over from yesterday’s fermentation workshop held in a small cottage in south Co. Kilkenny. Can you beat being with a group of people around a couple of tables - about a dozen of us, it’s a squash, this kitchen is tiny - sampling kombucha, dipping forks into Giedre’s jars of sauerkraut, then getting on with chopping cabbage, pineapple, grating carrots, beetroot, garlic, ginger and yes, turmeric.

Over several hours Giedre passed on so much from her Lithuanian upbringing and guided us on the correct proportions of vegetables to brine, shared the kombucha ‘mother’, the SCOBY², as her young children weaved in and out busy with their own tasks. Giedre is also homeschooling, which is another thing to add to her impressive array of skills and talents.

At the end of the workshop, as we said our farewells, we swapped contact details and I packed up my jars into my car; lacto-fermenting carrots (with dill and garlic), kombucha with ‘mother’, red cabbage and carrot sauerkraut packed into a crock that has been sitting empty in my utility room for far too long. I used to make sauerkraut fairly regularly in the past but somehow allowed the practice to fall away.

2. Cultivating Gardens of Delight

This morning, on Substack, I saw that

Tash

(Woolfish!) had a new post up, this time on Virginia Woolf’s short story, Kew Gardens, discussing the painterly nature of Woolf’s writing³. I hadn’t read this story in years, probably not since I studied it, and loved it, for my English degree. How is it that on my book shelves, with so much that is piled higgledy-piggledy, I was able to put my hand on it in moments. Truly, beloved books should always be within reach, one never knows the day nor the hour.

Included in Tash’s post was an audio recording of a conversation on Woolf’s story with writer and lecturer Nancy Miller. As I listened to their conversation later in the morning, I glanced out the window and I saw a thrush hopping around in my now almost empty raised beds. Empty of veg that is, now greening mainly with ‘weeds’. Although thrushes are, sadly, far less plentiful now than they used to be in Ireland, I always associate the thrush with the sound of a snail in its beak as it cracks the shell open on a stone. The child me in The Connawarries was impressed by a bird being smart enough to use a tool to get food. This morning’s thrush did not find a snail while I was looking but I continued to watch as this lovely bird, with its speckled breast, hopped around in my veg beds.

The serendipity for me is that in Kew Gardens, a snail features prominently throughout and a thrush also makes an appearance:

“The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it.”

“How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose to hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long pauses between one movement and the next.”

Between yesterday’s experiences at Giedre’s fermentation workshop and this morning’s shock of pleasure at being prompted to revisit the wonderful Kew Gardens, while a rare enough sighting of a thrush accompanied me as I listened, I am, despite the current state of the body politic worldwide, cultivating my own ‘garden of delights’⁴ as a bulwark against the seductive temptation to weary despair. Maybe this is how we strengthen ourselves, prepare ourselves, for whatever is to come - attending to the smallest possible things, allowing in both love and delight. In this time of language being widely debased, impoverished and made crude, Virginia Woolf’s writing is evidence of the potential of language, how it is rich with possibilities, helps us to imagine worlds and understand the human condition in all its complexity, growing in empathy and compassion. As many, many other great writers do too - yes, I am on the final chapters of War and Peace with

Simon Haisell

and am planning to embark on the Hilary Mantel trilogy with him in 2025 (at a minimum).

All is not yet lost, although there is no doubt that we are moving ever closer to that dire outcome. Tend to the microbes, create the conditions for the flourishing of all beings, spend time in the company of those who help us see the richness all around us. Recognise those vital compasses. We are very likely to need to locate them at short notice sooner than we think; we need to be practised, we really never know the day nor the hour.

Here is an earlier post in this series you might enjoy, featuring one of my valued mentors, Jerzy Gregorek, who, among many other things, taught me the importance of avoiding the temptation to complain; to instead take some action, however small…

1. I highly recommend Dougald’s book, ‘At Work in the Ruins’, with its invitation to surrender, but to surrender to the mystery, not the certainty.

2. SCOBY is an acronym and stands for for ‘Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast’

3. I read Austen Kleon’s newsletter on Friday and couldn’t believe that he is recommending Marion Milner’s (other) book, On Not Being Able to Paint, which I’ve just started and am underlining and noting down just as much as I had been with A Life of One’s Own. Apparently it had been a favourite also of Lynda Barry, another of my creative idols. Such synchronicity!

4. 'Gardens of Delight’ is a term from Marion Milner’s book, ‘A Life of One’s Own’, which I wrote about recently in this post