Winter's gift

Every month brings its gifts. February's gift is the light - light returning to remind us that dark is only for a season. I should know better - seasoned (well-seasoned) nature disciple that I am, but it gets me every time. The wonder and awe of the whole thing. 

Discussing scientific / planetary concepts is a daily event in our house. This morning it was explaining to the crafty six and a half year old that morning is morning because Earth spins on its axis as we revolve around the sun. And we call that first light dawn, and dawn turns into morning. All that before coffee. It starts early in the Holly Cottage. 

And so February brings its earth-warming light, but it takes its time. Between January and the last few dwindling days of February's reign, a slumber-full silence has been maintained. Not a silence of the cars that go non-stop, 24/7 on the main road mind. Not a silence of alarm clocks in pitch black mornings. But a silence of the earth - sleepy, dreary, brown-tired - browned off? - restful, turned inward, motioned earth-ward. Seemingly devoid of life. But no - this is dreaming time. Barely a breath or a leaf decomposed. Barely a whisper beneath a foggy shroud. But very much alive. Time to mull and ponder. 

La vie en hiver

In all that silence and respectful pause - nature drawing breath - somehow we see more.

  - The goldcrest that appeared in our garden for the first time ever this winter, flitting from leaf to leaf of sheltering leylandii allowing us occasional glimpses of his beautiful, golden head-dress -

   - And then as if not to be beaten, goldcrest's larger companion - industrious wren - catches the corner of my eye, reminding me she never tires of hunting in littering leaves left where they fell. Wren does wren's bit - helping them return to ravenous earth.

  - And there, peeping up through darkest, rotting leaves - snow-white, snowdrop beauties - heroes of winter's realm and harbingers of spring. Humble warriors that salute us in a sun-hungry world laid bare. Should they be pitied they only experience sun as something rare and hauntingly distant beyond frost beckoning clouds? No - no pity. Only celebration of those that defy the dark. 

And of course there's more - more creatures to be watched - waiting under a leaf, hiding under a rotting branch, burrowing through rich, dark, crumbling earth. Or singing from the top of an ivy clad wall. And we watch what we can, through the barest of days. 

For that is January's gift; beautiful, bittersweet and painfully for some, the longest month of all. As Winter strips everything back to the bone, January honours those bones with time and space, to see and hear more. February carefully, cautiously brings us back, back to the light - back to magnificent glorious, radiant life. 

And then, as if it never was here, Winter is done. 

A Time to Dance

Lat May I sat at the trusty – though somewhat battered by the three-year-old fella – kitchen table to write about a time to grow. Well, talk about an understatement. Where do I start?

Leaving the comfort of my well-worn battle ground of bogs and trying to get them restored was a moment filled with mixed emotion. Was I overly institutionalised? Was I too specialist? Was I too brow-beaten by the winds in the business world where nature came at the bottom of a sad and pitiful pecking order? At the National Biodiversity Conference last year I listened with great intent to eve

Red sky at night - flying over the Irish Sea,
looking back towards the west (Oct 2019).  

ry word of our inspirational flame-bearer – President Higgins. I’m not ashamed to admit that I near wept the whole way through his speech. Whether he wrote it or not, his delivery and his spoken words of camaraderie, respect and understanding for us ‘weary in the trenches folk’ hit me right in the core. I know I wasn’t alone. Sometimes we don’t know if we can go on.

With all these questions in my head, I walked on. I followed my gut and stepped off a corporate motorway onto a rugged path, with a well self-enforced speed limit, that I had never been on before. Scared? – does a duck quack? Excited? Levels were off the Richter scale, or that was nausea??? Free? As a bird. Think - off the north coast of Erris and an un-limited blue sky stretching over the horizon. Think John Lennon Free as a Bird. 

Six months later, how I have grown! Not physically (though I have spent a lot of time on my ass sitting and reading). More like - grown back into my curious, wonder and awe skin, back onto new neural pathways in my head, wriggled out of narrowing avenues and out into the limitless space of possibility. And how is that, says you? Well, I’ve had the time to read (part of the job - what a gift!). And it was science, journals, economics, philosophy, and the crossover of nature and business. Grasping nettles and taking the sting out them with understanding. Still plenty of nettles out there, takes time.

I’ve met some awesome people on this path – there are serious (wow) warriors out there armed with knowledge and understanding, and passion and fire for nature and people, together. Even to brush-off the energy of that fire feeds my own and brings to me great hope where I was probably a bit wanting. Maybe even more importantly, I got to spend more time with the hardy warriors I knew before but never really got to spend time with – you know who you are. Both these close encounters with awesome warriors have helped to rebuild – restore? – my own source of fire, to keep me in the dance. Nature’s worth dancing for, though in my heart of hearts - this I know - nature dances us.

Am I still scared? Yeah, who isn’t a bit scared if they are honest. Life is uncertain, but I have today. And tomorrow will be a gift. Am I excited? Even more than I thought I could be. The future needs us all to work together, from every millimetre of this intricate web. Not one more important than the other, though some can bear a more powerful blow to get us on the right course. And plenty of heavy lifting for us all to do, so hang in there. 

Free? Still flying, high. 

Time to Grow

May has passed its peak and there’s barely a thought of a time without full leaf cover or the rainbow meadow patch that has replaced our drills of spuds. It’s been a busy time. Getting used to the thoughts of leaving a work that has consumed much of my life to date, launching a book (click here if you've been on the moon the last month! www.catherinewilkie.ie) and now getting used to thoughts of a new horizon, already beckoning me and only days away.

Growing Time - bring on the bees, 
and the wigwam!

When I started working on bogs I didn’t know a blanket bog from a turf bank, or a brown moss from a less brown moss (mossy brains will get this reference!). I started my postgraduate research in 1996 at a time when bogs (peatlands) were well off the mainstream radar and also when I was probably more engaged with high level academic notions of ecological restoration. Rather than the real thing. Which involves diggers and dozers, and lots of welly wearing by the way.

Twenty-three years later and I humbly bow to the great wisdom of the wet-scapes that bogs and fens are part of, and the lessons that I have slowly and steadily taken on board as I moved through the bog-fairs of Canada, USA, Fenno-Scandinavia, Central and Eastern Europe. I never made it to the southern hemisphere tropical swamps, and much to the disappointment of a long-held aspiration, I’ve never witnessed Orang-utan playing in the branches of their very vulnerable natural habitat. But I have been eaten alive by midges on a breeze free Mayo day, and I have battled with mosquitoes in central Finland! Again, it’s the small things that really put is in our place…

The great events surpass the biting insects though and I have had the great privilege of steering some spectacular restoration work. And I have witnessed the power of nature to forgive the sins of us over-eager humans, by working its natural wisdom and healing to over-turn loss of habitat and species in the space of but a few Earth years. Nature does so much, but it is our nature to recognise when we must stop, understand, and duly restore and rewet as the case usually is with heavily modified wetlands. Nature shows no emotion, nature just gets on with it. There are no mistakes, just lessons learned and new horizons.

And so, do the same. I leave one world, carrying with me the lessons and memories that are etched on my soul. The memory of Mayo skies that go on forever, the wonderful isolation of being immersed in fieldwork yet never alone. The sound of gurgling water moving under your feet and not a clue of what secret pipes are flowing. Finding a new species, or finding a species wearing a different persona and it making an eejit out of you for days. Learning of liverworts and lichens and how the small things matter. My own reflection in a dark and peaty pool that is centuries old. A surprised Otter on a lonely riverbank. Cranes dancing and calling in the early morning Polish mist. Making a dried-out bog wet again, and hearing the birds sing again. Such gifts I carry with me. And friendships, lifelong though many over distances longer. 

To new horizons, though also old. Back to the heart of learning – of pushing boundaries of the mind, of stepping out of a comfort zone, yet with the comfort that nature has my back. Next week I begin my work with the indelible Professor Jane Stout in Trinity College Dublin. She, and others will be working with me to unravel the concept of Natural Capital Accounting – bringing nature onto the balance sheets. That’s right – water, soil, habitats, the whole kit and caboodle. Will it work? I don’t know. But it’s definitely worth a try. I won’t be trying to monetise nature – nature doesn’t do money – but this system may work to target restoration and identify the weak points in the system. The fragile bits that nature-based solutions can fill.

So, my path has changed. I carry my scars and my lessons, and I venture out to new horizons. 

Time to grow indeed.  

March On

Marching.

Snowdrops a'plenty and bright purple and deep mustard coloured crocuses are littered around the Holly Cottage paths. A golden lesser celendine flower is starting to peep up from a country green base. This is the colour we have. Tiny specks that draw the eye in an otherwise green and grey land. Fifty shades of green - and grey ;) 

It's a challenging month. We've been so good - biting our tongues in January and accepting the lingering darkness. Making the most of it with warm turf fires and hearty stewpots. And we didn't shirk at the bracing cold and snow. And February too - we welcomed the sun on St. Bridgid's Day - Imbolc - and we said, "she's just around the corner now". Within a hair's breadth. And we kept the fires burning and we waited for the sentinels of spring - crocus and pluirini sneachta - to lift our spirits. And they did. And they still do too.

But the warm sunny day of the 1st of February must have meant that Cailleach was gathering her firewood for a long winter. And the dry cold that whipped our cheeks last week, and the howling winds of last night that almost wrestled the towering trees that line the estate wall down, stand testament to that. And sure, why not resort to ancient celtic mythology that has been distorted by millennia of mis-interpretation to explain the weather? Even a scientist might sometimes rest back on the couch of imagination and explain things away by the complete mythological. It makes for a better fireside tale than "the empirical data tells us that..."Nerd ;) Oh my life...

Warriors of the cold - respect. 

And so - the long awaited March has arrived. March is on. Accompanied by a dusting of snow just for good measure. And while daffodil buds peep up for a look, still we wait. Will they decide not to come this year? Will they stick their heads back in the cold earth and just say - "nah, let's sit this one out?" But no they won't. We know that. They March, on. Just like us. 

Spring will come. Any day now. It will descend upon us from an apparent nowhere and we will magically emerge from our heavy cloaks of winter and forget that it was ever here. No dwelling on the dark forces that were, and those that are still to come. And that my friends - that, is the real magic. 

Stay strong, stay ready. March, on. 

A Journey of 1000 miles

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Lao Tzu (604 BC - 531 BC)

The first step marked by blue skies,
not North American but Irish Birch

I must confess my ignorance on this one - I had no idea that this quote came from Lao Tzu, he being  of Chinese philsopher and poet renown. An alternative translation from the Chinese (Bynner 1944) would read as here at your feet a thousand-mile journey have birth. It's an apt saying for all of us taking on new projects, new challenges or setting about making a change in our lives. The first step is taken with the idea in our minds and then if the idea is to come to fruition, feet begin to move step by step forward, onward and onward, inching closer and closer to the goal at the end of the proverbial 1000 mile mark. 

Most of our days here are defined by walking -  walking to the woods, walking up the town, walking around the garden. One of the main reasons I was attracted to this house all those three years ago was its proximity to the woods - a place where a walker could go everyday with a boisterous Holly and always see something new. Or see something that is the same thing yet completely different from a change in perspective depending on my own outlook, or my own frame of mind. So when a call to walkers was issued by a colleague in Chicago to embark on a 1000 mile journey, well of course my interest was piqued. The call comes from Liam Heneghan - ecologist and writer - of DePaul University, Chicago. Liam draws inspiration from the walking of Robert Llyod Praeger. Prager (1865-1953) - for those outside of Ireland - was the veritable godfather of all Irish naturalists and an inspiration to all of us who passed through the Botany Departments of Irish Universities since the 1950s.  You can read all about him in Liam's article. Liam's call is to all interested in walking and those with a keen naturalist's eye - no expertise or qualifications necessary. The call is to walk in the spirit of Praeger in your chosen area - it can be urban or rural or somewhere in between - and marvel at the small things you might otherwise have overlooked in a less attentive mode. There is already a growing community of walkers that can be followed under the #1000UrbanMiles on Twitter. 

Through a portal of Hazel
12/11/2013

For our part, it will be a matter of walking where we can, when we can. For the most part it will be Alannah, Holly and myself but I do hope to rope others in along the way. We consciously became part of the #1000UrbanMiles community last Tuesday, and in the interest of accuracy I have added the #1000IrishMiles to make a clear distinction between the urban streets of Chicago and greater USA cities and the highways and byways of my own Irish countryside. I confess that I am no Praeger and I don't find myself  stopping to identify every last moss and liverwort as I go, despite my great training under the UCD Botany and Zoology Departments (when they existed back somewhere in the 1990s). But I do appreciate everything I see, and I hope to meet others along the way that can point out the more subtle minutia of interest that my macro lens overlooks. And 1000 miles is nothing really - nothing over a year. And walking is such a transformative process, beta brainwaves turning into alpha brainwaves and all that stuff. That is of course once you remember to switch the mobile device off so the ringtones don't upset the perfect wave forms. 

Now if we were to run it, well that would be another story altogether....