Mid March Madness

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Our day at Embercombe

I’m sitting in bed feeling rather under the weather… the weather itself is also having a low day here on Dartmoor in the form of steady rain and low mist. In fact it’s now hard to imagine that just last weekend we briefly ran away to join the circus, inspired by sunshine and my friend Sue who works at Embercombe. For in this case the circus was in fact Embercombe’s Mid March Madness Day, to which our giant rabbit Pan had been invited to star as the Mad Mid March (sort of) Hare. As you can see from the photos, our travelling Bonehill caravan provided unusual family entertainment…. and quite a few small children were just as keen to feed grass to the long-haired lady as to the rabbit!

As I understand it, Embercombe is an educational charity and social enterprise and runs all kinds of inspiring courses for all kinds of folks in its beautiful woods, fields and gardens in the Teign Valley. I like being there because it has vitality and creativity and a kind of pioneering feel. I’d recommend you check them out at www.embercombe.co.uk. There’s something about the place and the people that makes me feel that anything is possible and that I can be part of it. I was very energised by my day in the rabbit pen…meeting and listening to young children, families, young people… One of my highlights was sitting by the fire listening to Mac, the founder of Embercombe. His story was a wonderful real life take on ‘what would you do if offered three wishes’ or similar. There was a great moment in the story when the hero had the choice of a large cheque for his personal use, or an even larger one for setting up a charity…and there we all were together enjoying the benefits of him choosing the latter…

I wonder if I could have made a choice with that kind of generosity and vision… what about you? It reminds me of one of my favourite poems by Adrienne Rich, Transcendental Etude. You really need it in its entirety but here’s a taste of the final stanza

Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with the small rainbow-colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away,
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow-
original domestic silk, the finest findings-
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.


Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance-
only with the musings of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright, silk against roughness,
pulling the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending 
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.