That Which Gives Water

Monthly Newsletter | Spain, May 2023

The monthly newsletters are an amalgamation of musings and two poems (one by another poet and one by me, as per a practice introduced to my master’s cohort by poet Alice Oswald). Sometimes I will alternate a poem for a song.

Please scroll down for upcoming course and event announcements.

---

EL Huerto de Manolo

Listen via audio:

Hello everyone,

I’ve just returned to the UK after spending the month of April visiting my family in a village in the mountains of Granada. And as I mentioned in my April newsletter, it was precisely the landing pad I needed to emerge out of the mythic Underworld of both a very long, cavernous winter, and what I sense is the completion of a long period of personal initiation and Dionysian dismemberment.

Something happens when we return to our homeland. It’s like plugging into the primordial socket that gave us life; that first animated us. Our bones respond. And they spill the wisdoms of place, our body place, into the rest of our being so that we might re-member ourselves anew.

And not only that.

Because where I went is a village at the very end of the motorway, set apart from the seizure of Anglo-Saxon tourism and expats, I was back in the lucidity and coherence of a way of life that is becoming as scarce and unwonted as hen’s teeth; an echo of an old world that is gradually being wiped out by factory farming and mass-production of goods and the cutting of resources for independent smallholders; a way of life that I was lucky enough to experience as a child with my great-grandmother Juana who was a peasant in northern Spain and whose livelihood was centred around her land and her cow - and whose fig tree this publication is named after.

Life became a ritual that month.

Robert Bly describes the difference between secular space and ritual space as the latter giving ‘something back to the man or woman who, prepared by discipline and quiet, enters it.’

Days were slow. Conversations short. The to-do lists distant and inconsequential.

Things that seemed to matter so much in the pandemonium of daily life went quiet. I didn’t know just how much I longed for that quiet until I arrived into its inner sanctum and yielded to it, on my knees, conceding to its courtship and letting it have its way with me completely.

Many an hour I sat under the same lemon tree, bursting with blossom and bees and overlooking the full-bellied Sierra Nevada mountains, intoxicated entirely first by the throbbing heat and then by the scent of jasmine that comes alive at sundown and transmutes anything that is not true into a new dream.

Afternoons were consecrated siesta time, a practice I only really participate in when I’m back in Spain, and when the heat of the day subsided and the village woke up again, I relished in the walks to collect water from the fountain that the old women dressed always in black decorated with flower pots and icons of Mother Mary. She is the god here. For women and men alike. Here she is Nuestra Señora de las Angustias, our Lady of Anguish, usually depicted with her son in her arms at the foot of the Cross. And the fountain with its mountain water is the shrine to her love and her loss, like so many mother goddesses before her, Demeter, La Llorona, Niobe of Homer’s Iliad… they all wandered the land in search of their lost children. And in the winding streets left over from the medinas of the medieval Arabs, the Mother’s image consecrates the entrances of the white houses with their plant-covered balconies and their thick tapestries veiling the doors to keep out the heat, flies and ill-wishes.

Sunday mornings were perhaps the most marked observance of all. In a land thirsting with drought, the men’s access to water for their land is sanctified. To preserve the little water there is, they each have a particular day and time to water his land. Manolo, my family’s elderly neighbour, has Sunday mornings. And so, every Sunday, my father and I would rise at dawn and scutter next-door to fetch him, and together set off to the village basins - where women still come to do laundry. Here we would direct the flow of water down the stone canals known as acequias in Spanish, and lead it down to his land.

The word acequia is derived from the Arabic as-saqiya, meaning ‘that which gives water’. This watering method is a survival of some of the old Arabic ways in Spain, the irrigation system the Arabs of the Middle Ages set up some six hundred years ago and that evolved in the arid regions of the Middle East over a period of 10,000 years.

This was my most treasured ritual - the watering of the land; watching Manolo wedge perfectly placed rocks and sheaths of corse woven burlap in particular parts of the stone canals to channel the water in the same way, the same formations and patterns and timings, that he has done for over half a century, and that echo the ways of the peoples who, with their knowledge of restoring the waters of life to places that are arid and dry, brought the first antidotes to the Wasteland in Europe that the old stories warned against.

In reminiscing about my month in the Andalusian mountains and in my longing to transmit some of its magics to you, I’m careful not to fall into the trap of romanticising the rural world and proposing an Arcadian idyll. But I hope that this month’s poems might serve and be received as a testimony and tribute to this way of life that is ending.

---

Poetry Offering

Manolo and his Mule 
(A way of life that is ending)

I come here to remember the old rhythm,
the one our bone memory knows;
that speaks in olive bark and night jasmine 
and meadows of wild poppies. 

I find it to be an antidote for the nervous mind 
that is always unsettled by one thing or another. 

Here, there is a baker 
who makes country loaves and pastries in a wood-fired oven,  
and speaks only with words that have something to say.

There is a shepherd 
who listens for the turn of the seasons; 
one of the few left who still herds his goats between pastures 
high and low, speaking the old language of weather patterns
and footprints of wild bores and deer hooves on dust,

and who worries that his daughters
don’t know how to plant tomatoes.

Vendors come from larger towns across the mountains
for the market every Thursday, 
selling olives, dried fruit and fresh vegetables, 
and jars of rosemary honey from bees 
that don't know the taste of sugar water,

while the village men in flat caps, with hard hands and loyal hearts
drink sweet wine in the hustle and bustle of the village plaza
before raising the dust in procession to the church 
that is their field,

each step rebuking the impossibility
that there is anything that is not holy.

Manolo is one of these pilgrims.
He is too old now to join the men for their morning eucharist in the plaza,
but he too makes the daily runs to his land, cane in hand,
a staff or wand for those with eyes to see,
hidden in plain sight like the wooden spoon
in the Nordic fairytales and the legends of Celtic-Iberia.

When he can't reach the oranges, 
the ones that like to grow closest to the stars,
he digs out his wooden rod that looks just like the hooked staff 
carried by bishops as a symbol for pastoral life
- the crosier -  and I can't help but think
of Psalm 23 that reads: 'He maketh me to lie down 
in green pastures: He restoreth my soul.'

The great kings and holy men
seek to emulate, still, this simple divinity 
in their regalia and their religious sceptres,

this is where it all began,
in Rumi's field beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing

where Inanna begged her beloved Damuzi
to plough the high field of her vulva

and the maiden in the Song of Solomon
longed for her lover's silken and tawny skin
which she likened to a field of wheat touched by the breeze;

where the priestesses of Demeter and Dionysus
held out their arms and poured wine from one hand
and bread from the other, their bodies not sin but sacrosanct, 
the hallowed fulcrums between Earth and gods.

Here, the fisherman is a poet 
and he comes every morning from the coast in his van; 

the old women wait for him 
on street corners in their slippers, 
and their morning chatter reverberates 
through the ochre cliffs 
that besiege the village like a fort, a threshold 
that holds this place magnificently apart, still, 
from the world of a rhythm 
too fast for a mule.

---

Rilke wrote some of the most daring poetry of the early twentieth century during his time in Andalusia, where he went on a tortured pilgrimage to find solace. This next poem is a section from his Spanish Trilogy, a tryptich poem that he wrote between 1912 and 1913 and in which I think he ultimately achieved to transmit the union between self and world that he was seeking. He finds this union in the image of a shepherd, who he encountered on one of his walks. 

The Spanish Trilogy, II
May I remember this heaven, when once more
I have the clangour of cities about me, and
Vehicles snarled in the streets, may I ,
Hemmed in by the crowd, once more recall
This earthy mountain edge, which the herd
Treads on its way home from afar.
May my spirit be of stone
And the shepherd’s daily round seem fitting to me,
As he wanders, brown from the sun, and, taking aim,
Hems in his herd with a stone’s throw, wherever it threatens to fray.
Slow of step, not light-footed, his body lost in thought
But in his stillness he’s splendid. A god
Might slip into his shape and be not thereby lessened. 
By turns he lingers and quickens his steps, like the day.
And the shadows of clouds
Pass through him, as though this vast space
Were thinking slow thoughts for him.

Be he who he may for you. Like the flame that blows by night
In the lamp’s mantle I make my dwelling in him.
A glimmer grows still. Death
Might see its way clearer.  

---

Announcements

Upcoming Dismemberment Ceremony: Sunday May 28th, 8 - 9:30pm UK.

Initiatory teachings tell us that we must learn how to die to fully live. Spiritual deaths are ways of clearing the old debris we accumulate throughout life. In shamanism, a form of spiritual death is called dismemberment. Belonging to the family of “death mysteries,” it is a process of dissolution which may lead to renewal and a return “to the bones,” the essentials of being.

These ceremonies take place monthly, on the last Sunday of every month.

Open to all genders.
8-9:30pm UK | £22

---