Digging deep

wandering a desire line through mud and memory

I love autumn. At least, I think I do. 

What I actually love is the idea of autumn. The pumpkin-spice-flavoured Instagram version, not the reality. 

I hold autumn in such hopeful regard that every year, while I’m immersed in the unbearable heat of summer, I picture myself in days to come. Cooler, softer, balmy, golden weather days. Days with a crispy underfoot coating of colourful leaves. Light scarves and proper walking boots days, when I can finally undertake long and rewarding walks in tolerable temperatures without the risk of sweat-induced foot rot. 

I forget—every freaking year—that autumn only brings with it a whole new set of challenges. 

This is the season of mud.

When I published my last post but one—an invitation to you, dear reader, to explore your memories with a gentle sensory walk—I think I was subconsciously in that Instagram mindset. I imagined you delighting in fabulous memories of autumns past, inhaling the soft, warm scent of bonfires and damp grass. 

But it’s rained nearly every day since I published. A month ago, the country park where I frequently take myself for a human walk without the dictatorial influence of a poodle’s nose, and where I planned to take my own sensory walk, is under water. From the top of our hill, I can see that the temporary lake that emerges every winter, flooding the low lying fields and making the riverside path impassable, is already in place.

At home, our badly drained garden lawn has turned to a quagmire. Even the dog refuses to venture onto the saturated ground for a wee. Instead, he picks his way around the edges, feet lifted high like a dressage pony in slow motion, searching carefully for a patch that’s just tolerable enough to release his load.

Nevertheless, I wanted to get out for my own sensory walk—so I’d be ready and able to share the experience with you. Real work is about to get real busy and I wanted to get ahead. 

We’ve had one day of sunshine. But with the impending promise of more work than we can handle, I also wanted to get ahead on a long overdue autumn garden tidy up. So I cheated. 

I didn’t go for a walk. Instead, I plugged myself into my own audio and tried to tune in to the sensory prompts I’d given you while cutting back invading brambles from next door and reclaiming the veg patch from an explosion of fennel seedlings. 

Even without a prompting audio track, gardening invariably brings up a raft of memories and stories—and plans for future memories. There’s the regret at having planted that first fatal fennel seedling. There’s the rare pride I still feel at having converted our front garden from a 1960s wonderland of heather and hebe into a productive food growing space—a lockdown project that kept me sane at the time—quickly followed by the guilt of having let it all go over this past season, distracted as I was with “real” work and writing work and an uncharacteristic lack of physical energy. 

Then there’re the plans for the future—the ongoing and niggling intention to finally get my head around succession sowing and make my haphazard delivery match my meticulous planning. 

By the time I stepped back from the here and now and lined up the audio, I was already awash with thoughts and ideas. I had to make an active choice to stop what I was doing, to re-align my thinking and become more intentional about following the prompts I’d set for you and for myself.

And when I did—

• I lifted the leaves of the bloody plantain and I saw that the sheltering clumps of tiny mushrooms I’d neglected to photograph two days earlier because the light wasn’t quite right, had already melted into mass of mycelium tendrils—a reminder that nature doesn’t wait—and neither should I if I want to capture those moments.

• When I picked up the garden fork and began lifting invading clumps of grass from the strawberry bed, clumps that clung to the sodden soil, I smelled that soil. That cool, heavy autumn weight of it rich with decomposing leaves. 

• I heard the one-sided conversation of a dog walker on the street pleading with their furry pal to ignore some irresistible morsel buried in the verge. And the soft—so soft—twittering of our garden robin who always joins me on these adventures in soil.

• I felt the physical struggle of up-rooting that damn fennel whose tap roots are the straightest and deepest and most fibrous of any I’ve ever tackled. And the increasing weight of my own feet as, bit by bit, my shoes picked up a volume of damp, coagulating earth.

And when I let go of the present, when I’d quieted my chattering monkey mind and allowed all I had inhaled through my nose and my eyes to sink back, what did I return to?

Mud. I went back to mud. Mud and soil.

Cutting out thoughts from the week past is impossible. Inevitably, the idea of the cow path is still in my mind. And so I’m taken back to my days on the reserves. Days when digging and mud and cow paths combined.

Cow paths, desire lines, social trails. The paths that emerge when the shortest route between a two points hasn’t been officially marked but is walked anyway. The more heavily a path is used, the more it’s eroded, the more obvious it becomes—and so the more heavily it’s used. Once a new path has been etched across grass or trampled through the undergrowth, its use, sanctioned by other walkers, becomes more acceptable. 

In my days working on the reserves, we were in constant battle with desire paths—especially in winter when all paths turned to mud. Instead of sliding their way along a river of slime, walkers would step to the edge of a path and walk on vegetation. In doing so, they made that path even wider. Either that, or they’d find a logical but destructive cut-through to avoid a dip that turned into a quagmire after heavy rain.    

In our battle to limit erosion and protect delicate spring bulbs, we built fences alongside the major paths to direct and limit the damage. Beautiful dead wood and brush fences. Habitat for beetles and bugs. But there was one desire path that got completely away from us.

It took walkers off the top path—avoiding a steep and energy-sapping climb that served no purpose except to plunge them back down the hill on the other side—and took them down to the old railway line—a path that was mercifully free of mud raised as it was above the surrounding woodland and embedded with previous centuries of industrial clinker and gravel. 

We built and rebuilt and extended a forbidding fence along the entry to this path over and again. And every time, determined walkers would simply add another ten feet to the desire path and skirt around our battlements. In trying to limit its growth, to restrict access, we unwittingly contributed to the path’s expansion and even greater damage.

This once small desire path became known as The Motorway—a name that acknowledged our powerlessness in the face of endless expansion.

We gave in.

We couldn’t deny the logic of the route. And a few years later we got funding to convert the mammoth mud track to a proper hogging path that defied the winter mud and limited the temptation (and the need) for it to keep getting wider. Once completed, the motorway became our own main route from the volunteer tool store to the top path. I mean—it was the most sensible route.

As I’m finishing this piece on grey Saturday, my eyes are drawn away from my screen by the one bright spot of colour in the garden. Days after I’d carefully cleared the lawn of any remaining dog-gifts and mowed the late season explosion of grass, the mahonia has scattered a frosting of yellow petals across the edges of the now luminous green lawn. And behind it, at ground level and partially obscured by a cranesbill clump, I spot something that needs my attention. 

It’s a hole. 

At the far end of one of the oak planks that comprise our garden fence where the land gently falls away. A new hole adjacent to one I’d previously blocked to keep the garden secure and the dog contained. Someone has decided that this particular route needs re-opening, and has dug around the far edge of my blockade. 

So this is why Pickle has been so excited to explore the undergrowth the last few days. Mr/Ms Fox has re-established their own desire path through the garden. I have no problem with foxes visiting the garden. I do have an issue with them opening a Pickle-sized hole in our perimeter. 

So that’s what I’ll be doing on tomorrow. Donning my mud-weighted gardening shoes once more to thwart another foxy desire line.

I’m delighted that several Root Stories readers chose to share some of the results from their own sensory walks.

Fotini Masika poet, photographer, and author of “tomasikaki” found her deliberate attention brought her a moment of joyful communion with an autumn-flowering crocus on her walk.

“Too many sensory details and feelings to share here in a comment, but by deliberately paying attention I feel like a child again. And that is an amazing feeling -- to be astonished with every little thing around you. I saw the other day for the first time in my life (and I am 46) a crocus flower. A single tiny flower in a hill slope that is still vibrant in my mind's eye. Oh, the joy!”

Fotini turned her walk into the underworld of memory into a poem which you can read here.

Poem #41

Susie Mawhinney, who writes (and photographs) A hill and I walks daily on hill outside her home in France shared the magic of her most recent walk. I believe her observations are from before I published the exercise, so not a result of it, but the photo she shared, and her description are so magical, I just have to share them.

Susie Mawhinney’s French hillside fogbow

Yesterday morning was a beautiful - actually, 'beautiful' feels like a lame word to use because it was so much more than that, lets call it a sublimely magical, breathtaking morning instead... I returned feeling high as a kite, my husband even said to me, 'I want some of what you're on!' I always feel elated after a walk but yesterday was one I will never forget, despite having walked those same steps a thousand times before. Everything, the air, the colours, the sounds... all were as if I'd stepped into a paradisiacal garden of Eden and just to highlight the whole effect, Mother N sent a fog bow which I have never ever been lucky enough to see before! 

The entire morning will never be forgotten!

It seems I wasn’t the only one who chose to make the active mediation part of the exercise a little more active by listening to the audio while gardening. SuddenlyJamie  of Inner Wilderness Unlimited discovered an unexpected peace in the exercise.

“This was lovely and so inspiring, Miranda. … I was actually doing some late-season weeding while I listened, and that was the perfect activity for the exercise - so many sensory experiences to notice! It was also telling that once your audio ended, I didn’t jump right into listening to something else (which is my usual impulse). I was very content to be in the silence. I felt more peaceful than I have in days.”

If you haven’t yet tried your own sensory walk, you can find the original article, exercise and audio over here. Share your own experience at any time in the comments or in the subscriber chat.