Digging in the Light
Rediscovering wonder with Seamus Heaney and the imagination of Earth.
Apologies for the late posting today everyone…Technical issues.
Every writer knows it: how a blank page can face you with a cold stare, with a dead-eyed look defying you to act. An oft quoted instruction on writing is that you have to show up, same time, same place, and no matter how good or bad it is going you sit there and you don’t get up. You keep digging until something is brought into the light.
Where does inspiration come from? From outside or from within? Will I look outside my window or walk along the shore and call upon lady-muse to gift me with that rumbling of excitement that an emerging spark of an idea can gift? Or is it better to sit still, close down the eyes, draw the blinds, enter a place of no sound, none but that of one’s own breath, and wait.
Today, as I sit before that blank page, my attention is drawn inward, perhaps because the energy of nature itself is turning that way.
The energy of Autumn moves inward and down, and I love that about this season. Our imaginations, the inward looking eye, is being drawn down from the tips of the trees, down from the sun no longer rising, down along the trunks as they are revealed - stripped of their summer dress, down to the forest floor, carpeted with leaves, new arrivals, generous mounds of leaf fall - an offering to the place we began and are returning to - the soil.
Gardeners are being asked to attend to the soil, to return to first principles - ‘we don’t grow plants, we grow soil.’ The forests do it without our help. Nobody needs manage a forest, it a closed system, designed by nature, outputs become inputs, leaves become fertility, breaking down into mulch, into earth, into food for the great soil life beneath our feet. The great gift of gardening - to gift us patience, gift us a doorway into nature-time, to move beyond instant gratification, so we may work today for the promise of reward far in the future, in summer maybe, in the new year.
So, I am drawn inwards, but the soil in my garden asks me to venture outwards.
So I take my van to Garrylucas beach, unload old plastic compost bags stuffed into each other, soiled with previous missions from past autumns. How many times have I re-used them now? I take a rake, and three pairs of gloves - because this morning I had two volunteers. We step onto the sand, beside morning walkers, and along the shore line, with gentle whisps of wave shimmering and shuffling up the sand to accompany our work, we begin to gather seaweed. It lies there in a low mound running in a line halfway up the beach. Predominantly today it is kelp, the great oceanic forest of kelp that lie off the Atlantic coast and finds it footholds on the rocks, the deepest of seaweeds, only dislodged and discarded by the sea when the waves are strong and churning at a considerable depth and strength. So this kelp whispers of the seas moods in the days just gone by, it was fresh and glistening in the morning light, like thin strips of bright leather, burnished, lashed by saltwater and constant thrashings, belts of glassy candy. Bend - lift - cut the stalk or snap it clean. raise the fresh strands before ones eyes, shake off the excess sand and stuff it in the bag. Fifteen bags we fill and walk them up to the van.
This seaweed is an age-old soil conditioner, and every year I gather it to dress the soil where I grow vegetables. For centuries along the Irish coast, seaweed has been gathered. After storms, families would walk the shore with carts and donkeys, collecting the glistening kelp and wrack cast up by the tides. To gather it still today is to feed oneself in the fullest sense of the word. A profound confirmation of living in right relation with the natural world. The deep satisfaction of partaking in a task as repeated for generations. It’s brings a sense of wholeness, of being in tune with the turning of the seasons. I’d make a garden just to collect seaweed.
I admit, for some years whilst studying organic horticulture I seriously ‘nerded out’ on soil biology. It was just too damn fascinating, it’s like nature’s greatest hidden miracle. Why would Darwin dedicate countless hours to studying the earthworm? Because……no, don’t get me started on earthworms. Don’t get me started on the vast complexity of the world beneath our feet - billions of microscopic life-forms in a teaspoon of soil…infinity in a grain of sand…
This is mushroom season - those fruiting bodies of the original world-wide web, or wood-wide web - the mycelial network beneath the forest floor. This complex web of mycelia, the fine filaments that spread in vast, interconnecting, inter-communicative networks, living symbiotically with plants and trees - feeding them and receiving nourishment in return. They are, in fact, central to the vitality of any healthy ecosystem. When the folk singers of old sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” about the dust bowls of Oklahoma - well, the flowers were gone because the soil was turned to dust, the mycelial network destroyed, and with it the life of the land.
Colin Tudge in The Secret Life of Trees laid it out clearly;
'Many of the toadstools that are such a delight in autumn.....are the fruiting bodies of fungi which below ground, they are locked into mycorrhizal associations with the roots of trees, and help them to grow. Thus the fungi are even more valuable than they seem. The wild mushrooms and toadstools are often only a tiny part of the whole fungus. The whole subterranean mycelium, including the mycorrhizae, sometimes covers many acres and weighs many tons. Forest fungi, mostly hidden from view, include some of the largest organisms on earth.'
I became fascinated by this when studying organic horticulture. It’s the equivalent of the Western canon if you were studying English literature - you can lose yourself in the myriad intricacies and branching associations of the mycelial world. It’s symbolically rich with meaning: the interconnectedness of all life. It inspired me to base my main practical project during the course on it. I inoculated isolated soil with wild mycelium collected in the woods and used it to grow the same two varieties of plants, both with and without the mycelial soil.
After my course, I travelled overland through France and Spain and arrived at Sunseed Desert Technology, a sustainble living project in Almeria, Spain. Two-week turned into a three year on-and-off journey living between Spain and Ireland. I got to work creating my own garden, creating soil for the dry desert ground, lauding over the success of my compost, happy as the veritable Irish pig-in-shite, and enjoying some of the most rewarding, challenging, and rather wild years of my life. It was just what I needed, just what we all need at that stage in life.
That kind of experience never leaves you. We all at some moment get hooked by something and it stays with us. It has always stayed with me how my fascination with soil life sparked a series of connections that brought me to Spain and helped catapult me into a new chapter of my life.
When I look back now, I can see how that thread - from seaweed to soil, from the unseen mycelium to the strange rhythm of desert life - has continued to guide me. Working with the earth teaches a kind of patience that the modern world has almost forgotten. It’s the same patience the blank page demands: to show up and to trust that something invisible is at work beneath the surface. Everything begins unseen, in the dark. And what grows depends on how we tend that darkness, how willing we are to take the time and care.
And so; to write, to garden, to live - they’re all the same act: to tend what’s unseen until it comes shining to the surface, glistening, for a moment, in the morning light.
With these thoughts musing through my mind, what a pleasure it has been to sit down with Seamus Heaney these last days - a writer who dug with his pen.
This month marked the publication of The Poems of Seamus Heaney, a complete collection of all his poetry. On the inside sleeve, John Carey is quoted:
“More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of.”
I’ve been enjoying the book while staying at my parents’ house. I opened it at random to his 1991 collection Seeing Things and began to work my way slowly through each poem. There, I found again one of my favourites - Markings. And as I read it again, it unfolded even further, revealing new gifts and revelations, like the poem itself could be teased open some more, like soil being brought forth into the morning light.
On the surface, the second verse simply describes playing ball with friends as a child, late into the evening. But the language is so sublimely precise that the image floats in a timeless light:
Youngsters shouting their heads off in a field
As the light died and they kept on playing
Because by then they were playing in their heads
And the actual kicked ball came to them
Like a dream heaviness, and their own hard
Breathing in the dark and skids on grass
Sounded like effort in another world . . .
It was quick and constant, a game that never need
Be played out. Some limit had been passed,
There was fleetness, furtherance, untiredness
In time that was extra, unforeseen and free.
Heaney unlocked the door to an early memory I had forgotten, his words brought it rushing back into the present. I could feel it distinctly again - being a kid, and pausing during a game of ball on the green late on a summer’s evening. I knew it then - that some limit had been passed - like time had dissolved into a boundless ocean and I was floating there, aware of the vastness of it, the gift of it. Aware but unable to understand, but not needing to, because I was in it and of it - out beyond tiredness, just a boy with life pulsing through him……unforeseen and free.
But the poem opens into something larger. Heaney reminds us that at any age, in any season, imagination remains our deepest inheritance - a sacred gift, always there to be met.
The poem moves to his father gardening, marking out lines along the soil before turning up its gifts towards the light.
Our imagination is like that, like soil - a place where creation begins, where the spark, the pulse, the richness we cultivate bears fruit and brings it glistening into the light. So why should we care about the health of the Earth’s soils? Because it is synonymous with the very health of our inner worlds. It is our birthright to cultivate and nourish a beautiful inner world, and it is fed in kind by the sweet and rich diversity of the Earth upon which we walk.
Heaney knew that. And his genius was to help us remember it too.
You can read the full poem here.
One more thing before I go……
Last week I mistakenly put the video post behind a paywall, thus many of you would not have been able to access it. My apologies. I have changed the settings now for anyone who still wishes to listen in.
Actually two things….
My Instagram is @daithi_sol for those of you wondering