Compost | June
Reflecting on a significant birthday at the hinge of the year, plus hospice gardens, skylarks, 1000 words of summer, Celtic saints and Arthurian legends.
The Sun, The Son, The Sun
June is the midpoint of the year (the summer solstice is less than a week away) and it’s also my eldest’s birthday month. He’s turning 13 and I have a lot of feelings about this - feelings which can mostly be summed up as a sense of disbelief that it is really 13 years since I became a parent and that the not-so-tiny spark of new life I first met on a sun-soaked evening in high summer is about to become a teenager. I remember turning 13, I remember being 13, and I have a deep desire to understand what the experience feels like for him. It’s unlikely if not impossible that this desire will be fulfilled, and nor should it be - if becoming 13 is about anything, it is about marking your independence from your parents, becoming your own person. I used to feel like I knew everything there was to know about my boy, and now there is so much that is hidden, things I can only guess at.
At first glance, the Sun feels like an obvious choice for my tarot card of the month for June: the summer solstice, the longest day in the northern hemisphere, the smiling naked child riding a horse to represent the baby born 13 years ago. There’s almost 18 hours of daylight in each 24 hour period here in County Durham this month, and while the sun still rises and sets at this latitude, there’s no true darkness at this time of year, just a long lingering twilight from around midnight until dawn breaks again before 4am. The Sun card is about joy, gratitude, abundance, positive energy. It’s a reminder to connect with the simple pleasures of life, to focus on the things that bring you joy. It’s a reminder that happiness is an option, that even if it’s not something you’re able to feel at the moment it will return.
I often find the Sun quite a challenging card, which fascinates me, because it’s almost always seen as such a positive card. I think this is partly because I can feel a little triggered by abundance when it doesn’t match my internal weather and season, as I explored in last month’s Compost post:
I’m wondering whether part of my melancholy around the vibrant rush of life and colour of late spring in previous years is because I felt as though I was somehow outside it. Separated somehow from the abundance of the season. Life was passing me by in a way: the world was green and growing and seizing the moment while I was still lying dormant, waiting.
Compost | May
This is the fifth instalment of my monthly compost posts: a round up of life currently, some short pieces of life writing, my bird of the month, a tarot card or reading for the month, plus potentially some thoughts on things I’m currently reading/ watching/ listening to.
For a less straightforwardly positive interpretation of The Sun, I would focus on the way the sun illuminates everything - there’s no place to hide. Too much sunlight can be harmful (think sunburn) or make it hard to see. Endless daylight is exhausting, endless joy, endless positivity is exhausting: we need the darkness too. Like the winter solstice, the summer solstice is another hinge point in the year, as so beautifully described in Margaret Atwood’s poem about the (winter) solstice:
This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking,
After the summer solstice - the longest day - we start the slow journey back towards the darkness. The Sun can shine a light on the parts of ourselves we don’t particularly like, or have learned to hide, because we have learned that other people find these parts difficult. The Sun can therefore offer us an opportunity to integrate those shadow selves with our daylight selves, to face the parts of ourselves we find more challenging, and learn to understand and accept them.
My eldest son was very much like the Sun card as a young child. In many ways, all children are like the Sun in their unselfconscious joy in the simple pleasures of being alive in the world: being cuddled up close in their parent’s arms, eating a delicious strawberry, the patterns the sunlight makes on the bedroom wall, the noise a tower of wooden blocks makes when you knock it over. As a toddler my son was a beaming ball of smiles, always happy to meet new people, trusting that they would meet him with that same delight. It felt connected to his June birthday somehow, coming into the world in a season of warmth and ease and abundance (let’s not mention the massive thunderstorm that took place the same week as he was born and caused wide spread flooding…).
He hasn’t lost that inner light, but at nearly 13 years old it has dimmed, or he’s learned how to hide it. Inevitably, he’s learned that the world isn’t always kind, that there are unpleasant experiences that have to be endured (maths homework, a classmate being cruel), that bad things can happen to people without warning and without explanation, that humans can cause terrible harm to the world and to each other just as easily as they can nurture life and create happiness. The Sun card reminds me of that early incarnation of my son, who embodied a sense of joy and delight in the world. Parenting is a constant process of mourning the loss of previous versions of your children who you will never get to spend time with again, while at the same time feeling excited to meet each new version of them, to get to know them anew at every age.
1000 Words of Summer
I’ve been taking part in
’s 1000 Words of Summer challenge over the last couple of weeks (31 May-13 June). I’ve attempted the challenge a couple of times in previous years but never made it beyond day 4 or day 5. But last autumn I successfully completed a solo challenge to write 1000 words a day for the whole of November, so I told myself I could definitely repeat the trick for 14 days this summer. was also taking part in the 1000 Words of Summer challenge and we’ve been acting as accountability buddies for each other. It’s been a real boost to have someone to check in with each day, confirming that we’ve reached our target word count, or sharing our experiences of trying to juggle our writing with the responsibilities of parenting and of our day jobs. Thankyou Ingrid!The challenge has given me a much needed boost to try and tackle some of the big moments in my memoir project, specific events or time periods that I’ve maybe been avoiding a little. The big emotional moments that were hard to live through the first time and that I’m a bit apprehensive about reanimating in order to write about them. It’s also been a good reminder that I can write 1000 words a day. It takes careful planning and commitment, and sometimes means prioritising writing over other activities (reading a good book, playing football with my kids before tea, doing the washing up, sleeping), but it is doable - at least in short bursts. I’m hoping to take the boost that participating in this two week challenge has given me and keep it going over the rest of the summer. Although I might reduce my target to a more sustainable 600 or 700 words a day.
One of the big emotional moments I’ve been trying to write about over the last fortnight is the experience of visiting Mum in the hospice during the last two weeks of her life. It has felt a little like holding my hand over a naked flame and daring myself to keep it there for as long as possible. I’ve tried to come at it from an angle, easing myself in with some place writing about the hospice’s location, its buildings, and most of all the lush abundance of its gardens - and how simultaneously comforting and discordant I found being surrounded by so much life while I was sitting with death. Sometimes, holding myself in that time and place has become too much, and my words for the day have veered off in unexpected directions. One of these diversions, via the name of the hospice (St Kentigern’s), the links between St Asaph and Glasgow, and some minor characters from Arthurian legends, led to an exploration of the nature of truth in historical accounts, and what those accounts can tell us about the past even when they’re partly or wholly fictional.
Miracles and Truths
St Kentigern (or Cynderyn to give him the Welsh version of his name) was a sixth century missionary and bishop of the Celtic Church. He is believed to have founded churches in both Llanelwy (St Asaph) and Glasgow, churches that both eventually became cathedrals: one in the second smallest city in the UK (population c.3,500), and the other in the third (or sometimes fourth) largest (population c.621,000). In Scotland he is know as Mungo, thought to be a nickname derived from the Cumbric1 equivalent of fy nghu, ‘my dear one’. He is the patron saint of Glasgow, Penicuik, Scotland, salmon, those accused of infidelity, and against bullies.
Kentigern lived in what used to be called the Dark Ages and is now generally referred to as the Early Medieval period.2 I love this era because so much of what we know about it is a tangled web of fact and fiction. ‘Real’ historical figures interact with mythological characters, or have elements of myth and legend woven into the historical accounts of their lives. I love the detective work of trying to unpick this tapestry, to work out which parts might have really happened and which should be understood more loosely, as telling us something real and true about a person or an event but not meant to be taken literally. There are several examples of this in Kentigern’s life.
Depending on which story you read (or believe), Kentigern was conceived following the rape of his mother Teneu by a man called Owain while he was disguised as a woman. In other versions of the story, Teneu and Owain had an affair while he was married to another woman. Both Teneu and Owain were Celtic royalty: Teneu’s father was King Lot of the Gododdin3, while Owain was the son of King Urien of Rheged.4 When Teneu’s father Lot discovered that she was pregnant, he had her thrown off a cliff. Miraculously surviving the fall, she escaped in a coracle across the Firth of Forth to Culross in Fife, where she was taken in by Serf (another Celtic saint). Serf later became Kentigern’s foster father and gave him the nickname Mungo. In some stories, Teneu is later reconciled with Owain and they eventually marry.
Turning to Arthurian legend, Kentigern is nowhere to be found and Teneu has become Laudine (or sometimes Luned, which at least sounds more Welsh). Owain (or Ywain) is one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. He defeats (read: kills) the Black Knight (or sometimes the Red Knight) in single combat and goes onto marry the knight’s widow, Laudine. Owain and Laudine live together happily for several years, but he yearns to go off on another quest. Eventually he leaves, promising Laudine that he will return to her after a year, but fails to do so. When he finally returns home, she rejects him and the rest of the story recounts Owain’s quest to win her back, during the course of which he gains a lion companion, defeats a giant and two demons. He is eventually reconciled with Laudine after he rescues her from being burnt at the stake.
Returning to Kentigern himself, similar themes around infidelity, domestic violence and the threat of execution crop up in the story of one the miracles attributed to the saint. There are two nearly identical versions of this story, one set in Gwynedd and the other in Strathclyde. In both, a queen is accused of infidelity by her jealous husband. The king attempts to set his wife an impossible task by secretly throwing a gold ring he had given her into the river and then asking her to show it to him. If she cannot produce the ring, it will prove she has been unfaithful and she will be executed. The queen seeks help from Kentigern/Mungo, who orders a fish to be caught from the river and prepared for the king’s evening meal. When the king cuts the fish open, the ring is miraculously found inside and the queen is saved.
There is so much going on in these different stories about Kentigern’s life, conception and parentage. One common thread seems to be around power imbalances in relationships between men and women. We can’t know whether Teneu was a consenting partner or not in her relationship with Owain, but the punishment her father Lot sentences her to bears a strong resemblance to an honour killing. Kentigern later takes on a male saviour role by performing a miracle to save a woman from the punishment that his mother suffered. Laudine is similarly sentenced to death, for reasons unspecified but which it doesn’t feel like a stretch to guess might be related to her becoming the ruler of Owain’s castle and lands in his absence - a traditionally male role - at first on a temporary basis while he away on a quest, but then on a more permanent basis after she rejects him following his broken promise and late return. On a more positive note, Laudine holds some power in her relationship with Owain - he is punished for breaking his word to her and must work to win her back.
Bird of the Month: Skylark
Alauda arvensis, Ehedydd
It had to be the skylark for my June bird of the month. For almost a month now their songs have been a welcome companion on my twice weekly runs along the old railway lines near our house. I catch the edge of that sustained, rolling, bubbling river of song and follow the thread of it up into the sky, squinting my eyes to try and catch a glimpse of the bird, a tiny speck of darkness against the blue. Sometimes I mange to spot it, or think I do; other times it remains a magical shower of musical notes that seem to be falling from the cloudless sky. I have only just discovered that it’s only the male skylark who produces those beautiful sustained songs, rising vertically up to 200 metres into the air and singing constantly for up to half an hour, before plummeting back to the earth.
Skylarks are around 18cm in length, smaller than a starling but larger than a sparrow, a light brownish bird at a short crest on their heads that they can raise or lower. They only live for around 2 years, but can lay up to 4 clutches of eggs per year, with the young larks leaving the nest around 2 weeks after hatching. Like the curlew, skylarks nest on the ground, preferably on moorland or in meadows, so are subject to predation by foxes, weasels and adders. The collective noun for a group of skylarks is an exaltation, said to have been coined by the Medieval poet and monk John Lydgate.
The Welsh name for the skylark, ehedydd, means ‘flyer’, from ehedeg (to fly) and ydd (the suffix -er). I love the ‘does what it says on the tin’ nature of this name; if there’s one thing we know skylarks for, it’s their flying, those sustained ascents high into the skies above us, only the unending thread of their song seeming to keep them tethered to solid ground. The Latin name, Alauda arvensis, translates as ‘lark of the field’, which is equally descriptive if a little more pedestrian. They are a bird associated with fields and farmland, places close to human habitation rather than the wilderness.
The lark is associated with the morning, with dawn and the sunrise, so it feels like an appropriate bird to choose for the month of the summer solstice. I am very much a lark rather than a night owl - I do my best work first thing in the mornings (I’m writing this post at 6:15am before the rest of my family is awake). That association of larks with the morning dates back a long time: in the Knight’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer writes of “the busy lake, messager of day” while in Sonnet 29 William Shakespeare describes “the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate”. But my favourite literary lark is perhaps the one that features in Alouette, originally a Quebecois song that for reasons lost in the mists of time has somehow become a song for small children. I liked it for the tune and the rhythm, and for how sophisticated it made me feel to be singing in French, even if I didn’t understand what the words meant. I liked it even more once I learned what the words meant: they are gruesome and delightful to a child in a similar way to the Horrible Histories books and TV series.
Alouette, gentille alouette,
Alouette, je te plumerai.
Je te plumerai les yeux/ la tête/ les ailes
Lark, nice lark,
Lark, I will pluck you.
I will pluck your eyes/ your head/ your wings
Cumbric is an extinct Celtic language closely related to Welsh and Breton that was spoken in northern England and south west Scotland in the early medieval period.
Generally defined as the 600 years between the Roman Empire withdrawing from Britain c.410 and the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
The Gododdin lived in south east Scotland, in what is now Lothian and the Scottish Borders. Lothian is possibly named after Lleudun/Lot.
Rheged was a kingdom in what is now Cumbria and Westmorland in north west England. It possibly extended into Galloway.