Direction of Travel

Almost a week ago, I was sitting hugging my kids in the ambient light of Allendale Village Hall in Northumberland, listening to the wondrous Karine Polwart performing at the Allen Valleys Folk Festival, before heading over the North Pennines with my daughters to splash in puddles and scurry up and down muddy banks for fun.

As I let my eyes relax to enjoy the sparkly bird decorations above our heads, I listened to Karine conjure stories and songs that bring nature and humanity and justice to life in a way that only she can, including her song ‘Heartwood’ (normally performed as part of Spell Songs and based on the poetry of Robert MacFarlane in ‘The Lost Words’, illustrated by Jackie Morris).

“Would you hew me to the heartwood, Cutter?

Would you lay me low beneath your feet?

Listen to my sap mutter

Hear my heartwood beat”

We could not have know then that, just a few days later, someone would be sneaking out under cover of darkness and stormy weather to intentionally cut down a most famous and sacred local tree, the one that had stood at Sycamore Gap for hundreds of years. It is hard to quantify the strength of feeling that rippled around the north east of England that morning. Tears were shed all round for the desecration of an iconic place that had been a local monument, a place of heritage and memory, a site of ashes scattered and loves professed, a ‘thin place’ that had inspired photography, painting, novels and songs a thousand times over. Sometimes a tree is more than just a tree.

Within 24 hours, a teenager was under arrest and, at the time of writing, an older man also is now under arrest. Many were left with the same question, ‘Why?’.

Direction of Travel

In a completely different area of my life, I spend a lot of time involved in the governance or mentoring of community or social enterprises, acting as a trustee, practical supporter or sometimes a fundraiser. I’ve never considered this my natural habitat by any stretch (paperwork is physically painful for me and paint is much more preferable), but having benefitted from people teaching me HOW exactly to effect change in my own neighbourhood growing up, it’s basically just my turn to pass that on after twenty years of learning. Good things begin with good ideas and beautiful vision, but they also involve knowing how to fill in forms, mount campaigns, look for resources and persuade people to believe in something. When I’m in these situations, my artist brain is often amused by some of the turns of phrase commonly used in more corporate environments… ‘circle back’, ‘conflict of interest’, ‘direction of travel’.

It’s a real privilege to volunteer on these things, but lately it has also offered a particularly acute bird’s eye view over all of the sadness, hardship, economic struggle and burnout that is occurring across the country, as good people struggle to keep going and hope is in short supply at times. There are ordinary people everywhere doing what they can with scant resources, to tackle the issues of environment, youth mental health, food and fuel poverty and more. For the most part, they are so tired.

So back to the Sycamore. When the worst occurred, people naturally took to social media to decry the wanton vandalism, to speculate about motive, to declare the symbolism of our broken relationship to nature. The most repeated idea I saw was a variation on ‘Why would someone do this, particularly a young person?’. I will not pretend to know about this precise case and will not speculate beyond the facts, but in the light of it all, I think of the proverb ‘The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’.

I wonder what gets us to the place where a young person (we assume) will brutally destroy something beautiful that sustains life, but I also feel like we knew this is where we are- it just really hurts to SEE it. From observing all of that dimming hope and from working around young people a lot, it doesn’t feel so surprising. Are we really ready to grapple with what it must feel like to be growing up as a child or teenager right now, met with the daily media messaging that your predecessors may have well and truly destroyed everything almost beyond repair before you even arrived? Are we ready to notice the violence coming from some young people, the outrage coming from others or the despair in the voices of wee kids who already have seen too much? Could the record highs in youth mental health issues and school refusal be an entirely natural reaction to our communal direction of travel? Whatever this all is, it wasn’t children and young people who created it.

It feels strange in a way to react so strongly to the felling of this particular tree when we know how much deforestation is going on, or to mourn a tree at all when there is so much struggle and even serious youth violence in the same week, but these things are interdependent. Perhaps this moment of grief over a tree is a watershed, perhaps we know deep inside ourselves that it might symbolise our direction of travel. Perhaps it’s one of our many wake up calls that nature is not alright, that our young people are not alright, that our attitude to community and shared existence is not alright.

I don’t know, I’m not an expert- I’m just a person who makes books and stories for the aforementioned young people. I wonder about how to create wonder and story for children who know far too much already. To me it feels like sadness and hope mixed together this week; the roots under the bludgeoned stump are still alive but it may take time and co-operation to protect and help it grow once again. It can happen, but right now it hurts.

In a wee bit of sadness and stubborn hope,

Gill

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So as not to end on a downer, I’m really pleased to see local author LJ Ross sending some positivity into the world by launching the Lindisfarne Children’s Prize, an inaugural writing prize for north east primary children on the theme of trees. Her famous bestseller ‘Sycamore Gap’ is one of many of her books inspired by the North east landscape, and she’s a shining example of someone who is generous in building up the place in which she lives.

Also on trees, I thought I’d share this new artwork which is in my home, a print of an oil painting by gifted local artist Jayne Parker Johnson. I once photographed my babies in the bluebells under that tree and it’s in my company’s namesake (Bluebell & Wren).

Finally, to complete the tree theme, you might like to learn about a beautiful woodland social enterprise in Scotland called ‘Beechbrae’ (And you’ll find a great song about a 100 year-old tree there called ‘Rebecca’ by Karine Polwart at the end of this video).

This drawing was inspired by a gorgeous photo taken by a friend James Ogilvy.