A great storm scours the earth, now and for some two hundred years, cracking down the great hornbeams and oaks of the valued past, the traditions under which we shelter. Religion and family and even architectures are tossed aside like broken fences before the wind; the rainwaters undermine the berms and levees, rending great holes through which flood every kind of filth and pestilence.
The choice anyone has is whether to blow before the wind, or settle in a ditch.
So many of us are wind-blown leaves, scattered across the earth, keeping ahead of the economic and social costs of our society. We move for work, again and again; we avoid to root ourselves, to “trap” ourselves with children; we so often see community institutions as a buffet – do you prefer Anglican or Baptist, cricket or rugby, oven pizza or pasta bake?
To those who have always lived in their place, amongst the dust of their ancestors, on the streets their grandfathers built or paid for, the choice I am articulating may seem bizarre – but so many of us have gone to University and never returned, or found work elsewhere and forgotten the old dialect, or even gone into an internal exile, living in the same place but separating ourselves from what has gone before. Windleaves, like us, have the choice, then: choose to fly, unencumbered but ultimately purposeless – or fall to the ground, settle, and in our time compost to leafmould so something new and stronger might grow.
Once “settling” might have had a pioneering (or, negatively put, colonial) sound. Now, settling has a strongly negative connotation – to settle is to accept inferiority and limitation, rather than to seek the best. No doubt one should always seek the highest and best in virtue – but there is something in that negative connotation to pluck from the refuse and reconsider.
Yes, settling means accepting inferiority and limitation. It means accepting, therefore, that we are human; that we are not immortal, do not have infinite opportunities, and cannot make of our life anything we want. This is not depressing or sad. It is depressing and sad when someone is deluded into believing they can fly, and cannot understand why their wings don’t work; that person is depressed, and their loved ones are saddened by their unmooring from the good things in their real life. Accepting limitation, accepting reality, is a blessing, because then we clearly see the good things in our life, and the real options. We cannot appreciate asparagus spears breaching the soil if we only buy them, perfect and prepackaged, from Waitrose; we cannot see the glory of Jupiter and the beauty of Venus through the neverending twilight of city lights.
Settling means turning away from many roads. To settle means not to go on elsewhere – it means not to work in certain jobs, to abandon your dreams of travel, to commit to one person, so long as you both may live (or one monastery, or one community). Those other roads have glories down them, no doubt – but they are not your road. Your road has many sloughs of despond and thorny hills, but it is your road. Strangely enough, though, the same slough would have turned up on any other road you might have taken, in any other season; the slough was settled in you from the hour of your birth. You must deal with it, here or elsewhere – but here, on this road you know, in this place you know, you are on home ground, with the advantage of familiarity.
Settling involves sacrifice (as if the Windleaves do not sacrifice, and for no return!) – but sacrifice brings life. Costless consumption brings only death – but sacrifice is the ever-present precondition of life. How else to see the physical risk incurred by a mother bearing a child, and the time and money set aside by both parents for the childhood of their offspring? How else to see the creeping buttercup and horse’s tail fed to the chickens, turned into liquid gold in the egg? How else to see the broken stalks and crushed leaves in the compost, disintegrating and being cast behind by worms, all turned to precious organics to enrich the boulder clay? All that is death and sacrifice, no doubt – and all of it brings life.
Settling requires perspective, then. It requires some acknowledgement that what is done is not done for now, or perhaps for any day you will see; it requires the perspective of leafmould. At one time I grew, and drank in the sun; then I flew, dancing in the rain. Then I settled. I settled in the meadow, and provided shelter. The strength of my form provided a wigwam for woodlice, and raincover for seeds. Next the fungus found me, translating my skeletal form to earth, turning from elastic green to crumbled brown. Then the seed I sheltered, now covered in my dust, began to grow, feeding on all that was left behind of me, so that after my death something remained of me – in the life of the courgette or the marigold. Then the bees drank from their flowers, and I became honey. The settled leaf knows many glories: the glory of drinking from Apollo’s own cup, and of the flying dance, and of sheltering, and of transformation; of nurturing, of fruiting, of becoming ambrosial sweetness.
The Windleaves never know half those glories, though, always looking for a better meadow or ditch or woodland to settle in.
Find a dell in some chalky hillside, scratched at by badgers, overhung by a willow, and settle.
