When one millimetre is progress enough

What the land teaches, the season echoes — on learning to listen

Greetings from the moss,

Gloved foxes wear candy store pink
Laddered ferns, fledgling fractals

Summer is high, yet the breeze has turned; from the north west under cloud it carries a chill that settles in my stomach. I have the sense that this is the beginning of the end. Summers are short in the North, and precious.

Words, like rain, seem elusive at present. I can drink in the season visually, but find little eloquence with which to describe the sights for you. If art is a mirror of self, the words now feel reversed and unclear. To stay the path, I’m trying to remind myself what I do in a single sentence:

Climate talk often overlooks the tiny details; here is nature’s enchantment, a call to notice and to care.

It’s something to work on.

I’m thinking of taking a break during August, to simply be, which I haven’t done for a long time. Creativity can’t be forced, and I can feel resistance here.

The Weight of Summer

From the many photos I took last week I find little that encapsulates the mood of softly misty July mornings. Emerald green can sometimes be too much. Here are snatches of the melody that I tried to entrain, remixed with words from the last two summers when perhaps I said it a little better.

Sometimes the point of photography is a picture; mostly it’s the encouragement to notice, to be outdoors, to slip through glass into somewhere else.

The Transience

I forget how precious these moments are, how drop-dead gorgeous the ordinary can be. I forget that as the sun rises the water does too and such moments are short-lived, to be seized, devoured greedily so that they nourish the soul.¹

MEADOWSWEET (Filipendula ulmaria)

The grasses are as notes dancing along the staves of the verge. My pace slows as I stop and bend low to look more closely, and sample snatches of song with the camera.²

Back home, as the sun breaks through, summer on the bank has intensified, shifting in seven days to the riches of ruby and gold. It is the smallest things that still enchant me the most, such as wavy hair grass (Deschampsia flexuosa) living up to its name.

Wavy hair grass, waving

The Settling

Like the background to the grass, I am looking forward to slipping into the softness of season. I could draw other parallels—soil benefitting from a fallow period, dough needing to prove—but the most appropriate one comes from the moss itself.

Everything I’ve done since I came here has been gradual; an accumulation of photographs, sketches, and letters—digital files and pieces of paper deposited over time. 5 years of visual art celebrating this place, 3 years of writing on Substack—160 letters to date. Yet the moss builds by a mere 1mm each year. This isn’t a numbers game, though so much online encourages this mindset. The moss won’t support fast growth and perhaps I am slow in recognising that I too need to conserve energy to make meaningful work.

I had it in mind to write another letter next week, on July 31st, but I’m going to save some precious drops of summer joy to share with you when I return in September. It feels something of a relief to write this. I’ll still be around; I will undoubtedly share the occasional moment in Substack Notes, and I’ll certainly be enjoying the articles that land in my own inbox. I will sign off by wishing you the opportunity, whether it is summer or winter, for your own fallow period over the next few weeks.

Before I do, an apology if you read my letters via the Substack app on iPhone. For some reason, last week’s letter doesn’t render and opens to a black screen; the app then freezes. It works fine on iPad or desktop; hopefully it’s a one off glitch and at some stage Substack tech may tell me what caused it. I may resort to rebuilding the post from scratch, but in the meantime if you missed it, this link should work: Summer’s Serenade.

Until next time,

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1. From When we Keep Forgetting: Remembering Nature’s Gifts.

2. From Music on the Breeze: The Melody we Pass Each Day