The time it takes ...

I am sitting in the sun on the verandah of our house in the Algarve, which is still such a surprising thought, that we have a house in Portugal.  It is a wintry sun, lovely and warm and consoling.  The laptop is living up to its name, and sits comfortably on my lap as I type.  

I designed our new gate!

I love the sun, understand the ancient Egyptians completely, would celebrate the sungod Ra if believing in gods was something I did.  

I think I am like my gramps, who worshipped the garden, the trees.  He quoted this little poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney: 

"The kiss of the sun for pardon, 

The song of the birds for mirth, 

One is nearer god's heart in a garden, 

Than anywhere else on earth."

While granny went to church and played the organ there every Sunday, gramps refused to ever set foot in a church again, after surviving the Battle of the Somme.  Who would?  

A tree-god

I find gardens very soothing.  Whenever I feel sad in my life, the beach or the garden have always reassured me.  It's something about green and blue, all those elements that make up a person are mirrored in the Outside.  

Illustration for a book never published.

Our salty blood loves the ocean, our bones recognise their green nourishment in vegetable gardens.  Our little souls have such a need for roots, just like the trees have.  And sunshine lights our eyes, performs magic with our bodies as it does with every plant on earth.  

Hope Jahren in her book Labgirl, wrote this amazing paragraph about leaves: 

"The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling your thoughts of leaves. "

Which is an absolutely gobsmacking thought. 

Creating a cyanotype

A cyanotype of leaves.
Sunlight creating an image.

I was observing our resident Orange Orbweaver the other day, as she is extremely beautiful and has been in the same orange tree for 4 months now.  I read that they can live for two years!   

I was also checking on the little orange tree because it seems that pests are only interested in that tree for some reason.  There was mealybug a while back, and now there are aphids with their attendant ants, which are causing the shiny new leaves to curl up.  There are, however, some tiny buds, about the size of my pinkie-nail.  When we arrived in March we harvested several oranges over the next month or so.  I thought about how long it takes a tree to grow  these incredible fruit that we eat with relish, such a huge source of vitamin C, such juicy beauty. 

We take so much for granted, seeing the cornucopias of fruit and veggies set out in supermarkets and stalls whenever we need them, never thinking of the long green flow of life from the sun and the roots and the bees and the rain.   

nasturtiums

So much time it takes to grow things.  I have all these baby plants, small trees and climbers in pots, and every day I check on them all, and they reward me with new green sprouts, with flowers, nasturtiums bobbing in the wind, the honeysuckle settling down into its new spacious pot to climb and please all lovers of orange flowers, large and small. 

And Time itself such a strange construct, linear in my culture, circular in others, part of our systems of meaning.

 

Leafprint

When I was 43 I had four children, a husband, a domestic worker who was ill and whom we were trying to help, plus a full-time job writing and illustrating books for adult learners, and I was also studying for a Masters Degree in Education!  One Saturday afternoon Tim rushed me off to hospital because my heart was seemingly going mad, and I went through a barrage of tests for a frightening couple of days.  I had been fairly healthy as an adult, especially since the advent of steroid inhalers, and now I was going to die from heart failure?  

After a couple of days of worry it turned out that my heart was absolutely fine, and the doctor informed me that I was probably having panic attacks, not heart ones.  I had never imagined such a thing, that I would experience these strange things which had only recently been accepted as diagnoses.  Not just hysterical women being their usual weird selves.  And then of course it just kept happening.  It's so frightening when your physical body acts out your mental state.  

 A beloved tree in my old home.

One day after many such struggles, the same sweet doctor just quietly advised me to have a conversation with myself when my heart started racing and the madness of that panic began.  He suggested that I go outside into a quiet space and just talk myself out of it.  Tell myself I was ok, breathe, watch the birds.  This was perfect advice for someone who loved always to be outside!  

Little frog in our pond we built during lockdown.

So I learned quite quickly how to do that, and occasionally over the ensuing years I have had setbacks, but I know what to do, how to right myself.  I know to go into the garden, or walk on the beach, or just watch a flower for a while, breathe through my imperfect nose with its deviated septum, breathe into my lungs scarred by asthma and radiation, breathe the sweet air, set my roots into the earth, and let the panic drop away.  Take time.

Nasturtium paintings I did for three friends 
for the first group lunch after lockdown.