Have you ever protested a little too vocally, a little too insistent that you can’t bear this or that which the majority embrace? I am not speaking of political or ideological opinions, rather personal preferences, likes and dislikes, the ones that elicit an inflexible, unquestionable stance. Ones that appear to demand verbal underscoring. My hands are reluctantly up.
Earlier this year I started exploring old stories and songs of England as part of an ongoing journey to re-connect with the land within which I and many of my ancestors were born. My spark was ignited around fires with new friends sharing songs, our hearts meeting in chorus. The experiences fountained an unexpected joy in me and I began searching for lyrics to learn so I could join in more wholeheartedly. These explorations expanded to discover contemporaries that sung old and new songs of the land and creatures, of old ways and elements, of a respect and reverence for it all. Very soon the likes of Sam Lee and Johnny Flynn were constant companions in the kitchen and car. But I wasn't just listening, they had crept up on me and found my voice that hadn’t sung for most of an adult life. I said I couldn't sing, I found it challenging even trying to sound, yet these old songs and their spells found my voice singing alongside them.
And I hate Folk Music.
Despite an eclectic array of musical influences soundtracking my life from early years, I always vehemently drew a line, no Folk. I am of the HMV generation of musical categories. Folk music, can’t stand it, too whiney, too whimsy, it literally jars my system, cue hands over ears. I can hear myself now, stridently dismissing a diverse and rich tradition in one judgemental, ignorant cut. Despite enjoying the likes of Dylan, The Waterboys, Rodriguez, Damian Rice, Bon Iver, Bonnie Prince Billy and Billy Bragg, I carried this vocal rejection until recent times (my definition of Folk was very specific and limited). Then in June I penned my first song, A Tongue Untying, an ode to my Love’s unwavering and patient encouragement whilst I faced the fear of my own sound. I sang unaccompanied to place and elements, to Rose and Robin, and cast my spell in a framework of repeated rhythms. I can not deny it would most definitely be filed under F for Folk.
This hilarious callout of my fatuous prejudice prompted consideration, were there other things I had historically dismissed and derided only to embrace them when my ego wasn't looking?
OH YES.
I think it is helpful both to out them and to highlight how many of them are now woven into the core of who I truly am. Or rather some of them have always been at my core, I perhaps just didn't want to notice? “The lady doth protest too much”. It makes for some necessary uncomfortable writing to witness my arrogance, absurdity and rigidity, and also my implicit judgment of others.
There are the small things. I hate olives was blown apart by hunger and the cinematic seduction of NYC 1989 and my first proper Italian pizza generously salted with the black ones. It was instant devotion.
I literally can’t drink tap water it makes me gag, and yes it did, ask my Mom, but I am writing on my fourth glass of the day.
I detest the colour Pink, I don’t wear heels. I hate Nick Cave… Friends within the last two decades will now surely have faces shaped with perplexity, what?! Yes I have seen Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds live 3 times, paid for all the cinema live streamings and will enthuse about his exquisite craft as a performer and pied piper allure. It is highly likely I wore my shocking pink sixties swing coat to any one of the performances, but probably not with my heels which I save for dancing.
I won’t bore you with other random ridiculousness, but there are some historical snubs so striking given their residence in the bones of who I am today. Remember, I don’t sing. This week I am heading to South Wales to embark on a year long enquiry into ‘Singing the Unseen’ with Briony Greenhill, an artist and teacher at the forefront of Vocal Improvisation.
I was once contemptuous of Crystals and “those sort of shops” that sold them, thereby labelling the people who bought them. And here I sit looking upon a window sill where I have intentionally arranged crystals, stones and bones in a circle around a candle. They are not decorative, not objects, but animate beings intentionally arranged as my council. I once gathered many such things and more into a wholesale rejection of what I perceived as fantastical, mythological or symbols of identifying as New Age. How confused I was. I am learning I have a storyteller in me and share myth around the fire. Inspired by Dr Martin Shaw and Sharon Blackie, to name just two, I believe the mythic imagination is the hand to guide us out of the environmental and societal collapse we are in. And for pure escape I am currently traversing a world of gods, knights and godkillers in Hannah Kaner’s Godkiller - I recommend it. Kaner says she is inspired by “the stories we tell ourselves about being human”. I continue to dismantle the stories I have told myself.
All the noise of my rebuffs and spurns are the detritus of a teenage need to define myself in opposition to the culture I was given, not offered, there was no implication of choice into that which I was born. I used the means I had available, my body, colour, sounds, behaviours and words, to separate from a mainstream I did not identify with nor wished to collude. I was the first girl born on my Father’s side of the family after female skipped a generation. Back then it was the Father’s side that counted. I was born into a lot of expectation, thankfully a lot of it from a Mom who wished her Daughter more opportunities than she was allowed, but it was still a working class framework with certain ceilings in place. And it was the late sixties and gendered. My feisty spirit soon strove to define herself in resistance to what was waiting for me in a culture of polarities, I found myself as who I was not, rather than hearing who I am, “your own truth at the centre of the image you were born with” (from David Whyte’s poem ALL THE TRUE VOWS, shared later in this newsletter). I inadvertently suffocated my true self, swaddled myself in other symbols, conventions and mis-intentioned rebellions. I became of Art School and Cool, of Urban and Contemporary and in the polarised world I inhabited, rejected all that didn't fit into those boxes. I became JO and abandoned Anna.
It is a long journey to come to know, to remember all of who I am. I reclaimed my complete name Joanna in the Winter of 2017, but other forces had been guiding me home way before this. I now recognise the seed was sown in 1998 when I was uncharacteristically called to start gardening on a suburban allotment. Hindsight now makes the threads, the hops, skips and jumps so clear, retraining as an Acupuncturist, devoting myself to embodied movement practices, a courting of Nature, a move to the alternative rural town of Hebden Bridge … it goes on, but note, as I left that town twenty years later, my favourite shop was Earth Spirit. This time I didn't need to reject any parts of me that did not fit with this, the culture vulture or lover of clothing and dressing up, but accepted and embraced more of the paradoxes and complexities of who I am, my very own hybrid.
So now my ongoing enquiry must be, what am I protesting about now, that may hold clues to where I need to focus my attention? These edges of myself not yet integrated, the ‘fertile edges’ as both Glennie Kindred and Maddy Harland speak to in relation to the larger living world. The liminal spaces where the wild things grow, the untamed, where nature and possibilities thrive. I am grateful for being time rich and having the space to hear, to unearth more of who I am and where I belong. And I can also see I never want to work with teenagers winking.
David Whyte, ALL THE TRUE VOWS in THE HOUSE of BELONGING, 2004, Many Rivers Press.
Glennie Kindred, Letting in the Wild Edges, 2013 Permanent Publications.
Maddy Harland, Fertile Edges: Regenerating Land, Culture and Hope, 2017, Permamnent Publications.
The Inspirations
One to Take To Heart
David Whyte.
One to Sing With
Not just an actor and the guy who composed The Detectorists score, Johnny Flynn is a fine singer and songwriter with five studio albums behind him. Lost in the Cedar Wood is the collaborative project made with award-wining Nature Writer and Professor, Robert Macfarlane during the pandemic lockdowns. Their second album Uncanny Valley will be released 10th November.
One to Do Do Do
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