Week 40 Abundance

My three ‘r’s – running, resting, and reading.

Since delivering the manuscript of Love Like Your Heart’s On Fire to my publisher I have taken a break from writing.  This week has been devoted to three of my favourite occupations running, resting, and reading.

Running

The weather has been perfect for running. Crisp sunny mornings when you can almost taste the oxygen in the air.  I’ve signed up for Run Norwich 10k race on October 23rd so I’ve been gasping my way around longer routes trying to improve my stamina. (You can sponsor me at  https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/sally-anne-lomas1 if you feel generous) 

Crunching over narrow tracks covered in fallen acorns I’m struck by nature’s abundance.  In just this tiny area of Norfolk, there must be millions upon millions of acorns. Evidently, this is a ‘Mast’ year when oak trees go into overdrive and produce a bumper crop.  This only happens every five to ten years as it slightly stunts the tree’s growth. But the bumper crop leads to a surge in the population of mammals feeding on the acorns and ensures the germination of a few saplings.

The Mighty Acorn

To start with I was thinking sadly of how few acorns would ever grow into oak trees but then I began to research the uses of acorns. Acorns were a vital part of our ancestors’ diet. Here is biologist John Slattery, author of Southwest Foraging

“No other food has sustained the human race to such an extent as the acorn. If you took a gigantic table and laid out all the foods humans have eaten across the globe and over time, making an individual pile for each foodstuff, acorns would be, by far, the largest pile on the table.’

We are built out of acorns, every one of us a little bit ‘oak’. I love this. Those acorns that didn’t become oaks weren’t wasted. They kept our ancestors alive.

Resting

While I am resting - sitting in the sunlight watching the wind make the golden grass of the meadow bob and dance – I think about the many generations that have gone before me to make my life possible.

Here is Nikita Gill’s wonderful poem.

I AM MY ANCESTORS’ DREAM

Your ancestors did not survive

everything that nearly ended them

for you to shrink yourself

to make someone else

comfortable.

This sacrifice is your war cry.

be loud

be everything

and make them proud.

Our lives are shaped by the circumstances we are born into. We humans are like acorns destined to live our lives in the shade of the tree from which we sprang. Not all of us can be oaks but we can feed future generations.

Reading

I feel very lucky to have been born into a time in which world literacy is now at 86%, and into a country in which public libraries allow me access to millions upon millions of books free of charge.

Back in 1424 the University of Cambridge had one of the largest libraries in Europe at a massive 122 books! I currently have far more books than that in my garden writing shed.

In these troubled times when the news churns out a constant message of scarcity, we need to remember our sources of abundance. Here in Norfolk I may enjoy foraging for blackberries and sharing homegrown fruit and veg with my neighbours but I don’t need to grind up acorns to survive.  Reading books costs you nothing and delivers, without resorting to air miles, worlds upon worlds to be discovered.

The pleasure of a great book

One of my greatest pleasures is to dive into the world of a great book. There are many very good writers writing now. There are a few great oaks.

In my view Tsitsi Dangaremba is an oak. I read her Booker-shortlisted novel This Mournable Body and thought it was wonderful. I’ve now read the first part of that trilogy Nervous Conditions and I’m blown away. When I finished this book I felt that I had lived every inch of thirteen-year-old Tambudzai Sigauke’s life growing up in what was then Rhodesia. I understood cultural imperialism from inside another human being’s body.

Impact

I cry very easily. Sad animals, unkindness, happy endings, moments of heroism, all of these start the waterworks. Nervous Conditions made me cry from a place deep in my body, a place of which I’m barely conscious but which is the wellspring of all that I love.  I don’t know how Dangaremba did this. She has changed my worldview and enriched my life. That’s what a great book can do. That’s why I read. That’s why I write.