First cut

 

 

No Mow May had passed, and it was time to scythe my grass.  My apple trees needed light and air beneath their canopies to prevent disease.  I had been shocked by the discovery of apple ermine moths a few days previously, and wanted to prevent anything else happening to them.  Seized by a kind of primal instinct, I had brushed all the webs off with a stiff bristle brush, and reminded myself of my Greatnan as I did it.  

Later I discoverd that they don't actually do much harm to the tree, and the birds eat most of them.  It's just that the look of the dense, confused, hanging clusters of web look so eerie and wrong, that I was seized with an impulse to eliminate them

I sharpened my scythe and my psyche, and was soothed by the familar rasp of the sharpening stone against the blade.  It was as if I was letting the grass know my intentions with the sound. It has a timeless rhythm, and connects me to all those who cut grass in that way before me.  Perhaps some of them are my ancestors.  

As I started to scythe, the rhythm continued as I moved from foot to foot, in a dance with the blade as it cut throgh the long tangles of green.  I was aware of the birdsong, and my scythe dance danced me right through the human world into the world that the song described.  It was a world as timeless as the seasons.  It was a world as ancient as the method I was using to cut the grass.  

Balance and timing is a key element of this dance.  It is very similar to the basic walking movement in qigong, where the core muscles are engaged, and the body swings like a pendulum from left to right, moving in time with time.  

However, as much as I enjoy the experience, every year I have regrets when I begin to scythe.  Animals have more chance to escape than if I used a mechanical tool, but I am always saddened when I misjudge things and find I have cut a white nigella flower, or developing lavender buds.  The apple trees did look better for having sunlight under their branches, but I missed the patterns and textures that the grasses and wildflowers had created.  It is nature's creation, and it is beautiful in its complexity, variations and detail.  It soothes and occupies my eyes and my mind.  

I finished scything under the apple trees, and I sat and rested, and surveyed my plot.  The bees hummed around the huge mounds of comfrey, pushing in and out of the wobbling flowers.  The grasses swayed in the breeze, their seedheads reflecting the sunlight as soft silver.  They arehed around my chair, as if protecting me.  They danced an integrated symphony all around me. They connected the earth to the sky, and sang back to the birds in whispers.  The perennial sweet pea clambered through them.  

The nettles, their cascades of pendulous flowers almost ready for the butterflies, joined them to border the pathways I had made through them with my body.  I love how these paths are functional works of art, taylor made by and for my form.  They are works of art made in union with nature.  They describe how I have moved in the land, and how I will move in the land.  They are like neural pathways, connecting intention to action.  They remind me of the ancient tracks that have in some cases become our modern roads, and sometimes still remain as deep brown grooves in the earth, embraced by the trees that border them.  I relish their visceral, earthy power.  They carve me into the earth.  

I love in particular the track that leads into the plot from the main entrance.  It is lined with wafting grass and nettles.  It doesn't hurt me, but I feel very protected by it as I push through it with my barrow.  It is as if I am going into the green womb of the world through a birth canal.  

 I sat and watched, and knew that this year I couldn't scythe any more grass.   Both I and the land around me seemed to relax into an out breath.  It felt as if there had been a slight shift in reality with my decision to engage differently with the land.  It made my heart feel good. Long may it last.