Moor Time
An exploration of surrender
I stood atop the moor, arms spread against the wind, wind having at me like a passionate lover. I let my organism absorb the rolling valleys, sculpted by ice & time. I digested the ochres & golds of the grasses dancing before a February wind and I howled like the Banshee; ferocious & animal. I screamed from the depths of me. Unapologetically. Then I sang. Wove words into the air so the lichen & rock could hear my reverence. I laid this body out angel splayed against soft moss & budding heather, there she held me, in communion. I stayed still for some moments. Let the body feel the textures of her. Let her wildness tame me. Allowed the soft green of the moor to meet with the round of my cheek.
Here are my ancestors.
Walking across me & into my thoughts, walking in the way of their departure across wooden planks onto coffin ships. They offer an image of darkness, walls coal black, the chink of the pick against carbon. Wooden carts brimming with the guts of the earth. Millions of years of decomposition, hand pulled by tired fathers with filthy faces. The father’s absence carried in the stone of the mother’s eyes.
Atop the moor, beneath a crisp blue sky I feel connected. Surrounded by sheer, uncompromising wildness I feel I belong. There is no need to apologise for my intensity here. There is no need to apologise for my anger or grief. The moor makes a place for it, makes a place for surrender, offers me the experience of feeling that there is something far bigger than oppression, far bigger than me. The moor whispers for me to let go.
And I want to.
I rose from the earth and back to my feet. We continued to walk. Heart carrying the faces I have only ever seen in photographs.
Body carrying their stories.
I’m in a busy room in Sheffield, I’m working the event of an author’s book launch. An author whose work & mind I admire. A caring man. The conversation turns toward how we could begin to hospice modernity. The author & the host discuss surrender as a pre-requisite of this work; that to hospice modernity we must first surrender to it. My body rattles with anger. I do not know why.
My partner & I walked until we reached a cleft in the Valley, giving us shelter from the biting wind. Elliot pulled out the flask of ginger tea and poured it into the old plastic school cups. Steam warming our faces. We both sit there in silence, hands huddled round the glow of this golden liquor, listening to the gurgle & spit of the brook. The brown iron of her water rippling over ancient stone.
It was in silence that I realised I was led to the moor by the body. Body walked me there because it is her home. The wilderness within me screamed for a place to be rid of the politeness, to be rid of the accommodating smiles & agreeable laughs. Needed a place to spit out the fury so I could feel the joy. Needed a place bold enough to hold me.
It was surrounded by moor, heather & bracken, accosted by the piercing wind that I began to piece together what rattled me…You see, the longing that lies in the depths of my stomach isn’t entirely ‘mine’. Nor is my anger or grief. It is ancestral. Primitive. My longing for rootedness, for the land, for that which was stolen, is far older than my thirty years in this skin. This quest wasn’t just carried by me, it was carried through generations by those who came before me. The wound is generational. As is symbolic violence. Like the coal that lies unmined in the pits of my community, symbolic violence has been submerged into the depths of British, colonial culture. And, like coal it takes exploration & time to locate, to unearth.
What is this symbolic violence?
It is the uneasy, sour feeling in the depth of your stomach. The barbed silence that chokes your speech. It is the subtle knife that cuts through connection. The gentle reminder of your difference. The assumption that you & I face the same barriers, that poverty is a choice. It is the comfort of not needing to acknowledge the brutality. It is the softening of your accent so you sound more like them. It is historic. An invisible prison. An unceasing reminder of your place in the social order of things; what you can do, where you can go, where you’ll be welcomed, what you can say, who you can say it to. It is the constant self-monitoring when you transgress the boundaries of the world you were forced to inhabit. And it is also the fury, the ferocity of the free animal held captive.
Sometimes, when I encounter symbolic violence I not only feel my own oppression but the oppression of all those who came before me. The injustice swells like a huge tide and the body of me rattles; the walls of my skin wrestling with the contents within them.
This too shall pass.
And the emotion does, but the root of the emotion forms the lining of my cells.
How to surrender?
The conversation between the author & the host comes to a close. We are told that the book signing will commence. I cue up. I’m told the book is £20. My mums universal credit payment is £70 a week, this book is almost a third of her weekly budget. There is a man behind me who heckles the author & participant to hurry up. I have so many questions but do not want to invoke a confrontation. My palms feel sweaty and I feel a lump in my throat. My heart races. It’s my time to get the book signed. I step forward, shaking. I tell this kind man, this man of education & privilege & culture that I have things to say but not enough time to say them. What I mean, is if I share those thoughts now I might cry so another time would be better. He gives me his email & invites an exchange. I clean down the kitchen & leave the venue. Whilst I wait for the train, I try to construct an email. The station is swamped by football fans tribally chanting. I cannot find the words. I pull out my new expensive book. Flick through the pages. Try and learn more about this man & his intentions through the words he writes. Three days later the words come. I spend all day typing an email. Writing, reading, deleting, writing again. Ensuring that each word is correct. This is a moment of transgression & I am vigilant. If I step over the boundaries, I must do so with rigour…
I wonder what kind of request is being made when we suggest to people, who have no ‘God’, whose main food source are food banks, whose financial security is enmeshed with the judgement & discrimination of the DWP, when government regimes have ripped out the heart of their community, to surrender. When surrender got raised I wanted to ask, how? How would one go about surrendering to modernity under these conditions? What are the practical requirements involved in such a suggestion?
In my experience, part of the complexity of poverty is trauma. A tributary of that complexity are the physiological and chemical impacts of trauma on the human's body & thought which catapults the individual into a habituated hyper-vigilance. The practice of surrender requires an individual to have, in my experience, a certain level of security & detachment both emotionally & physically from the thing they are surrendering to. In the absence of that, an individual must have reached the plateaus of despair.
Fundamentally, an individual must be willing & able to trust in something bigger than themselves, if they are to reach a cognitive equilibrium where the environment sustains the action of letting go. They must migrate from a place of feeling threatened to a place of safety & action. In the discussion, I observed the reduction of vital complexity, this posed a presupposition (for me at-least) that surrendering is a mere shift in the epistemological framing of events that results from the input of different information. I think surrender is much more than that, I think surrender needs to be experiential, it must be felt & embodied. It cannot only be cognitive when you're swimming upstream, otherwise it won't be maintained. I see this regularly in 12 step programmes, of which I am part. Those who do not make the journey from surrender into trust relapse.
Surrender requires support & infrastructure. It requires access to mental health services, in the absence of that it requires the support of a community or fellowship, safe housing, a reliable source of income & food. Surrender requires connection. And the irony is, that connection becomes increasingly difficult when people are traumatised by poverty & modernity. ”
My partner & I gathered our things, packed away the flask & the cups, checked for any opportunist litter. Something in me had settled. The moor had, had her way with me. I felt slower, more peaceful. The sun was setting, it painted magnificent orange hues across our Yorkshire sky. The clouds were biblical; golden mountains against the moor. We walked back, through bog & on path. I stuck my fingers into cold wet earth like a child, laughed at my love for it, foraged pigment made red from the same Iron that ran through the brook. We sang old Irish folk songs & lapped up the light of the season. We reached the final stile, modernity on one side, moor on the other. I looked back, ancient valleys rolling violet before me and I felt small, insignificant, immensely grateful.
What lay before me was something more powerful than Man & The Machine.
What lay before me was something I could trust.
Something I could surrender to.
Something worth praying for.
Grant me the serenity,
To accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can
And, the wisdom to know the difference.
i feel this Deeply. Thank You.