A blanket of place

and taking off the shoes of the voice

‘The Creature’ with Cathy French is a free newsletter. If you enjoy it, please consider supporting it financially.

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Thank you for reading.

“I want to make my words deliberate; I want to enter — I want to take off the shoes of my voice so that I can enter a place with care so that I can do the work that I need to do.” 

-Ocean Vuong

Welcome.

I’ve named this publication The Creature out of an incomprehensible longing to write and guide from a place of wildness. Other titles were meddled with in the process- The Soft Creature, The Wise Creature- but they didn't land. The creature is tender or ferocious on any given day- likely to disrupt, slow down, and hopefully incite generous aliveness.

My plan for this little project is to orient to the word Creature as a kind of wayfinding- to challenge myself (and you) to err from the monotonous hum of the reasonable. To write and practice our way to soft-bellied presence through tricky, messy terrain.

Landing in the body is a foundational theme of my work- aligning our desire, joy, hope, world-weariness, consolation, awe, and anticipation to the land beneath our feet.

I’m also drawn to try to articulate the knocking together of cultures and the nomadic agency of roots. Between still carrying a wisp of a twang after five years in California, a brother and two tiny half-Kiwi nephews down in Auckland and my work with migrant teenagers, I’m never not aware of the ambiguous knaw of homesickness that comes from having more than one place or set of people we call home.

It’s Autumn Equinox and I’ve been back in Dublin for almost four full years.

I arrive at this new project on my laptop with the totality of my love and commitment and I’m squirming with uncertainty. 

Over the past six years, I’ve cheerfully sent out dozens of these newsletters. It’s always felt fantastically important and exciting to me to relay what felt like vital information about inner and outer seasons, weather, and what the light is up to from whatever patch of land I’ve found myself on this ongoing migration.

I’m breaking new grounds of resistance in the exposure of attempting to catch and distill the ache of being alive into words on a public platform.

And… if I’ve learned anything it’s that that resistance is fertile and worth following.

I stalk my clean kitchen for pockets of wild creation and overlapping intricacy. It’s the season of blank-lined copybook pages and the possibility of correct answers. A rummage in my schoolbag- the perfume of an overripe apple floats up from under the iPad and I pull out a stack of handwritten essays.

English teachers are gifted genuine glimpses of raw insight into the worlds and lives of the humans they work with. A cluster of other worlds materialises on the pages in front of me and locates me in a third-story classroom full of bodies. The organic substance of young voices, postures, physical oscillations, and watching, noticing eyes from Nigeria, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine. Carefully chosen words bring the body of a larger planet to my kitchen table; anxious, mawkish, gentle, and overwhelmed.

Tidying my school shelf at the start of the year I found the unreturned homework of a Georgian girl transferred to our inner city school seeking international protection last year. Seventeen, studious, serious, she was moved to an unnamed direct provision overnight center in the middle of the final term. Months worth of friendship, stability, and community uprooted and severed.

I can’t iron out the painful contraditions of these kids lives. The sole possibility for my work with them is to answer their homesickness with decent teaching and hopefully an atmosphere of love and trust, gestures of comfort and solace.

Life has gifted me two full days a week to dedicate to my ‘other work’ this academic year. 

I hold the roundness of these two bonus days in my hands- precious autumn windfall to write, practice, cook and pray with. The space of and expectation of them feels like long held dreams of balance and slowness made real. 

Soon enough though, the primal mood of the atomised self kicks in. 

A self-consciousness starts to shut the door on truth moving through these words. I become so aware of myself, looking down over my own head, catching glimpses of my reflection on the laptop screen. I clobber the laptop keys, straining to rethink every phrase to make this more writerly or convincing.

I’m up in my head- the rush of stimulus, phone screens, coffee, exams, surfaces that need cleaning, floors that need sweeping. Familiar fumes of anxiety mixed with dread wafts around the kitchen and out through the open door to my small urban garden.

The tangle of medicinal herbs thickens and dies in a sagging raised wooden planter that my brother and dad assembled for me on my first Spring here.

We’re designed to forget belonging.

Over the course of the five years before my homecoming, a piece of land in the hills of Southern Humboldt took me to the edge of myself and taught me everything I needed to know about becoming a creature. I turned to that land as a means to survive; tended, tidied, cleaned, nourished, prayed, pressed my full weight on it, made love to it. Bled, spat, kicked and screamed into the soil. I was homesick for Ireland every waking and dreaming minute of my time there.

And this land was my home.

I’ve been biding my time in this rental house in South Dublin city for two years. My nest is transient but I’m as firmly cocooned and rooted as I’ve been in any of my temporary homes over the years. I circumnavigate the tennis courts and soccer pitches of the suburban field over the road- skulking the edges and hedges around the handball alley. Picking nettles and blackberries above the height of foot traffic and dog pee. 

I always have to come down a level to teach or write anything of value- a handover of Self to the immediate soft meshy network of non human agency that lives outside my heat-controlled home. Outside driven by a kind of love to contact the bodies and communities of crow squack, slug, sparrow, seagull. To breathe volatile compunds of sharp, green autumn air and nestle into the presence of other beings.

So I walk.

Today I head straight for the cool river stream around the field’s perimeter and take off my shoes.

Gold light warms the surface and I wade in as far as my ankles to pull out a white plastic stackable chair resting against a tree. I drag the chair to the bank and sit there with my feet on the the pebbles, oldest pieces of Earth’s crust, letting everything happen for a few moments. Life is moving and this corner of suburbia is overflowing with treasure. 

The storyteller Martin Shaw says that children need to be wrapped in a blanket of place to grow well.

Our belonging is our own longing to be held.

There’s no great mystical trick to the practice. Get low to the ground- sit down, lie down, take off your shoes. Unselfconscious. Empty handed. Really here. Pull the blanket up to your chin.

I drop a pebble of silent prayer into the stream.

“I want to make my words deliberate; I want to enter — I want to take off the shoes of my voice so that I can enter a place with care so that I can do the work that I need to do.” 

-Ocean Vuong

Thank you for reading The Creature.

Tucked under this line is ‘Sink Back, Fall Open’, a 30 min Autumn Equinox yoga nidra for steadiness and ancestral support. The Celtic Wheel yoga nidras are sanctuaries of prayer to our Earth and seasons. Indigenous Irish Animism is woven with sensual ecopoetry to deepen your restful, relational enchantment with the land.