Becoming Pomona

Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. This is a special post, and one for paid subscribers, but as always, please don't let mere money be a barrier. If you want to read or listen but not pay for a subscription, please message me and I'll happily gift one to you. If you are able to support my writing financially, it means a great deal.

As mentioned last week, I'm away at an event this week, at which I'm hosting an art space. The images from my Becoming Pomona show (June 2024) are up on the walls, along with some new ones, and the rest of this post will be available as an audio commentary via headphones for those entering the space. That audio commentary, including the long two-part poem “The Song of Pomona”, is today's Substack offering. Enjoy - and please, let me know your thoughts and feelings in the comments!

For those of you wanting a little more information about Pomona Strand and her history over recent centuries, including the ways that humans have opted to use this land, please see the first of my photo diary reports from Pomona back in October.

Pomona Strand and Friendship with Place

Reading John O'Donohue's marvellous book, Anam Cara - or "soul friend" - recently, I was struck by two short passages, less than a page apart. This is the first:

A friend is a loved one who awakens your life in order to free the wild possibilities within you.

I was taken by how accurately it describes the ways in which Pomona Strand has been a friend to me, showing me first her own astonishing, flourishing wildness; then urging me to discover this same quality within myself.

The second passage reads:

The life and passion of a person leaves an imprint on the ether of a place. Love does not remain within the heart, it flows out to build secret tabernacles in a landscape.

These words describe precisely the way I feel about Pomona, and my deepest wish for the relationship we share. Creating secret tabernacles in her various parts: this is a gorgeous way to describe my practice of the last four years when I am there.

Love Pomona - April 2023

I am not going to attempt to tell you four years of friendship on this recording. Rather, I'm going to describe an event that happened at Pomona a year ago, then another that I organised for my birthday five months later.

On the 15th January 2024, as I did my morning stretches I gazed out at a perfect blue sky, and a bright sun I couldn't see from my north facing window, though it turned the red bricks of the building opposite my flat a glorious golden hue. It was then that I felt a familiar urge in my body. It was the conspiring of place and weather and desire. Pomona was calling me to visit her.

I had visited the previous morning, in similar weather conditions, and had been mesmerised by her beauty as I crunched slowly through her frozen marshes, flushing gorgeous, striped, over-wintering jack snipe into the air as I walked. I knew that if I responded to her call, Pomona would gift me with more wonders to marvel at. I dressed in many layers and plodded up the road.

Cornbrook Colours - The Portal, June 2024

I made my way through the gap in the railings, walked down the slope towards the body of Pomona, and was met with a sight that caused by heart to sink and my stomach to lurch. Several men in hi-vis workwear were standing around, and two tractors, each wielding huge blades behind them, were parked on the road. I knew immediately what this signified: they were going to start cutting down all that grew there. A so-called "land management" practice that happens every couple of years at Pomona. I knew also, immediately and instinctively, that Pomona had called me there to witness this destruction. There was nothing to do other than allow events to unfold, and to access our shared grief.

I made my way hurriedly across the frozen marshes towards Magic Pool, where I knew I could sit, hidden from sight, and have the winter sun on my face. There I could be still enough to calm myself and to be present for the task at hand. These words came from my lips as I walked to my sit spot:

There is so much beauty it is impossible to grieve.

There is so much beauty it is impossible not to grieve.

I knew being next to Magic Pool would give me what I needed, and sure enough, tears readily came to my eyes as soon as I sat down. It was hard to speak - my throat was constricted and I felt truly overwhelmed with the heavy mix of deep beauty entwining with deep grief.

Shadow Over Magic Island - November 2023

It felt like the raw edge of pure life. Devastating beauty and devastating grief, coexisting in one madly beating heart. Dwelling together in the soul of a man who is deeply in love, and sees both the enchanting beauty of his beloved and the horrific mutilation that is about to be done to her without any notion of consent, or even wrongdoing.

As I sat and allowed things to rise up in me. A new song came forth from the land through my mouth, which I sang to the creatures around the pool.

Along with the song, I spoke blessings on the swans that came to accept the food I scattered on the water. I used words that have become habitual over time with repeated usage toward all my feathered kin:

Blessings on you 
feather and beak,
wing and feet.

Blessings on
your resting and your feeding, 
your nesting and your breeding. 

Blessings on you
on land and on water and in the air. 

Swan at Magic Pool - postcard image

As I sat and allowed the waves of grief to come, I was struck by a troubling sensation of powerlessness. All I could do was to be a friend to Pomona; a witness giving attention to the brutality of the assault and the pain that it inflicted. To share in the suffering of a friend and beloved, and let them know I was there with them in that moment.

What else was there to do? If there was an answer to that question I did not possess it and could not fathom it.

Even though the sun warmed my bones, after some time of sitting on the cold concrete my body was stiff with cold and I knew I need to move on. To the Heart of Pomona. As I approached this sacred place I could pick out the distinct sounds of the machines with their cutters.

I made a prayer of confession to Pomona and to Yeshua:

I acknowledged the way we humans live is out of kilter with the world. It is destructive, extractive, and deals in death.

I acknowledged my own humanity and my complicity in these behaviours - in the way that I myself have lived, and still live.

I asked for grace and for forgiveness. I asked for wisdom and strength to live into another way of being; one that is much more in keeping with the more-than-human world, into which I am inextricably woven. To which I intimately belong.

As I spoke I could see a large green tractor with blades attached to its rear, making its way along the edge of Pomona, once again cutting down all of this magnificently beautiful life. I could hear the rending of living wood as the blades tore through saplings and hardy sea buckthorn bushes. My heart was utterly rent also.

While there at the Heart Pomona, with those noises and sights unfolding before me, I prayed: "Please teach me what I must do. I cannot bear this." I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. I felt helpless and powerless. I did not know whether to stay or go but my body was becoming cold and tired and I feared that if I watched for too long I might just lie down and die there.

As I thought about the men enacting this brutality, I was reminded of the words of Christ during his torturous death: "Forgive them, father, they do not know what they are doing." I considered all of the life I had encountered at Pomona over the years and concluded that if these men knew what I did, they surely could not carry it out. That prayer was the genesis of the poem you will hear shortly.

As I approached the road that runs through Pomona, five men, some of them in hi-vis coats, walked along it, right past me. They paid me no attention whatsoever, not even glancing in my direction. I wondered if I was even visible to them. I was expecting to be told I must leave; that this is private land, that there are heavy machines at work with dangerous cutting blades. Yet they simply strolled past, caught up in their own light-hearted conversation. This was clearly just another day for them. Just another job.

I headed across the road to the place I call my Ancestral Grounds, for I did not know where else to go. The machines could not go there due to its steep mounds and troughs - at least, only if they were handheld ones. And even as I considered that, I feared that that, too, could happen in front of me. I wondered if the small jar and candle I keep in that space would survive the attack.

Ritual Space - Ancestral Grounds, October 2024

I felt increasingly overwhelmed and helpless, like the disciples in the garden, failing to stay awake and pray; running away and hiding, and denying Christ. I did not think my body could handle too much more of this devastation, or indeed the cold, which was steadily seeping into my body. I felt both the need to go, and the compulsion to stay. I could not tell what was harmful and what was helpful anymore.

All the while, trams kept running, birds kept flying, the incessant noise of the machines kept grinding away. For me, time had stopped and this was the end of the world. The last day on earth. Life felt stripped of meaning. What to do, what to do, what to do?

I stilled myself and did my best to listen to the sacred land around and beneath me.

Pomona spoke:

There is nothing more to do.

I never asked for a hero, Jez

I never asked to be saved; only witnessed, and here you are sharing my grief as the destruction of my body unfolds once again - as it has done countless times over the decades.

What is cut down will grow back.

What is destroyed will rise again.

What lies beneath can never be touched or diminished.

Go in peace, knowing that you are everything I need you to be. I could not ask for a better friend to be here on this day. Thank you.

Willow Flames - November 2024

I was genuinely moved by the grace contained in these words. I was reminded of Stephen Jenkinson's words: "Fixes are overrated. The capacity to stand and bear faithful witness is the order of the day."

But I didn't quite feel ready to be released. I spoke my feelings:

"I don't want to abandon you Pomona. I don't want to betray you by leaving or failing to take action."

Her response:

Jez, you should know this: you are faithful in your friendship with me.

With that, I left.

I walked past a man in orange overalls taking a piss at the edge of the Ancestral Grounds. I walked past the van full of gear and a pick up truck on a trailer. I walked away from the two green tractors as they wielded their cataclysmic machines. I turned my back on the captivating glory of my beloved friend, lying in her brightly-lit wild fullness, and I trudged home with the the great heaviness of grief lodged in my chest.

And, the next day, I wrote this poem: