November at Pomona

Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. Every part of you is warmly welcome in this space. Bring your whole heart.

Yellow feels like such a curious colour to me.

It's sun and summer and warmth and beaches and happiness, for sure.

It's also cowardice, sickness, jaundice, sepsis.

And, for me at least, it is melancholy, grief; the ache of unfulfilled longing.

It's the colour of the solar plexus (power) chakra, and of fire. Of the buttercup and evening primrose and gorse flowers. Of the Metrolink trams that pass above and alongside Pomona. And of the machines that gouge the earth to dig foundations and extract resources. That have scraped and heaved Pomona’s sacred soil before now:

December 2022: fuckery

Yellow is potent and delicate. Searing and gentle. Welcoming and warning.

Like anything else, yellow is many things. Whatever it symbolises in any given moment, I think it's a glorious hue.

However it feels to you, for this month at least, it's the colour of Pomona. As such, it's something I love deeply.

November birch saplings at Pomona

Actually, although the yellows are clearly present, this November at Pomona hasn't seemed as abundantly yellow as last year was. I've been pondering this and have concluded there are two main reasons. The first is the extended mild autumn we've experienced, at least until the middle of the month. There has still been a great deal of green on show this late in the year. Not everything has turned as early:

12th November 2024

The second is the cutting of all the plant life across Pomona this January. Almost everything you see in these images has grown since spring this year, with the exception of the more mature trees like those along the banks of the Bridgewater canal, shown here:

Silver birch canopy by the canal

This time last year, all the trees were in their second year of growth, and the birches were both bigger and more abundant, which provided a great deal of last year's yellowness:

November 2023

This November, though the yellows have been later in emerging, they’ve been every bit as enjoyable. It's been a month where my visits to Pomona have been mostly very deliberately slow. The concept of slowness is something I've been exploring for a few years now, one of the gifts of the shape I find myself in, and Pomona has been a good teacher in this regard. I'm going to write at least one piece entirely about what slowness means to me, and how I practice it. Today I'm going to talk about just one element of it - “Fox Walking”.

Fox Walking is an approach I first heard of from nature connection mentor, wildlife tracker, peacemaker and author, Jon Young, via this episode of the Lifeworlds podcast.

Essentially fox walking involves moving incredibly slowly and carefully through natural terrain. Each footstep should take three seconds to make, with slow steady movements and taking great care about how and where you place your feet. There’s a good, more detailed description of Fox Walking practice here.

Walking at this pace helps us to pay attention in new ways - both focusing intently on where we are going, and also on using our peripheral vision much more fully. Everything somehow looks even more magical than usual. I find that other senses are heightened, too, in particular hearing - an awareness of all the bird calls and other natural sounds around me.

I'll always remember the first time I tried fox walking at Pomona, a couple of years ago, because I got really close to a small bush and saw a wren in it. I was used to hearing the alarm calls of wrens as I approached, but not watching them bob about happily. But this one hadn't registered my presence - at least not as any kind of threat - and I got a really good look at them. Another time I moved in this way I finally saw a mouse at Pomona, moving through the thick grass. I had long known they must be there, but had never seen a live one. It all makes me more aware of just how much noise and commotion I must create most of the time.

I've also been making some of my visits at dusk. Admittedly it's not a great time for taking pictures, but atmospherically it's incredible. Walking dead slow through the yellowing greens as the light fades from the sky, ears attuned to the calls of birds, has been a real delight.

Other visits have been earlier in the day, and as the month has deepened, the weather has shifted from almost-permanent overcast skies to a real mixed bag. One particular morning a week ago had a taste of everything from glorious blue skies and sun, to slate heavens and a downpour. I have to say, even though I adore the sunlight, I relished all the weathers that day!

Blue skies one minute…

Cloud cover moving rapidly in…

Fade to grey

If that morning taught me one thing, it was that the combination of leaden sky and emerging sunlight transformed yellow into gold. The dark backdrop served to highlight the colour being illumined: a truth that feels somehow alchemical.

When yellow is golden

Here, by way of interlude, is a poem I wrote a year ago, about one of my November Pomona wanders. Despite all my ravings about how yellow this month is, the title is actually appropriated from a small child.

When my best mate’s middle daughter, now eighteen, was about four years old, she used to make loads of drawings, just like most kids. Unlike most other children, however, she also gave them all the most brilliant titles. “The Beetle That Didn't Exist” was one that has stuck in my mind. Another was “The Yellow of November”, which always seemed somehow perfect, and has almost certainly coloured (geddit?) how I see the world.

Here's the poem. It was a day that I was feeling pretty low.

The Yellow of November

Slowly, attentively,
I wend my way through
the yellow of November,
opulent and welcoming.

Though there is no path,
and I pay no heed to direction, 
inevitably I arrive at 
the heart of my beloved. 

I lay my hand on her softly
receptive mossy chest, 
telling her how I need her 
to teach and encourage me.

Without pause she gifts me
an answer: tangibly solid,
beautifully translucent, 
vulnerably delicate. Like us. 

The gift I received

While yellows dominate the November landscape of my favourite place, there's still plenty of other colours on offer, as shown in the following photos:

Willow flames

A whole palette to choose from here

Admittedly no foliage, but outlandishly blue

This month I'm pretty sure I've also seen a snipe on two occasions. This is massively encouraging, following what happened in January. Here's the story…

This time last year, following heavy rains in October, large areas of Pomona turned to marshland. In November and December I started regularly inadvertently flushing birds from the ground when I walked in those areas. Eventually, after much observation and some research, I realised they were snipe - birds I’d never seen before. Some flushed much closer to me than others, and followed a different flight pattern, so I'm almost completely sure there were both common snipe and jack snipe present.

Snipe aren't birds that reside or breed in England, but they do over-winter here, which explained the time of their arrival. On one day I saw a dozen individuals. Despite a great deal of patience and a heap of fox walking, I didn't manage to see a single snipe on the ground though. They are incredibly well hidden!

They were all still there in January, with the marshy puddles frozen solid, when the men-with-machines came along to cut everything down. This didn't only destroy all the plant life; it also turned the whole of Pomona into churned soil. The marshes were obliterated, and the snipe disappeared, though I did see one or two in corners of Pomona that weren't hacked down on that first day. These were also devastated within a couple more weeks though, and the snipe were all rudely evicted.

This autumn, knowing that the cutting tends to happen every other year, (even soulless arseholes like to save on maintenance costs I guess) I've been calling the snipe to return to Pomona, trusting that this time I'm offering them a full winter of safe harbour.

So the fact that I'm (very nearly almost) sure I've seen one or two is of great encouragement to me. As for the marshes - they appeared again briefly in mid-October this year, following several days of rain, but have subsequently dried up again. The spreading rushes and similar vegetation is still abundantly present though, so the terrain will hopefully suffice for snipe. (I can't believe I'm implying we haven't had enough rain in a Manchester autumn!)

Brief reappearance of the marshes last month

Time for one more glimpse of yellow before you go? Of course you do!

And here's my ongoing message to the corporate gatekeepers and money-grubbers:

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What does yellow evoke for you? What have you noticed out in the wild this November? How do you go slow?