Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. I'm always encouraged that you're here, reading or listening to this, for what is a writer without readers? Still a writer, actually, but probably a little more lonely and a little less purposeful. So thanks for visiting.
I've now posted weekly Substacks on various topics for eight months. I don't know how long I anticipated continuing to write weekly, but it's only been in recent weeks that my energy for it has started to run low. I've been questioning the frequency of posts, not least because I've learned to value of pacing and slowness the hard way, through chronic ill health.
However, so far it's felt important to keep going, and here's why. Most of my posts on here have been predominantly to share my existing poetry or story work, or my love of Pomona Strand, for the benefit of readers. But in recent weeks, with more emotional struggle present and much less archive material available, I've increasingly been writing for myself first, to orient and make sense of the life circumstances and feelings I'm traversing. Something I've historically done in journals rather than online. So welcome to Jez’s online journal. Sometimes a writer just has to write for their own sanity and clarity, and by choosing to share such posts here, I trust that these incomplete thoughts may have resonance for some readers as well.
Back in April, as part of my series of posts on longing (which, I might add, has definitely not yet come to an end, in my mind at least) I wrote about the sense of lostness and uprootedness I experienced on returning home after a wild and wonderful week in Rio on an arts and homelessness exchange in July 2016. Since then, my day to day life has begun to increasingly mirror the sensations I described in that post, and the poems contained in it. I've begun to be immersed in a disturbing sense of being unmoored and lost within the familiar landscape of my own life…
Before attempting to describe that any further, though, I'm going to start off by talking about the Omen Days. This was something my good friend Lydia introduced me to through her writing here on Substack on 7th Jan 2024, precisely one day after the Omen Days were done and dusted for another year. I was left intrigued and frustrated in equal measure.
Lydia wrote:
A Celtic tradition, with close sibling practices from other parts of Europe, the Omen Days invite an opportunity to use the days between Christmas and Epiphany to spot signposts, possibilities and nods from nature pertaining to a wish for each month of the coming year: The first day speaks into January, the second for February, and so on.
This notion of paying sharp attention in natural spaces on each of those fuzzy Betwixtmas days, seeking out - or perhaps more accurately, allowing oneself to be found by - signs from the world, to help navigate the coming year, appealed to me immediately and deeply. I love that it is a folkloric practice indigenous to these isles, in line with the kind of things I'm already investigating and practicing, particularly at Pomona. The first thing I did was to note the days in my calendar for the next Omen Days, 354 days later. So I guess you can thank me for writing about it with only seven months left to wait until the next Omen Days!
Lydia, as is beautifully typical of her approach to art and to the whole of her life, undertook her first foray into this practice as part of a small group of friends, sharing their omen noticings and experiences via a Whatsapp group. I, as is rather typical of my nature towards mystery and the unknown, opted to do this on my own, without even telling anyone what I was up to. I have subsequently told a handful of friends about it, but this is my first time of sharing about my Omen Days experiences in any detail.
The first point to clarify is that I instinctively looked only for birds as signs. Why? Firstly, these creatures have long been the primary way that the world communicates symbolically with me. I already view birds as messengers, and have a partially-developed framework for understanding what they mean to me when they appear.
Secondly, I have come to greatly appreciate limitations. Looking for signs twelve days running, when they could be literally anything, was a surefire way of opening myself up to overwhelm. I knew I couldn't navigate that much information and stay on track. Limiting my attention to the appearance and activity of my feathered friends was the obvious solution. I also made a mental note that I wanted to observe these omens while I was outside, if at all possible. I would accept birds I saw through windows, but primarily wanted to encounter them while out and about, which felt like a bit of a challenge at that time of year. What follows is a run-down of my first five Omen Days and how the signs they offered have translated into my life over the first five months of 2025.
Magpie on a blustery day - Pomona, May 2025
Omen Day One / January
Boxing Day is the first of the Omen Days, and the sign it offers relates to January of the year to come. I took a walk at Pomona as my allocated window of omen-spotting. It was a quiet, misty day, and though I could hear birds calling and singing from around the edges of Pomona, there were very few to be seen. A few gulls and a cormorant at Magic Pool, but that is almost always the case. I was looking for the unexpected, not purposefully seeking out particular birds. But throughout my wander, nothing unusual appeared out of the mist.
I made my way to the Heart of Pomona, where I told her that I was already feeling bereft of signs and rather frustrated. My expectancy levels for magical occurrences are often rather high, and I can probably be more dramatic than necessary when feeling a bit disappointed, but it always feels important to express how I'm actually feeling, nonetheless. No sooner were the words out of my mouth, than a brown bird lifted from the vegetation nearby, and flew off toward the river, giving me a good look at them. It was a song thrush.
This was a very encouraging start! Song thrushes are birds that already held a rich symbolic resonance for me, since encountering a young one, its beak full of worms, in June 2024. On that occasion we eyeballed each other from a short distance for quite some time. Immediately afterwards I went and sat by the lock at Pomona and wrote the second half of my long poem, The Song Of Pomona, which formed the last part of my Becoming Pomona show four days later. It helped bring my creative cycle to a point of completion, and gave me renewed confidence as I approached my first solo art show.
I don't always use the Internet to help me interpret what a particular bird means to me, but on some occasions it throws up some real gems. Here are the ones I had absorbed most fully as a personal meaning for the song thrush:
When this beautiful bird appears for you, it is time to sing the song of your life.
It encourages us to listen to our inner voice and trust our instincts. If the thrush appears in your life, it may be urging you to express yourself artistically or creatively.
This was helpful to me, not only because I already had some symbolic connection to reach for, but because I already knew that I would be reprising Becoming Pomona at a gathering in January of this year, where I would also be hosting workshops on the theme of befriending places. Indeed, that weekend, the connections I made and strengthened there, and its theme of friendship, all emerged as the focal point of my January this year. It lent me much encouragement for continuing my Omen Days practice, as the months beyond January were a complete unknown at that stage.
Omen Day Two / February
December 27th was another misty day, and my Omen walk once again took place at Pomona. This time my omen birds made themselves abundantly clear to me: snipe.
As I've written about on here before, snipe are over-wintering visitors to the British Isles, and for the last two years I've found both common snipe and jack snipe hidden away in the marshy undergrowth at Pomona. It took me quite a while to discern that there were two different species present, but eventually I began to recognise two distinct types of bird and behaviours.
Common snipe are larger, with longer beaks. They flush from the ground when humans are still some distance away, and they make their zig-zagging flight relatively high, and travel some distance. Jack snipe are smaller, with richer patterning. You can get very close to them before they flush - on more than one occasion I've very nearly trodden on one, only to find the ground next to me exploding into a flurry of life. Recovering from the subsequent heart attack gives them plenty of time to get away, but jack snipe tend to fly low to the ground and find shelter again a relatively short distance away.
Over the winter of 2023-24, I had seen at least a dozen snipe, including both species, at Pomona. This last winter I had seen only a few, and had not been able to reliably discern any jack snipe among them. I had mostly felt encouraged that any had returned at all, having experienced the sudden loss of their habitat in mid-January 2024, when the heavy cutting machines arrived and ploughed the marshes into a boggy, plantless mess.
On the second Omen Day this January, however, I saw seven separate snipe, including both jack and common. Three of them were hidden in places far from the marshes, where I've never encountered snipe before or since. Snipe had literally leapt up at me as a clear omen!
Discerning their meaning was more tricky, though. I should add at this point, that I have not sought to determine this in advance, but only when each new month rolls around on the calendar. I read quite a bit online at the start of February, but the only thing that seemed to make any sense was this curious line that grabbed my attention in much the same way as a flushing snipe:
The answer won't reveal itself to you unless you are seeking it.
As it happened, this was a perfect fit for February, because I spent all my time at Pomona enquiring with her, “how do you want me to express you to the world next?” - a question offered because I sensed it was time to embark on a new creative project, and the timing allowed me to use the enquiry as a design project for my Permaculture Design for Creatives course. I wrote about that here. Once again my omen bird and its meaning had come up trumps with a guiding framework for the month!
Omen Day Three / March
This was a much trickier day for going and seeking out signs, as it was the day I drove my sons and I down from Manchester to High Wycombe to stay with friends, a journey that my body can just about make on a good day. Packing the car and driving all that way would leave no time or energy for attentive wanders, especially as we arrived after dark. On top of this, it was yet another misty day.
We glimpsed some buzzards as we drove down the M6; saw plenty of rooks at the motorway services; and, as always, saw red kites circling in the skies above the M40 south of Banbury. But none of these felt like they were what I was seeking. Then, remarkably, just as we drove through High Wycombe town centre, my older son pointed up through the windscreen and said, “I think that's a heron!” I glanced up to be met with an incredible sight: a great egret was flying overhead! This is a bird I've seen occasionally, but never before in flight, and certainly not in Wycombe. My omen had been generous enough to seek me out that day!
When March arrived and I sought out the symbolism of the great egret, it turned out to be once again on point. That month I was spending my time at Pomona focusing on telling and refining the story that Pomona had shared with me in February, that has since become the central strut of the collaborative Pomona-based art project Becoming Kingfisher (there's more on that in last week's post) As such, I was spending a great deal of time at a particular portal at Pomona, one that I associate with the source of the story. Common symbolism for the great egret, particularly in Celtic culture - my main reference point for these things - is as a Guardian of portals to the otherworld, and a Messenger between realms!
Even more surprising was another reference I found about great egret as a spirit animal carrying the gift of incredible focus, to gain maximum output from the least energetic expenditure. In March I created four zines of poetry and art, bringing together into cohesive collections nearly seventy of the vast number of poems I wrote between 2020-2024. All previous attempts at finding ways to present this body of work had failed me and left me feeling overwhelmed. In March it all just flowed, and it didn't even feel like work. And curiously, once April started, that energetic flow quickly dried up. I had certainly felt great egret’s energy and presence.
Plenty of these three zines are still available - £0 or £7.50 or £15 for the bundle of 3 (your choice what you pay) - just message me for more details
The first three Omen Days had been really kind to me, providing clear and obvious bird messengers, even when it seemed unlikely that I would find one. From day four, though, things started to become much more hazy and uncertain.
Omen Day Four / April
The fourth day seemed to provide the perfect conditions for encountering an omen bird. I took a walk with my friend and my sons in a beautiful wooded area called Mop End. It was the last of the very misty days, and the woods felt incredibly atmospheric. It should have been easy. But in fact, we saw barely any sign of birdlife for most of our walk, other than a few scattered pheasant feathers.
Finally, as we made our way back to the car, three separate male blackbirds appeared, one after another. But in April I found it almost impossible to make any sense of what this augured. Nothing I found seemed of any relevance, and most of my online searches threw up results pertaining to black birds - ravens, crows and blackbirds as a symbolic group related to underworld energies - rather than the blackbird itself.
Sharing my frustrations about all this in an online group part way through April, a word that seemed to keep cropping up in response was murmurations. I was told that American blackbirds form murmurations, something I had no idea about. I've always associated these dramatic, dynamic groups in the sky with starlings, as British blackbirds don't form them.
The same day, someone shared about an upcoming men's group for mentoring and learning called Murmurations, which I was keen to follow up. That course has just begun, and I'm immensely curious about what it will bring into my life. But back in April, everything that had felt clear and purposeful for the first three months of the year seemed to have entirely lost its clarity.
Furthermore, as I wrote about recently, some unexpected and unwelcome emotional upheavals came my way that month, which dominated my attention and required a great deal of effort to move through in late April and early May. It certainly felt like a visit to the underworld for a few weeks!
I've also just now remembered that I inadvertently tore the image below in half, and put it in the recycling in mid-April, which I guess should have told me I needed to rip up my ideas of blackbird as an omen, and accept that it was indeed the black birds of raven and crow, and their underworld energies, that were my omen for the month.
Found poem on an image of a blackbird by artist Robert Gillmore, taken from a 2023 calendar and created August 2024
Omen Day Five / May
We're up to 30th December now, and the omen that speaks to May, the month that has just ended as this post is published.
I'd gone to stay at my mum's house since the previous evening. She lives round the corner from a gorgeous small piece of woodland that I always try to visit when I'm there. Near the bottom end the deciduous trees give way to a dramatic section of pine woods that always capture my attention. I took a solo walk on a circular route, following the path around the edge of the woodland. It was the first day without mist, and both the conditions and environment should have been perfect for coming across birds. But it really didn't work out that way!
As it turned out, I saw a few pigeons, heard some long-tailed tits, and that was about it. Just as I was leaving, I caught a glimpse of a red kite through the naked branches overhead. This was the bird I settled on as my omen, but it felt less than convincing.
Furthermore, finding an omen and parsing its meaning are two different things, and the kite has felt by far the most impenetrable sign yet! I certainly receive the kite’s presence as a sense of “home”. I grew up in High Wycombe, and still visit regularly, as friends and family live there. Since they were reintroduced to the Chiltern Valley a couple of decades ago, the red kite population has boomed, and they are a common sight overhead, often in great numbers. So driving south down the M40 and seeing these great fork-tailed birds of prey always grants me a sense of homecoming.
But how this has related to May - beyond a visit from my Wycombe friend - is still mostly unclear. Perhaps it simply relates to “home comforts”, of which I've needed many this month: sweet treats, favourite movies, books that I already know and can immerse myself in once again, more tipples than the average month. And sleep - oh boy, has my body wanted to sleep throughout May! I've been dragging myself out of deep, dream-busy sleeps after nine or ten hours, and taking an age to come round into the real world. Those dreams also seem to be speaking to me in their own mysterious language, most of which makes no sense to me at all - at least, not yet.
Patterns
Writing all this in one go here has helped me to see something, though: not only have my individual omen birds been giving me guidance for each month - some much more clearly than others - but there's a pattern emerging too. The birds that revealed themselves to me very obviously have been easy to translate into meaning and action in “their month”. My energies, even if limited, have been clearly focused. But the Omen Days where the birds that appeared weren't obvious to me have related to months where meaning in general has been harder to find, and my energies have been more scattered.
The birds that related to January, February and March made themselves really clear. The Omen Days for April and May, even though I was in woodland environments, revealed very little birdlife to me, and it wasn't clear or easy to decide which bird was making itself known.
So I feel painfully aware that the next two Omen Days - 31st December and 1st January, relating to June and July - were the vaguest of all. They were days that I barely went outside, other than on short car journeys between houses, and even when I did venture out with the intent of paying attention, birds mostly seemed to have evaporated into obscurity. So I'm preparing for another couple of months lacking in clarity of purpose. It's probably a good time to double down on discipline and routine, because these are helpful anchors and, for me, often the first things to slip when I feel in this unmoored state.
The good news (for me) is that the final five Omen Days offered really clear bird signs like the first three, so I'm hopeful of regaining some steadiness and focus from August until the end of the year!
Meanwhile, I was intending to write today about the feelings and experiences surrounding the sense of lostness in my own life. Not least because one beloved friend bought me a copy of Rebecca Solnit’s marvellous book A Field Guide to Getting Lost for my birthday this month. I've read it before, but I wouldn't be re-reading it now if it weren't for his thoughtfulness. It's reminding me how much I loved it first time round, and also providing me with some useful ways of navigating the mystifying territory I seem to have wandered into, beyond any maps I possess.
However, I've already penned a great deal today. It all feels very specific to my own life and, as I've said, it's mostly “processing aloud”. But I'm ever hopeful that something here makes a meaningful connection to someone reading or listening. If that's you, please do drop a comment below! Is anyone else out there noticing a similar pattern of clarity and mystery this year?
I'll (hopefully!) be back next week, though with what I'm more uncertain than ever. There will perhaps be some salient passages from Solnit's book, and maybe even a poem, if I can find my way to finishing one in my current state of being. For now, Wild Green Blessings on you as we enter June - the month that has contained the most magical encounters for me in recent years. Let's see how it all unfolds this time round, in the middle of a distinctly foggy period of life.
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