The last Saturday night in May, and I’m writing in our garden as the light fades, with the embers of an impromptu fire after cutting back overgrowth to let more light in. Which always feels like a metaphor.
Gardening is all metaphor – and I have been losing myself in mine, between real time working and new forays into writings, which is why I haven’t written here for so long.
In my overactive imagination, every ‘weed’ I pull or slug fed to the hens feels like a Nazi act – brutal, far too powerful. And yet there’s also the great mother in the clearing of space for the things you choose: moving things into the best possible position; protecting young promise from undiscerning appetites. Moving always in your imagination between a future dream of flowers and fruitfulness and this moment now of the body. Which is gently moving – being moved – by an ever evolving co-creativity with nature. The garden is a very long conversation.
I am completely in love with my garden. So much so that I’m embarrassed I might finish this writing with the only cultural recommendation for you being Chelsea Flower Show on the BBC.
We are incredibly lucky to have a stream running through the two halves of our patch and over the past few months I’ve had whispers in my ear leading me to…
…perfect second-hand furniture which has emerged into a little room on the bridge over the stream. Now right in the middle of the garden, with the most sun and the best view over all the changing flowers, brave birds and stream life, are old bamboo chairs with cushions so comfortable they fall me to sleep.
The garden lulls me to listen to all the advice in the silence.
And often nothing is as beautiful or as tempting as being silent listening to the garden.
—
I do have a cultural recommendation for you after all these months – and probably many more to come – but just one for now that I think everyone has a duty to watch, if you live in a body.
Summer of Soul won the Best Documentary Oscar award this year, and very deservedly so. We took our children to see it at the local film club and the whole room was toe-tapping and making audible inhalations and exhalations to cope with the electric atmosphere.
Perhaps it’s a film you should watch standing up.
Summer of Soul was a music festival that took place in Harlem in 1969. The same year as the infamous Woodstock, with all the best black artists of the time performing – Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, BB King, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Temptations… attended by three hundred thousand people!
Unlike Woodstock, however, the festival was never written into history because no one would air the footage – until now. But it is extraordinary footage, beautifully curated. Of course it’s politically important. But for me the deepest politics of the film is a politics of the body. The spiritual power of those performances to light a fire in the cells of every one of the 300,000 bodies at the festival, and everyone who will watch the film – I don’t want to over-egg the pudding for you – just watch it.
We have a human right to dissolve into musical ecstasy –
and this is a celebration of a moment when culture understood this with such depth of talent and soul – soul is a spiritual word even and especially in music – that every generation dancing together, being taken together to new places in their bodies, is as profound as it gets.
Yes I absolutely love dancing.
But I challenge anyone who doesn’t think of themselves as ‘a dancer’ to watch this film and not question what white Western culture has done to the way we use our bodies.
When there are other cultures that make it an act of universal spiritual worship to create spaces through music for the body to explore ecstasy. The body, not just the mind.
Because it’s easy to forget that the body is our instrument for listening, receiving.
And that good things always come when we surrender to the listening.
—
I’d wait to listen to the soundtrack until after you’ve watched the film, but here it is in case you want to cheat:
You can watch Summer of Soul online by streaming it at:
Amazon (one-off rental cost of £4.99)
or
Disney Plus (if you’re not a member, you’d have to subscribe to their monthly subscription for £7.99)
As a footnote, I’d also add that to understand Nina Simone’s perspective at this event, the documentary about her on Netflix provides very useful context, and is wonderful television about an extraordinarily talented if extraordinarily complicated soul. And if you don’t love Nina (poor you), it’s about time you did:
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"the garden is a very long conversation." wonderful