Back to Black-a-tor

You can never see too many oaks; nor can you spend too much time in temperate rainforest.

And so, Gary, Elise and I went-a-wandering back to Black-a-tor. We took a different route but, just like last time, still went the wrong way and ended up retracing our steps, albeit to a different car park.

I sat with a tree for a while - in fact, there are images: in the film there are about five photos (and one of them is the front page of this entry) of a root embracing a rock like a second skin. Or a first skin, since rocks don't have a skin. So, just a skin. It's hard to tell what is tree and what is rock.

You see struggle and death and life against the odds and I will tell you how vibrant, creative, and exultant life against the odds is. Embrace that which constrains you so utterly that it supports you. This is where the real, in our view-our as a whole and as a collective- meaning lies: to turn stone and wind and rain and the raw cold into a green garden for everyone to thrive. What joy to be alive in this way. What can look twisted and tortured is, in fact, the expression of what it's all about: boundless vitality. Every surface can hold water, can catch sun, can absorb the wind, can insulate from the cold.

I did love Cabilla and I am hugely impressed by what they have done there. The scheme is larger than I explained: Merlin is working with farmers across Bodmin to enable landscape-scale regeneration. He and his wife Lizzie are clearly dynamos.

Yet, Black-a-tor has a Tolkien-esque je ne sais quoi all of its own. Even more than Wistman's Wood. But best of all, back at "home", the Grove Oak... and, on a level footing, even if I am considering Kairos, inappropriately, as an individual, my companion tree.