Earthed, p.1
Earthed, page 1
‘A moving, intriguing and beautifully conceived exploration of place, person and planet through time, Earthed speaks to the struggles of holding on during dark days and the power of hope in hard times.’
Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground
‘I’m in awe of this extraordinary book. Artfully crafted yet full of raw honesty, Earthed is unlike anything I’ve read before.’
Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden
‘A beautiful memoir of a scattered mind and how it can find peace in the soil. Rebecca Schiller’s gaze is unflinching and full of truth. So many readers will find themselves in these pages.’
Katherine May, author of Wintering
‘A stirring, powerful and honest examination of mental health, motherhood and the pressures we put on one another.
A vital book.’ Alice Vincent, author of Rootbound
‘A hard and beautiful read. The tough truth about the simple life.’
Eva Wiseman
‘Earthed is Rebecca Schiller’s powerful, poetic meditation on the process of falling apart, and her love letter to the land that rooted and rebuilt her. A deeply affecting read.’
Leah Hazard, author of Hard Pushed
‘So powerful, so human and so compelling. This is a beautifully written story of land and life and people. How we need them all yet all struggle with that need. I couldn’t put it down. Connecting past to present and future, this frank and vulnerable memoir is filled with hope, strength and resilience. A must read.’
Frances Tophill, Gardeners’ World
‘A lyrical journey through nature and the human heart.’
Sarah Langford, author of In Your Defence
‘Earthed broke me open. Painful, visceral and amazing writing that I loved from start to finish. This is a book that I will read again and again.’
Grace Timothy, author of Lost in Motherhood
‘An intimate story of fragility and losing control . . . I loved the evocation of women from history, their reminder that trees and terrain are part of what we all traverse and part of what we need to look after ourselves.’
Jessica Moxham, author of The Cracks That Let the Light In
‘We can never really know the inner landscapes of another person’s mind. In Rebecca Schiller’s Earthed, we see the compelling portrait of a woman who struggles and pivots, persists and adapts to a mental health diagnosis in honest and insightful prose.’
Kathryn Aalto, author of Writing Wild
‘Profoundly observed and beautifully rendered, this is a timely reflection on what it means to be human, and the redemptive power of nature. It is both exquisitely personal and painfully universal, I was underlining whole paragraphs as I read. A remarkable book.’
Charlotte Philby, author of A Double Life
‘Earthed is the most beautiful, poetic book about what it means to be a woman raising kids in this high-pressured modern world while attempting to connect with the natural world in order to feel more grounded.’
Annie Ridout, author of Shy
‘An extraordinary, life-changing read. Honest, vulnerable and deeply moving.’
Sara Venn, founder of Incredible Edible, horticulturist and food activist
‘A brave and honest memoir.’
Alice O’Keeffe, author of On the Up
‘Invoking the power of the land and the women who worked and walked it before, Earthed is a spellbinding account of an urgent search for wholeness, acceptance and belonging.’
Andrew O’Brien, ‘Gardens, Weeds and Words’
‘Earthed beautifully captures the unravelling of a woman and mother in all its untidy, unyielding and brutal reality. The honesty and rawness in the way Rebecca writes about her rage spoke to me so much. A powerful and poetic look at our connection to country, to those women who came before us and the understanding our own minds.’
Penny Wincer, author of Tender
‘An incredible, candid memoir: full of flowers, truth and the reality of growth.’
Cariad Lloyd, creator of the Griefcast podcast
For Jared, with love and faith
This is my letter – you’ll open it when it suits you best.
For Clare, with gratitude
You are pure carbon. Never doubt it.
CONTENTS
Prologue: February 2020
Part One: Spring 2019
January: I Fall
February: Beginnings
March: Frag ment ation
April: A Candle in the Dark
Part Two: Summer 2019
May: Mismatch
June: I Dissolve
July: Offerings
August: Djendjenkumaka
Part Three: Autumn–Winter 2019
September: Map-making
October: Missing Pieces
November: I Am Revealed
December: The Mind Scrambler
Part Four: The New Year
Spring 2020: Zoom In
Summer 2020: Zoom Out
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
FEBRUARY 2020
TEST START
Blue square, red square, red circle, blue circle, red square, red square: CLICK.
This feels like a race that I have lost from the start. My body is alive with potential movements but I try not to give in to them. I’m aware of everything all at once, which is too much and makes it hard to concentrate on the – blue square, red circle, red circle: CLICK. My thoughts bounce off the red circle and into the future when I tell Jared about the test: this result, that result, which result do I want it to be? Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. I need to speed my brain up or make the shapes slow down – blue circle, red square: NO CLICK – but how? If I could just rewind ten minutes and listen to the instructions again, perhaps it would be easier? That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go just the tiniest half-step back and try harder to pin it all down.
The grey, ping-pong-sized ball is attached to the middle of my forehead with a black sweatband. I’m wearing the child’s size, and at first it holds my head in its grip comfortingly. As the minutes pass the band constricts until my temples bisect the circle of my skull with a line of future headache. I keep it on though: the adult size doesn’t have a single-use cover and, according to the news, this sort of thing is becoming important. As we get ready for the test to start, adjusting the equipment squeezed close together in the corner of the consulting room, the psychiatrist’s assistant and I dance around this awkward issue of hygiene, unsure whether we are being overly cautious or not cautious enough.
I am sitting where I have been told to sit: facing a camera, at a laminate desk, in front of a laptop. There is no window and the room is small and impersonal: an examining couch behind me, clinical waste bins and a sink to my left. It has not yet got to the stage where we think to wash our hands.
The slickness in the well of my right palm as I take the black plastic button-clicker makes me realise how nervous I am. The assistant’s instructions are simple. All I have to do is stay in this chair for twenty minutes pushing the button with my thumb every time the screen in front of me shows a matching shape sequence. Red square, red square: CLICK. Blue circle, red circle: NO CLICK. Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. Blue square, blue circle: NO CLICK. Together the camera and ping-pong ball will record how much I move around, while the computer program keeps tabs on my accuracy and reaction times.
During the test the psychiatrist’s assistant will sit behind me, just out of sight, making notes.
I have done much harder things than sitting in a too-warm room clicking, or not clicking, a button. Yet I’m breathing fast and my lungs are stretched taut – the soon-to-split skin of an over-watered tomato after a drought. I no longer know how to be in this kind of electric-lit absence of a room. None of the versions of myself that I usually wear to camouflage this seem to fit. My fingers shake slightly with this disorientation: the ruffle of grass in a June breeze, the tiny bounce of a birch branch as a goldfinch lands. To cover my discomfort I make three stupid jokes, which fall like stones on to the rubberised floor.
An example test starts. I yank my mind back to the laptop and find red and blue shapes sliding past my eyes very, very quickly. I struggle to catch them before they disappear. They shimmer and blend with each other and I am instantly jumbled and on the back foot.
Oh.
An hour ago, as my husband Jared drove me here, I watched the fields and forests of Kent turn into shopping centres and wondered whether my subconscious could skew the test’s result one way or the other. Now that the shapes are in front of me, refusing to cooperate with my brain, I am realising that, as a patient, I don’t have that kind of power. But once a try-hard, always a try-hard, and so I lean forwards, deepening my crow’s feet, and squint with concentration. I ready myself by pushing my hair out of my eyes and shaking my tilted head sightly as if hoping to tip the fog out of my ears. There’s a blond hair caught on the purple sapphire of my engagement ring: mine. A mane of two years of neglect now: elbow-length, with split ends and better-than-salon lightened by the sun.
Why didn’t I tie it back? Why am I making myself do this? Why didn’t I just stay at home?
This year I decided not to make resolutions. Not to wake every morning and tie each day to them and not to spend the evening crying because, once again, the wind had blown those twelve hours loose. 2019 was difficult, but so was the year before. And the one before that – 2017 – when we moved to the plot and more than my edges started to fray. So I wanted to find a new
Yet in my cold new-year garden, I couldn’t help letting one hope in. As I went out to feed the hens, I spotted something in the mud. I told myself that the grey-green shoots were only grass but the buds revealed themselves anyway: tiny, tightly closed, spear tips that loosened into white bells. The snowdrops opened with an invitation to believe that, whatever this year would bring, it would be better than the one before.
And it will be.
And it won’t.
TEST START
Blue square, red square, red circle, blue circle, red square, red square: CLICK.
This feels like a race that I have lost from the start. My body is alive with potential movements but I try not to give in to them. I’m aware of everything all at once, which is too much and makes it hard to concentrate on the – blue square, red circle, red circle: CLICK. My thoughts bounce off the red circle and into the future when I tell Jared about the test: this result, that result, which do I want it to be? Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. There is a clock on the metal-and-glass shelf to my left. Its hands read 10:46 and I already wonder what time the test started and how many minutes have gone by. Blue circle, red square, blue circle, blue circle: CLICK. I hear the noise of biro on paper over my right shoulder: the assistant is writing something down. Anxiety prickles up my arms and into my throat as I wonder what notes she could possibly be taking already: I haven’t done anything yet. I am sitting so still, clicking this button (as I have been told) in total silence – though of course the silence exists only outside my head. Blue circle, blue circle: CLICK.
My legs are very restless but I try to keep them fixed in one position. Red square, red square: CLICK. My mind is a kaleidoscope of blurry thoughts and questions: the task in hand, its interpretation, trying to read the woman sitting invisibly behind me, keeping all these tabs open, active and interlinked. Underneath this first avalanche of thought are many bigger-picture wonderings: about my family, my life, our way of life and, as these things pop up, they obscure parts of the red circle, blue circle, red square: NO CLICK.
I hear the receptionist leading someone into the room next door. Babble, footsteps, door open, door close. A muffled discussion makes it through the plasterboard between us and a single reassurance is audible: ‘No one is trying to trip you up.’ The receptionist speaks in a voice that I remember from the two sentences we exchanged earlier. Has this reassurance made the woman on the other side of the wall feel more nervous or less?
Blue square, blue square? CLICK? CLICK.
As I depress the button with my thumb again I realise that – ridiculously, embarrassingly – I am going to cry and there is probably nothing I can do about it. With as little movement as possible (red square, blue circle, blue circle: CLICK) I put my left hand on my right arm and discreetly dig my fingernails into the freckles there. I feel naked: underneath-my-skin-level naked. As if my fat and bones and partially digested food are suddenly visible and the world can see all the bloody parts of my body: the ones I usually dress up in skin and shove out into the world as if they were a person.
I am confused and ashamed, none of my sleights of hand work here and now a tear has escaped and is making its way down my right cheek. I decide to risk wiping it, disguising the movement as a nose scratch and treating myself to uncrossing and recrossing my legs at the same time. I need to stop this crying before the assistant notices, so, just for a second, I pretend there is night sky above me instead of ceiling tiles; a sliver of new moon in the west replacing the ugly brown water stain.
But the squares and circles block out the stars and I am sinking with the effort of separating them: NO CLICK. I’ve stopped wiping tears, so there’s a regular beat of tiny, almost non-sounds as they hit my skirt.
Red circle, red square, blue square, red circle, blue, red, blue, red, square, circle, squircle, circed, squed, blircle.
Bled. Rue.
CLICK?
NO CLICK?
I am screwing this up and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. No performance I can roll out and no illusion of competence. There’s no one to hide behind here, no last-minute miracle push I can pull out of the bag, no way to fake it, no brilliant distraction, no covering humour, no meticulous preparation, no costume, no series of reminders and lists, no lie or excuse, no way to cancel at the last minute, no opt-out, no get-out, no convincing apology, no way to go back in time.
I have finally been caught out.
I take deliberate, slow breaths and try to overcome this realisation – blue square, blue square: CLICK – and become one with the – red, blue, blue, red, red – computer. I tell myself that I exist only for this button and these shapes. That nothing else matters. Except it does. It all matters. It is all connected. It is all important. Square, square, square, circle, square, circle, square. My house is square and our field is made of two rectangles. I guess the pond is a wonky circle? And inside the trees’ trunks there are hundreds of them: concentric circles, red circles. A red circle? CLICK.
I am trying to stay in this room but I want to go home to the place where all my hopes and hurts are held safely by a boundary of trees and hedges, two acres of dirt and a swatch of red sky in the morning, blue sky at lunchtime and red sky at night. Red: shepherd’s warning, shepherd’s delight. Red sky, red circle, blue circle, blue circle: CLICK? Red, blue, red, blue, rose, delphinium, dahlia, anemone, bluebell, tulip, forget-me-not.
But I have forgotten.
Time has stopped flowing and become a pool of superglue. I am lost in it: held fast by primary colours. Beyond this screen I know there is a world where red circles are ladybird poppies I sowed in autumn and blue squares the sharp-edged cornflowers. In that place it is shadows and whispers that compel me to stare at the curves and corners of red and blue as they sway gently in the wind. There I watch a dronefly settle to take a little nectar and wait for the understanding to land in me, as it always does, in the tiniest fragments: pollen caught in bristles and then flown away across the many miles.
The plot is out of my reach though. Red square? Red square? I don’t remember what a square is but I am sure I never want to see one again. I can’t think why I have to click this button but I’m certain that I must. I click. I don’t click. I click. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.
I disappear.
I have become earth now. Crumbled to a fine tilth and blown into the cracks of the keyboard: lost between the ‘A’ and the ‘S’ and the ‘D’. I am so fine and so light that I could plant carrots in myself and they would grow straight and true in my insubstantial being. Nothing exists but the squares and circles that keep coming at me relentlessly, an endlessness of commas, here in the place where I am stuck:
red, blue, red, blue, , , ,
The world as I know it has ended. The plot has died off, died back.
A felled forest: white noise and then silence.
And even the swirl of the wind is stopped.
The Hummingbirds
In this book
there are many hummingbirds—
the blue-throated, the bumblebee, the calliope
the cinnamon, the lucifer, and of course
the ruby-throated.
Imagine!
Well, that’s all you can do.
For they’re swift as the wind
and they fly, not across the pages but,
like many shy and otherworldly things,
between them.
I know you’ll keep looking now that I’ve told you.
I’m hungry to see them too, but I can’t
hold them back even for a moment, they’re
busy, as all things are, with their own lives.
So all I can do is let you know
they’re here somewhere.
All I can do is tell you
by putting my own hunger on the page.
Mary Oliver, from Blue Horses
PART ONE
SPRING 2019
JANUARY
I FALL
It is dark on this moonless night, the ground uneven, and the half-bottle of wine makes me forget to place each foot deliberately as I have trained myself to do. I am upright and laughing one moment and the next, side-lit by the pub window, I’m knees down on the wet pavement trying not to cry. Down here I spot mud and grass smeared on the side of my good shoes – a gift from my field no doubt. My palms are skinned and there’s a pain somewhere else too, but I pay more attention to the two men in front of me turning their heads in interest and amusement.
