For the last six years or so I have been asking questions about the mosslands of Greater Manchester. Questions revolving around a sense of connection to older ways of knowing and being in the land, knowledge informed through touch.
Knowing through a relationship to place and the stuff of place.
How do these lands shape us? and how can we consider thinking in slower, wider timescales and in terms of local when we live in an age of mass production and ecological degradation?
Attention given to the land underfoot informs my growing relationship with Little Woolden Moss.
If you sit on the land long enough
It will speak to you
If you listen you will hear it murmur
If you sit still,
If you stop moving
If you open your ear
You will begin to hear a foreign language – an ancient tongue
And if you
If you can be silent
You can hear it move
And if that silence is maintained
You will hear a faint pulse
And within that pulse begin to feel the fibre of that old song
And it will touch every part of your being
And start to tell you the story of the old spirit that rests in this country.
Song, the story of a Girl, a Bird and a Teapot.
Devi A. (formerly Waiata) Telfer, an Australian poet and playwright.
July saw long periods without rain, followed by days of heavy rain.
Degrees of exposure are revealed starkly as exposed moss slowly turns white.
Humidity was captured and held within the architecture of the moss. Tall grass and ferns hold moisture and fragrance. Textures are revealed by droplets of water as they reshape the leaves/stems/petals on their journey towards the ground.
