This piece originally appeared in Folding Rock Issue 001: Roots.

SOIL | 2019

Early in December 2019 I found myself doubled over and pulling wildly at the roots of nettles – shovelling soil in the shade of an elder tree, leafless in midwinter; levelling a small piece of shrubby, neglected land.

It’s a romantic idea, to move to an island and live off the land. Emyr and I had met in August the previous year. By June, the opportunity arose to become Wardens of a small, wild island, and by September there we were; limbs and spades, the soil gathering under our fingernails.

Gardening came to me like a language. Instinctively we cultivated a small piece of left-behind earth, built a polytunnel and started to grow. That first year, every seed we sowed grew. It was tropical. It was my first time experiencing the journey through the seasons as a grower – travelling through space and time, playing with heat, light and water – the miracle of what can be achieved when you have all three, soil, and a packet of seeds.

We had created a space where everything was simultaneously ancient and young at the same time. Vibrant and fleeting. The garden became a thread that tied me to time and as the years passed I almost became a puppet to its invisible strings, unconsciously playing out the rituals – sometimes, on reflection, a year exactly since the last time. Gathering and spreading seaweed, planting the first seeds, digging up the last of the potatoes. The garden taught me patience, taught me to trust, taught me that everything flowers in its own time.

I met others in the soil too; layers of past lives, stories held in old chipped pottery, glass and bone. One summer I found a flint arrowhead – it came up from the earth tangled in the roots of an onion.

My grandfather had been a gardener too and it was he who had planted a feeling deep in my childhood. He died when he was ninety-three. I wonder now what he had sown that final summer. At the time, I was a rebellious fourteen-year-old and had my lifetime again to live before I would be clipping cutting from his raspberry bushes in my own garden. This is how gardening time works; it is deep, fluid, yet rooted – it outlives us – and the feeling I’d carried from when I was five years old and digging up potatoes with him was a feeling of connection, between us and the earth

SEED | 2022

The day I found out I was pregnant, it was late August, the land tired and bone-dry after a hot summer, and I’d seen a rainbow where there shouldn’t have been one. The next twelve weeks passed in a blur of nausea and fatigue. At times I felt detached from my body, unable to comprehend what exactly was happening inside. Twelve weeks of only being able to whisper the truth into the wind had spread it thin between the blades of grass. I became startled by the thought of saying it aloud – of sharing the news with hearts and minds. In mid-October, before the winter’s path was fully blown open ahead of us, we had crossed to the mainland and I found myself lying down in a darkish room with a stranger spreading cold gel on my flat stomach. Through sound we saw our child on a small screen. Like moonlight on seawater, black, white and dancing – there it was, the unmistakable flicker of a heartbeat.

Looking back now, the thing about that winter, in the depths of it – when the days were short and the darkness heavy and pressing on our windows, when the wind had weeded in between all of the cracks and the garden was barren, I did not need to kneel in the soil with my ear to the earth to listen. I knew. I knew there was life waiting, I knew everything would return in its own time.

To have the same trust in my own body was an act of faith, not of knowing. I had not known this feeling before and at times I became focused on feeling the life within me move. Some days, a lull made me anxious, the miracle of it exposing the fragility of existence. Inside me was a soul, with a beating heart, arms and legs and hearing ears. Living on the edge of structure, far from the sliding doors of the midwives clinic, I had no choice but to have faith in my body and the land’s ability to provide.

The island, Ynys Enlli, is half a mile wide and a mile and a half long. It is separated from the mainland by two miles of raging, seal-filled sea. The tide-race has shaped the history of the place. Humans have gathered on the island for thousands of years yet today, for four months of winter, it is only me and Emyr that hold the space. Off-grid, we are left to the mercy of the elements; for power and for water. The weather has a hold on our lives equal to our ancestors’.

ROOTS | 2023

It turned into an unsettlingly rainless February. I spent three weekends ridding the soil of last year’s weeds, making room for new growth. Where I didn’t want the light to grow fertile yet, I covered it with seaweed and cardboard, gorse chippings and wool. In the tunnel I planted peas and broad beans; the cycle beginning again. Crouched over and gathering the cut stalks of the raspberry bush – I had felt the baby kick.

My belly by then was becoming rounder, my organs pushed and squished upwards and sidewards. After the birth it would take two months for my stomach and liver, intestines and kidneys to return to their normal place. Occasionally I could see where an elbow or a foot was pushing against the skin. It is only in hindsight that I can admire what the body goes through during the nine months of gestation, the same way as I can only fully appreciate the abundance of summer in midwinter. When you’re in the middle of it, surrounded by it, embodying it, it can be hard to have any perspective at all.

March brought the rain. Water arrived in sheets of grey; pelting, pouring, pooling on the dry earth, our shoulders dropping with relief. We were deep into the pre-season duties, weeks passing in a blur of soap water on skirting and dry sponges on mouldy walls. My thirty-three-weeks pregnant body was still agile enough to reach the ceilings and crouch by the floors as we prepared the island for the season. Spring was stirring; the island slowly filling again with wandering souls.

At the edges of the lengthening days, I gardened. Knowing that I might be off for some time over the birth, I planted seeds in trays, in pots and in the ground – I sowed some things earlier than I should but knew a seed in soil has more chance than a seed in a paper packet. Gardening is an act of the imagination and I prepared the tunnel beaming, my belly and heart full.

In early April I handed over my Warden duties and it was time to wait for the birth. The morning I was packed to leave I had sat on the north end of the island and met the rising sun. A waning moon was setting behind me, not into the horizon but into clouds. The wind was cold and I felt annoyed at having to leave before the thrift blushed the shores. The forecast was unsettled. Boat crossings were a week apart, and the baby in my belly was thirty-seven weeks old; fully formed and ready.

I have spent many hours watching seals as they lay heavily pregnant, waiting to pup. I have never seen the miracle happen. It is hard to prepare for something that could happen at any moment, and could go in so many ways.

It had been four years since I had spent spring on the mainland, and my pockets became heavy with the stones I started collecting, subconsciously drawn to the ones flat and rounded like small grey suns.

Time passed. The dandelions emerged first, turning fields into a carpet of yellow before returning to seed. Bluebells came and went. The white petals of the apple tree flowered and then fell in the garden.

I felt it all, the world unfurling around me.

When the due date came, I was restless and found myself sitting in my parents’ garden at 5 am, barefoot. The young April morning had clung to the leaves of trees. Birds called, louder than the early traffic thundering, blurry-eyed, four fields below. Westward I had watched two lighthouses flash; one slow and one sudden like the hearts that beat inside me. Around me the whole world was awakening. I didn’t know then, but I still had two weeks to wait.

FRUIT

My waters broke when I was out walking; on my own and in between the hedgerows I felt the change. The water came out patiently and clear and then my contractions began. My body and my baby, despite spending a month on the mainland waiting, were still on island time. Later, in the depths of the night, I stood smiling, out in the garden, in my slippers; walking under a blanket of stars, the earth glistening beneath my feet after a heavy shower of rain. Passing the hours by counting the seconds between the waves of tightening in my body. When the sun rose, I was much the same, contracting one to two times every ten minutes. The heron that flew over the house that morning was out of place yet told me something; just like the rainbow had nine months before.

We arrived at the hospital that evening to fluorescent lights of the night shift glaring. Mothers in full blown labour screaming. The heating of the ward room broken. Too hot, too slow, too many risks. Strapped to my belly were two discs listening and transferring my baby’s heartbeat to a line drawn by ink on paper by a machine by the bed. The baby was fine, but I was urged to be induced and the feeling was of a spring tide, turning. I had been carried by the waters to the height of my pregnancy – but then it was a familiar instinct, perhaps from hours sitting on the steep east side of the island, watching for the first subtle signs. After the flood of a tide, the waters lull for two hours, slack and calm before the first lines appear, pulling at the edges of rocks. Thirty-six hours after my waters had broken I found myself swimming forcefully against the tide.

I wondered if there were crows circling. I felt far away from everything that was real.

Too hot, too slow, too many risks. I refused an induction. I tried to calm myself and held my belly, my hands feeling the life within; the shortest and the greatest of distances. Midwives at 4 AM, shadow-eyed, tired and reminding me of time. No time. Forty-two weeks, waters broken for over twenty-four hours. Too hot, too slow, too many risks. 6 AM. A cannula is slipped into my wrist, an IV drip of antibiotics. Too hot, too slow, too many risks. The tide by morning was raging and my intuition that everything was happening in its own time slipping, seaweed-like through my fingers.

At midday I found myself outside of my own body, looking at my own hand signing my own name on a black line, pulling a gown over my shoulders; as if they were not my own at all. Pain surging through my entire body, I couldn’t speak. I had been told that I still wasn’t in established labour and I stopped swimming.

Too hot, too slow, too many risks. I asked for a Caesarean.

At 1.17 PM the knife sliced my skin.

My body numbed, I felt no pain. Emyr was holding my hand and had covered my eyes with a cold flannel. Finally I was home. I walked in golden light on the mountain’s top, heather beneath my feet, the sea below a pond, calm and quiet.

At 1.20 PM the knife sliced my uterus.

I took a final deep breath – the last breath I would give my baby and then…

she was born.

HARVEST

Two weeks later, my body was still in shock, the stitches still undissolved. Remnants from the womb remained in the crease of her eyelids and in between the folds of her skin. Both her hands were still tightly closed in small fists. She was feeding and I was sitting with my back against the headboard – looking south, through the half-open window, towards the sea. It was a moonless May night and I was in a new state of consciousness. Outside, I could hear the familiar cry of the Manx shearwaters – young mothers too, I thought. We were finally home.

For the first time, the island felt big. The south end felt far, the mountain steep. My body had become a stranger but the garden had been faithful; the seeds I had planted in March were now more than ideas. They had roots and leaves – and, not being able to lift much weight, I had been watering them by the half canister.

I was off-kilter. I felt broken. I felt I’d failed in some fundamental way. I also felt profoundly happy. I was the light and the dark side of the moon. I was all the tides, high and low, spring and neap; a calm and wild ocean of emotion. I relived the night of her birth. I detested the red mark on my wrist where the cannula had been. Hated the pinpricks on my stomach from where I’d had to inject myself with a blood thinner for nine days. I feared the incision site. It felt vulnerable; the stitches still rigid and out of place, easily undone, my whole being held together by it.

But in the garden, I felt peace.

Ahead of us were four months of summer and tied to my chest; my daughter. I stood surrounded by life. There, rainwater trickled through the green pipe, filling the butt. The elder tree was in flower.

And so I was able to resume and find my place. I learnt to move, to bend, to weed and water, sow and transplant with the baby sleeping; somedays tied to me, other times lying in her basket. I moved birdlike around her, quietly creating order again. When everything changed, the garden weaved the past and the future and held me, right at the centre of things.

FLOWER

It was in those early months of motherhood that I felt most primal – we were mammals, not reduced to but raised to our highest selves – my most ancient of instincts were awake. Without language, I knew her; and she knew me. I felt reflected in the world around us: the milk stain in the sky was like the one on my shoulder; the blue of her eyes had come from the sea.

In the dark, I would listen to her breathing, and then a sound would come from her like birdsong. In these moments, when my mind was soft, my thoughts like sun-rays through seawater, I imagined that she had the spirit of a storm-petrel. I saw her as a bird, against all odds, small and mighty out on the great sea.

The long days of summer kept me sane. Time became an illusion, but the light held me, like a friend on each arm, lifting me up and out of the house at dawn if she would not sleep. Or on the harder days when she fed for hours and I gazed out through the window at life – the evenings were still long and forgiving. The sun still high at 8 pm; its light still edging south.

After five weeks the bleeding stopped and so I swam. I dared not jump into the water, dared not move my body too wildly, too freely – and so I slipped from the jagged black rocks into the clear cold sea. It was the first time in a long time that I was without her.

Afterwards I let the sun and the breeze dry the seawater off my skin and then Emyr gave her to me, and on the rocks I fed her.

Healing is a process and gradually I was returning to my body.

SOIL

In the tunnel by the end of October, it was taking longer by the day to find the red tomatoes amid the green. I kept thinking that I had picked the last of the cucumbers, but the plant kept providing, the fruits growing quietly out of sight behind its rigid leaves. My body was still providing for our daughter too; by this point I would have lost between three and five per cent of my own bone mass and the act of feeding had engrained itself into the rhythm of my being. Motherhood is primal. Physical. Our bodies give, unconditionally.

Simultaneously, along the coast, in sheltered coves and shallow rock pools, seals were slipping out of the warm wombs of their mothers. Just as the storms start to batter the island and the harshest months of the year lay ahead, they too give all that they have to their young. A mother seal will lose up to fifty per cent of her body fat during the four to six weeks she feeds her pup. One afternoon in late October I had sat on the beach feeding my daughter, watching a seal twenty metres away feeding hers. Precious, rare moments, shared. A feeling of solidarity.

By November, the island was empty of everything that migrates; people, birds, the warmth of the sun. The strength of the tunnel was waning too – we were down to three types of oriental leaves and a stubborn courgette plant. The seaweed we had gathered slumped and started to smell in the compost bins and the leaves of the beetroot in the garden had turned the colour of night. On the first of the month, I had sat by the breakfast table to write a letter to a friend and had watched through the window as the wind attempted to blow the last of the apples off the tree. The leaves would survive another month.

In late December, a gale force was roaring down the chimney and she was sat on my lap, smiling. On the table was a cardboard box full of old tea boxes filled with open half-packets of seeds. With one hand holding her I used the other to rummage and write, making a list.

As the entire northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun; unseen and unheard, deep in the soil of the garden, a bulb of a snowdrop

sprouted.

Dedicated to Lleucu; who made me a mother.