The Author’s Kingdom #7

The Author’s Kingdom is a series of articles by Author Robin John Morgan that provides some deeper detail and understanding of his writing. This event has been written and planned for Christmas 2016

 

The Cycle of Life.

There is something quite special to the relationship between a person who works with the land and the natural world that surrounds them. Having spent most of my life working with plant life, I feel a lot more in tune with the world, than say some of my friends and acquaintances that work in offices and factories.

Even now, whilst I am no longer working as a professional in horticulture, and I sit at a desk most days to write, I still take out time to walk within the natural surroundings of my home. The strong urge to reconnect is never far away, and I can only go for so long before I feel the urgent need to work in the soil or walk beneath the trees. It is often hard to explain this to others who live a more material life within the built up areas of town or in the city. I feel that it is within this part of the person that I am that I have created the woodland peoples and the realm that they live in.

There is something about working outdoors and being part of the circle of creation of life that has a deep impact on you, and in many ways your senses changed and become more in tune with Nature. I have found after most of my life working with plants within each season that I feel the changes in the weather and the atmosphere as they build. People laugh when I tell them I can smell snow or rain coming, but I do notice those slight subtle changes. It is probably odd to say it, but the smell of the earth changes as you work through the seasons, and there is a very real difference between the damp earth of autumn and the earth of high summer.

Basing my Woodland dwellers in this cycle of a working life that is dependent upon the life cycle of life, not only gives me the chance to express a great of the joy I take from the wilderness, but I have also used it as a vehicle in which I can share some of these precious moments of my year with the readership. There is no coincidence that Robbie and Rowan react as they do to the world around them as I add small details to the background of my writing to let you know what is going on in the British wilderness at that specific time of year.

I started the books on New Year’s Day as a deliberate act so that as I progressed through the books I could introduce the circle of the year’s events and some of the tasks involved in the life cycle of the plant and tree life around the characters. It really pays to visit the British countryside and witness the life that the people there live, it is very similar to the way in which Loxley functions, and it is a very important part of our living heritage. Many towns and villages still celebrate many of what are now the old country traditions, and you would be surprised at just how many people get involved and celebrate. We are indeed a country that was built around Christian worship, and yet I am never surprised to see that a great deal of our Celtic and Saxon country based traditions are still upheld and celebrated, be it corn dollies in Somerset or well dressing in Buxton.

In many ways it is nice to know that around the country there are small pockets of people that work very hard to keep alive important skills and traditions. All of us have visited craft shows organised around our larger towns where we get to see just a small selection of a few of the living skills we hold on to, and it is important we see them, but it always appear to be the same old skills of wood turning or hand pottery throwing, yet in my travels over the past forty years I have delighted in finding that there are people keeping these important crafts alive such as spinning wool and cottons by hand and traditional weaving, even glass blowing has had a resurge over the years. What is even more important is that these skills that have been passed down from an age where they were essential to the survival of the community are now being taught to our young, and this is all happening quietly behind the scenes of modern life.

There is no coincidence that I started my series by mentioning how those who flocked to the countryside were saved by the country folk who had the skills but were too old to carry them out on a larger scale. I was questioned by a few in the early days of HTTK as to whether or not this would be a likely scenario, but if you look at the plain facts of younger people fleeing in terror from the crumbling cities, it is abundantly clear to me that the influx of extra youth into rural communities would serve to greatly enhance the survival rate of all of them.

I have always tried to encourage the people around me to look at these skills and learn them, my children have benefited greatly from both myself and my wife taking time out of our routines to teach them these skills. My children see this as fun family orientated activities, but it serves the important tradition of helping to keep these traditions alive, and it also has the added benefit of allowing me the personal experiences that enable some of my writing from a point of knowledge. We have made our own arrow heads, started fires without matches, learned to identify all the wild foods that are actually very nutritious and safe to eat. As you can imagine the kids love our wild rambles outdoors, as I always point some form of food they much as we walk, and even though they are not aware of it, I am preserving some very important ancient skills that sadly were once common knowledge.  

As with all things within the writing community, every experience helps to enhance the writing and although most readers probably do not realise it, HTTK is riddled with some really important ancient skills that are the reason we survived through the pre modern times. Ok so maybe we will not have some major apocalyptic event, I mean it’s not like I am planning one any time soon, but the thing here is we do really know the fate of the world? When I look back at my youth and then compare it to just the last five years of my life, I think it is very noticeable how the weather has become more and more extreme round the globe, even here in the UK we are seeing flooding and freak weather we have not witnessed before. It matters not if this caused by global warming or not, the fact is that the world as we know it at the moment is very unpredictable, and so the scenario I have painted or something similar could very well happen, and I feel that is even more an important point to consider. Learning a few of the skills of our past may be the very thing that gets us through some major future event, and that is why I feel it’s important to share the information or make people aware, which is one of the many purposes that HTTK also serves as a hidden layer between the pages. Ok so we don’t all have to become arran clad folk singers, who spend our days weaving and carving, although I must admit I think the influence of my father has given me a bit of a desire to get into wood work, which I need to find more time to practice more, but let’s be honest being more connected with anything remotely natural is not exactly a bad thing.

I cannot mention nature, country living without the influence of Pagan ways on my woodland dwelling folk. Earth Faith, which I created as a slightly enhanced version of what is traditional Paganism. I have had the privilege of being around Pagan’s for a very long time, and I do have a very deep understanding of their beliefs, many of which I share. HTTK does contain a huge amount of pagan ritual and beliefs due mainly to the fact that the faith is based to work within the wheel of the year and it is a very seasonal linked faith. When I wrote the very first draft of the Bowman of Loxley with a readers beta group, a great deal of the questions I got were Pagan based. The Beta group asked if it was actually feasible that a woodsman type belief would actually resurge across the country as depicted in the introduction of the book. I think they were surprised to learn that actually in this country there are far more Pagans than people realise, it is a faith that has been growing steadily since the 1950’s and I have been a large part of it. Unlike most mainstream religions Pagan tend to be quite secretive about their beliefs, which mainly is due to the stigma placed on it by both the Christian and Islam faiths. Devil worshiper is a tag often placed on Pagan, and even in this modern time, the slightest hint of anything remotely Satan based is still something very much shunned and frowned upon. The sad thing is that Satan or the devil is a Christian creation, and no self-respecting Pagan would support such nonsense, but mainly due to the fact that for almost two thousand years the Church has demonised Pagans, it is still a very sore point with modern pagans today, and society frowns due to a huge lack of understanding of the Pagan faith.

From my own observations and involvement with Pagan belief, I see it as a kind of spiritual environmentalism, which considering who my lead female character was going to be revealed as works perfectly into the woodland community. From my own point of reference and my knowledge of the lifestyle that surrounds plant life, I do not feel that there is a great stretch of the imagination to understand that people who turn to country ways in order to survive would embrace a Pagan based faith. I have always felt that people would tend to embrace what was around them, and Pagan tradition and lifestyles do still predominately get practiced on a higher scale in more rural areas today. It did help create a good backdrop on which to work in the politics of some of the Christian faith, after all we have over a thousand years of historical rivalry between the two, so from a writing point of view it does give me a good vehicle for a lack of understanding between the two factions. Although it was never planned or scripted, I have found from my conversations with readers of HTTK that it has actually broadened peoples understanding of the faith, which cannot be such a bad thing as knowledge breeds acceptance, so I take that as a plus for the books.

In HTTK I have taken the workings of the rural community, added a more earth based faith, and introduced what are basically the living skills of the medieval era, spliced with a small amount of modern technology. In my mind this was always a natural direction to take considering the scenario I had created, but I have to admit that from the initial scripting, to what has evolved in the books to date I am happy to find that the story almost feels timeless. I have had quite a few people comment that suddenly during the reading they stopped to think, and realised this is a story set in the future, and yet it would also fit snuggly into modern or even medieval times. It is hard for to me comment as at times I become so immersed in the story as I write that even I lose track of the date, although I will add at this point I do actually keep a calendar of 2038-40, to which I add each event as it is written just so I am aware of the actual date and the season. It is important that I keep this kind of record of events as it allows me to place my horticultural knowledge in its correct time frame, which is why I can write about the aconite popping through the snow or the honeysuckle creeping through the hedgerows of green.

There are days I sit back and ponder just why the hell I spend so much time sat at my desk adding all this stuff to the story in ever increasing layers, and then I get a message or someone I meet who has read the books comments on a particular aspect of the story, and it is during these moments of seeing the enthusiasm of a reader that all of it makes sense and it brings me a great feeling of satisfaction. I really do enjoy the feedback I get and the chances to explain something in deeper detail, and I always encourage questions, and so as I pull this next instalment of The Authors Kingdom to a close I will say that I am here and even though I have written a lot for this event already, I am happy to work out a piece that explains any aspect of the Kingdom, all you need do is message me, and I will write something to provide my view of it for you. It matters not whether I have one, or one million readers, as long as it is required from one of you, I am happy to keep writing it, and I am very grateful to all of you for the love and support you have shown my work, as always my thanks to you all.