For a couple of weeks or so, this blog is going to be used for some reflections emerging from our artists retreat on Fairisle, the most remote community in the UK – a tiny little island between the relative hububs of Shetland and Orkney.

Today we arrived, after 4 and a half hours driving, 12 hours on a ferry (to Shetland,) taxi for 15 minuites from Lerwick to Tingwall, a 25 minute flight in a small plane, then a short hop in an island car (there are no ‘roads’ here, and no MOTs!) to the lovely Lower Leogh, with its hobit-sized doors, cosy warm fire and total peacefulness.

We have almost two weeks.

It feels miraculous, and impossibly greedy. After all, we live in such beauty already (it was actually quite anxiety inducing to leave my garden at this time of year) so why would we need an artists reteat like this? What use would we put such a thing to?

Well, the answer to the first question is easier, in that we both very much need some time out, to take stock and to consider again the roots of what we do. Creativity is often like a well that refills as you take from it, but you can take too much. Looking forward to this year, I am very conscious of how much I want to do, to say and to lean in to.

Time is short. Life is fleeting.

Life is also beautiful.

It is there in the lovely laugh of my little grandson, in the worries and triumphs of my kids, in the spring leaves and the space between stars.

We were talking on our long drive about the old Jesus statement about us having ‘life in all its fullness’. I understand this so differently now, not as a call towards correction of sinfulness, but rather as a call towards an on-going encounter with our true selves, made real only in deep connection.

How do we find this connection? For me, this is through meaning making through art and wild shorelines. It is also in veg beds and oak trees. It is most real and least abstract (even now) when I encounter something that points me towards ‘god’, although we might have to dig much deeper into what I mean by ‘god’…

In fact, this book has come with me;

…the rigid and self righteous certainty of some religious people – and some atheists for that matter – is something I find dissagreeable. The hubris of it. The sanctimoniousness. It leaves me cold. The more unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and the not-questoining can be accompanied by a moral superiority… a bit of humility wouldn’t go astray.

Nick cave in conversation with sean o’hagan

I find Cave’s music a bit hard to swallow mostly – with some notable exceptions – but this book is based around a conversation between friends, and it is perhaps this that allows it to speak to me more clearly. Connection comes to me strongly through friendship- the sort where even when we talk about surface things, we also meet at a deeper level.

Where profanity mixes with profundity. Where we find each other absurd as well as inspirational. Where we hit each other with cudgels made from kindness wrapped in a tissue paper of merciless abuse.

In a strange way, here on this island, I feel these friends to be close. Perhaps because lingering on islands with friends has been such an important part of my becoming.

Michaela had a greater challenge than me today, on our stunning (and rather scary) small plane flight. We were the only passengers in a six seater plane that was even smaller than I thought it might be. But what a view. What a gloroius view.

So, from our tucked-in place of rest and renewal, here is a video I made of this bit of our journey to get here…

This is a photo of a spring ‘forest’ – one of the sitka plantations up above where we live.

If ever you have entered one of these plantations – and they are not hard to find – then you will know what strange places they are. Nothing grows at ground level, not even the ubiquitous invasive rhododendron, because all light is excluded. You have to crouch down low to make any kind of progress, as the only creatures that live in here are deer, who have nibbled to their head height. Ticks and midges proliferate, but very little else.

And they are almost silent, as if birds know better. As if (almost) everything that breathes… knows better.

I am thankful that there is a growing movement of people in Scotland who see these vast plantations as what they are – green deserts, made only for the profit. At such a cost to the natural ecosystems that they are destroying. At a time when we need our artists to raise their prophetic voices, we have this;

regular readers of this blog may remember me writing about these issues before, so here is what Alexander Chapman Campbell has to say about the inspiration for this haunting music (from here)

It seems to me that this way of producing timber, and of relating to trees, is simply a habit. We don’t need to improve the process, we need to chuck it out altogether. To reduce a forest to simply an economical process does trees a massive disservice. Through our mechanical inventions we’ve been able to reduce the old concept of a forest – with all its associated beauty, depth and mystery – to a crop, with tragic consequences both for humans and nature.

I wonder if any experiments have been done where a person’s brain is monitored while walking through the avenues of sitka spruce, and then compare this to the same person walking through a diverse area of woodland. But even without the science, I feel it’s obvious; humans are stripped of something vital in these plantations, as much as nature is.

Alternatives are possible. They’re demonstrated all over the world, and even in some places within the UK. You only have to walk through Norway to realise that things can be different; the persuasive rhetoric coming from those running our forestry operations suddenly loses its credibility. In the five weeks that I spent walking from Oslo to Trondheim I was able to experience a completely different kind of wood to most found in the UK. In places the forest was ancient, and protected, in others it was managed for timber, but in a way that didn’t strip it of its richness, its depth and its life.

According to the GWM1 (global wood markets info) in 2022 Norway became the largest exporter of softwood logs to the EU. The UK, in contrast, can only supply about 20% of its own timber and imports the rest. So, despite our intensive production approach we still find ourselves falling far short of being self-sustaining.

Norway is a much bigger country with a different rural history, which has left it with much larger tracts of forest. But the point is that alternatives are possible. In the glen where I live there is a forester who works for a company that largely practises an approach to forestry known as Continuous Cover Forestry, also known as Close-to-Nature Forest Management – a more sensitive and holistic approach to producing timber, and which is gathering traction. She was explaining to me that the economic benefits of large scale operations, with its associated clear-felling, is not as ‘clear-cut’ as we are sometimes led to believe.

We are creative, intelligent beings, able to find ways of supplying our needs without impoverishing the earth. It simply takes a strong will to make it happen, and in 2024 I believe the UK is still a long way from achieving the healthy relationship between humans and trees that we all desperately need.

If you’re interested in any further reading, here’s a very recent, and hopefully significant, report by the Royal Society Of Edinburgh. Published in 2024 it follows a two year enquiry, and is calling for a “radical rethink of tree planting in Scotland”: Read The Report

And if you’d like to read more about Continuous Cover Forestry, here’s an interesting page written for Silviculture Research International.