Jill Teague : Living with the Land

Born and brought up in the Rhondda Valley, my childhood years were spent on the vertical playground of the mountains. They surrounded my world, accepting me on to them in all seasons and weathers. There and then, I spent hours on the spoil tips, found pieces of rusted mine machinery embedded like shrapnel, and thought all rivers ran black. It was a land formed from fractures and faults. It was an integral part of who I was. 

Time has a way of winnowing that bares the essentials of the soul. Spending time on and with the land is, for me, a life imperative. It is both rejuvenation and regeneration. I have learned from the land – to be flexible in path and pace. Some time ago I wrote – “the forest lives and breathes in me and I in it”. Precious, like breath interchanged, such sustaining connections alert my senses to what is mutable and also unchanging, in myself as well as the land. I find my own strength and fragility in the skull of a sheep, the talon of a buzzard or a rock veined with quartz. It was and is a healing presence.

As a writer and Poetry Therapy Practitioner, living with the land provides constant inspiration for my work. The process “Treading Softly – Alert Aloneness” that I introduced to the artists during the residency at Stiwdio Maelor, is one that I often use myself as a writer. It is a way of being fully present with the land, allowing thoughts and feelings to arise without judgment, and acknowledging the powerful mirror and metaphor that nature can offer us.

 ‘I feel that I have found the fulcrum – acknowledging that up and down, lost and found are essentially places along the way. I feel connected to the raven’s raggedness, the branches’ bareness, the emptiness and fulness of the moon. I find feathers loose among the leaf meal that lift with the wind, as if the will to fly could resurrect.’

from “Finding More than was Lost “Jill Teague, Honno Press