The Golden Thread
I've always tried to take less.
Switch off the lights. Walk or cycle when I can. Buy organic when I can. You know what I mean. Less electricity, less oil, less resources. So that maybe, when the apocalypse comes rolling black and thunderous over the horizon, Cthulhu might overlook me and I can scratch a living digging through landfill for twinkies.
And then, just after I'd met him, Rupert looked critically at the hillside, some of it bare to the flint, and said that we needed to build soil. That it was our whole job as farmers - I don't remember his words exactly - but when he said it a tiny bell rang inside my head (not that I listened to it at the time).
And not long after that I listened to a podcast where the host interviewed Robin Wall Kimmerer. Robin asked: what can we give back to the living world? She seemed to be suggesting that humans could actually have a positive effect on their environment, and instead of worrying about what we take, ask ourselves: what can we give? This new way of thinking rang the tiny bell again, except it was no longer tiny. It was as large as the church bells rung on Sundays; piercing, echoing with clarity, spreading like ripples on a pond.
For most of the pandemic, I lived in a caravan on a chicken farm, hidden in a wooded valley. The toilet was halfway up the hill. It had no flush, it was a wooden cubicle on stilts above a chickenwire-and-straw compost heap full of human manure. For me, it conjured up visions of Baba Yaga in her chicken-footed hut: trickster witch of the winter wood, she embodies the rude, violent, animal part of ourselves that we try to hide. Whilst using that toilet I watched the sunlight on the leaves, blossoms and bare branches, or tried to identify birds, or fussed the dog (who loved a captive audience).
When I moved back into a plumbed and centrally-heated house, I missed that toilet like hell.
After listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer talk about giving back, I began to wonder what exactly I had to offer. People used to say (and probably still do) the most helpful thing you can do for the environment is to kill yourself.
When you do the maths, regardless of how 'eco-friendly' my lifestyle is, I, as an individual, will always produce more carbon, more plastic than if I had never existed. I will always take too much. And part of me thinks about this carefully and realises that, in a way, it is very accurate, and it makes me miserable and hopeless.
Then the pragmatic part of me folds her arms and thinks: oh god, talk about drama. Fine. Sure. I don’t want to die yet, I don't really want to give up my life to save the earth from suffering from my fraction of consumption. Fine. I'm selfish. So sue me.
But then the third part of me, the thoughtful part, wakes up just for a moment to chip in: Good, she says, that's good. Your grief is vital, so feel it, listen to it. But your selfishness might just be your salvation. Cling to life, treasure life, because without a love for life there is no way forward. There is no way out.
I digested the idea of giving back (it takes me a while to think about things). I remembered something else I’d heard: about human urine being one of the most precious resources, one of the most useful for the land. It was a quote from someone or other. Anyway, I wondered if my urine might actually be helpful for the soil and plants. I can offer my thanks to the living world, I can write poetry, songs and stories, but urine is tangible: nitrogen, potassium and water are all valuable and life-giving in the right quantities.
You piss in the woods and the trees benefit. You piss in the field and there's more nitrogen for the flowers. Magic.
The maths tells us that it would be better if humans simply did not exist any more. Calculate the quantity of carbon, calculate the temperature rise our planet's ecosystems can cope with, calculate how many years we have left to wean ourselves from the slick teat of fossil fuels, calculate calculate calculate, and in the end we’re still taking too much. The problem with this mindset is that it assumes we have nothing to give.
But what if, what if we could rejoin the circle of life as active, useful participants. Could we do that intentionally? Is it even something that the average human could understand, or get on board with? I am speaking specifically about ordinary people in western society, Indigenous peoples already know this and their wisdom on the topic runs deep.
What can I - a woman trapped in a system that intentionally separates me from the land, and the land from the living world - really do to give back? Could our waste (urine and faeces) reconnect us? And does this only make sense in my mind, or is this something that other people can relate to?
So I asked three women, and one soon-to-be-woman, chosen simply because they are my friends, whether they had any thoughts or stories about wild weeing. And the answer was a resounding “DO I!”, as if they had all been waiting for an outlet to talk about weeing in the woods. They wanted to make me laugh, or tell me deep secrets, or didn’t feel they had much to say at all, but I wrote it all down and tried to do justice to the voices behind it.
CARLA
Carla lived in a van in a wood for a while. She told me that seeing the winter stars when you went out for a wee at night sort of made up for the cold, but I didn't really believe her until I lived on the farm and experienced wild weeing in winter myself. There's nothing like slipping out into the frigid air and frost and starlight, semi-naked, squatting barefoot and hoping your aim is true.
Once we went camping in Wales. The hillside was patchworked by gauzy crowds of bluebells, amber bracken, and the green, green grasses of spring. I had never done a poo outdoors before and was almost too shy to ask Carla for the trowel, but when I got back she congratulated me cheerfully. Because to Carla it wasn't shameful: she would emerge from the darkness, chuck her piss-soaked tissue on the fire and rejoin the conversation as if nothing embarrassing had occurred. That was a revelation for me: a breaking open, permission given, or tearing down of rules which don’t even exist. And now I feel more at home in my sickly body, and in the broken world.
MARIANNE
My sister lives in London. She is a hospital pharmacist and her work is both highly skilled and philanthropic. She lives on a pleasant street in Putney with her husband, in a flat which has no garden, although it does boast a balcony.
She is ready to laugh, to take any little inconvenience in her stride, so when she was caught short while walking on Wimbledon Common, she found a little wood to spend a penny. Even though the trees offered some privacy, Marianne certainly wins the award for the most risky wild wee: there were dog walkers everywhere, and their little dogs were running around in the wood. Funny, how we don't mind urinating in front of our fellow mammals.
Connecting with nature in the city can be hard. The sewage system, even though it exponentially improves the health of our towns and their inhabitants, still separates us, River Styx style, from giving our offerings to the world. But, despite our best efforts to neatly box up our bodies’ needs, when nature calls, sometimes we have no choice but to squat down and answer.
ABBIE
I have known Abbie since I was a child. She was the first person who saw me as a soon-to-be-woman, and she was the first of my peers to treat me as something human but not as something dirty. Her ability to listen to her own body and communicate her own soul is a gift. I asked her the same question as everyone else and here is her answer:
Instrument:
In the original versions of nature,
The body is an instrument for instinct.
It returns everything it uses,
Intimately re-gifting itself.
Woman - get low,
Bring your body to the earth,
You are an instinct,
This is the way your body moves.
FIREHEART
When I moved onto the farm in January, she turned 7, and that year she changed her name to Fireheart.
Spending any amount of time with a 7 year old human brings you eye-to-eye with our bodies: farts, poo, wee and bums are all prime topics of conversation and are useful if you need a cheap laugh. Fireheart had been brought up on the chicken farm with a compost loo and a tree bog, but for her, anywhere in the woods was an acceptable toilet. In her mind wee and poo were part of the living world, she did not separate herself from other animals.
When I asked her what she thought about wild wees she told me, quite simply, that they watered the plants. The implications of that statement are actually pretty amazing when you think about it: it’s taken me 27 years to figure out that human waste is a gift to nature and Fireheart grew up just knowing it intrinsically, she grew up with the same wisdom as the dog and the foxes and the chickens.
We certainly have a lot to unlearn. And a lot to learn from children and animals.
In these unprecedented times we are separated from everything that connects us to the earth: we excrete into a flush toilet and our sewage is fired out into the sea, which, quite frankly, could do without it. We are not allowed to squat to relieve ourselves, or feel the soil and grasses beneath our feet, or put our hands in dirt and clean, living water. Sometimes it feels like we are not even permitted to work the land, or live on the land or close to the land, or accidentally wee on our own foot.
What I'm trying to say is that pissing outdoors can be a profoundly healing act, like a golden thread rejoining us with life, the living world, the earth. And if I’ve learned anything from the women in my life it’s that we already half remember this and only need a gentle prod to work the magic.
Perhaps the most miraculous part of all this is that the golden thread is connected to the parts of us that society tells us are most shameful and dirty and bestial. If we are willing to listen to them, our hidden, filthy bodies can show us a way back to the holy dirt. Follow the yellow brick road, the yellow river, the golden thread into the black earth.
Watch it soak away, down into the dark.
And then, just after I'd met him, Rupert looked critically at the hillside, some of it bare to the flint, and said that we needed to build soil. That it was our whole job as farmers - I don't remember his words exactly - but when he said it a tiny bell rang inside my head (not that I listened to it at the time).
And not long after that I listened to a podcast where the host interviewed Robin Wall Kimmerer. Robin asked: what can we give back to the living world? She seemed to be suggesting that humans could actually have a positive effect on their environment, and instead of worrying about what we take, ask ourselves: what can we give? This new way of thinking rang the tiny bell again, except it was no longer tiny. It was as large as the church bells rung on Sundays; piercing, echoing with clarity, spreading like ripples on a pond.
For most of the pandemic, I lived in a caravan on a chicken farm, hidden in a wooded valley. The toilet was halfway up the hill. It had no flush, it was a wooden cubicle on stilts above a chickenwire-and-straw compost heap full of human manure. For me, it conjured up visions of Baba Yaga in her chicken-footed hut: trickster witch of the winter wood, she embodies the rude, violent, animal part of ourselves that we try to hide. Whilst using that toilet I watched the sunlight on the leaves, blossoms and bare branches, or tried to identify birds, or fussed the dog (who loved a captive audience).
When I moved back into a plumbed and centrally-heated house, I missed that toilet like hell.
After listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer talk about giving back, I began to wonder what exactly I had to offer. People used to say (and probably still do) the most helpful thing you can do for the environment is to kill yourself.
When you do the maths, regardless of how 'eco-friendly' my lifestyle is, I, as an individual, will always produce more carbon, more plastic than if I had never existed. I will always take too much. And part of me thinks about this carefully and realises that, in a way, it is very accurate, and it makes me miserable and hopeless.
Then the pragmatic part of me folds her arms and thinks: oh god, talk about drama. Fine. Sure. I don’t want to die yet, I don't really want to give up my life to save the earth from suffering from my fraction of consumption. Fine. I'm selfish. So sue me.
But then the third part of me, the thoughtful part, wakes up just for a moment to chip in: Good, she says, that's good. Your grief is vital, so feel it, listen to it. But your selfishness might just be your salvation. Cling to life, treasure life, because without a love for life there is no way forward. There is no way out.
I digested the idea of giving back (it takes me a while to think about things). I remembered something else I’d heard: about human urine being one of the most precious resources, one of the most useful for the land. It was a quote from someone or other. Anyway, I wondered if my urine might actually be helpful for the soil and plants. I can offer my thanks to the living world, I can write poetry, songs and stories, but urine is tangible: nitrogen, potassium and water are all valuable and life-giving in the right quantities.
You piss in the woods and the trees benefit. You piss in the field and there's more nitrogen for the flowers. Magic.
The maths tells us that it would be better if humans simply did not exist any more. Calculate the quantity of carbon, calculate the temperature rise our planet's ecosystems can cope with, calculate how many years we have left to wean ourselves from the slick teat of fossil fuels, calculate calculate calculate, and in the end we’re still taking too much. The problem with this mindset is that it assumes we have nothing to give.
But what if, what if we could rejoin the circle of life as active, useful participants. Could we do that intentionally? Is it even something that the average human could understand, or get on board with? I am speaking specifically about ordinary people in western society, Indigenous peoples already know this and their wisdom on the topic runs deep.
What can I - a woman trapped in a system that intentionally separates me from the land, and the land from the living world - really do to give back? Could our waste (urine and faeces) reconnect us? And does this only make sense in my mind, or is this something that other people can relate to?
So I asked three women, and one soon-to-be-woman, chosen simply because they are my friends, whether they had any thoughts or stories about wild weeing. And the answer was a resounding “DO I!”, as if they had all been waiting for an outlet to talk about weeing in the woods. They wanted to make me laugh, or tell me deep secrets, or didn’t feel they had much to say at all, but I wrote it all down and tried to do justice to the voices behind it.
CARLA
Carla lived in a van in a wood for a while. She told me that seeing the winter stars when you went out for a wee at night sort of made up for the cold, but I didn't really believe her until I lived on the farm and experienced wild weeing in winter myself. There's nothing like slipping out into the frigid air and frost and starlight, semi-naked, squatting barefoot and hoping your aim is true.
Once we went camping in Wales. The hillside was patchworked by gauzy crowds of bluebells, amber bracken, and the green, green grasses of spring. I had never done a poo outdoors before and was almost too shy to ask Carla for the trowel, but when I got back she congratulated me cheerfully. Because to Carla it wasn't shameful: she would emerge from the darkness, chuck her piss-soaked tissue on the fire and rejoin the conversation as if nothing embarrassing had occurred. That was a revelation for me: a breaking open, permission given, or tearing down of rules which don’t even exist. And now I feel more at home in my sickly body, and in the broken world.
MARIANNE
My sister lives in London. She is a hospital pharmacist and her work is both highly skilled and philanthropic. She lives on a pleasant street in Putney with her husband, in a flat which has no garden, although it does boast a balcony.
She is ready to laugh, to take any little inconvenience in her stride, so when she was caught short while walking on Wimbledon Common, she found a little wood to spend a penny. Even though the trees offered some privacy, Marianne certainly wins the award for the most risky wild wee: there were dog walkers everywhere, and their little dogs were running around in the wood. Funny, how we don't mind urinating in front of our fellow mammals.
Connecting with nature in the city can be hard. The sewage system, even though it exponentially improves the health of our towns and their inhabitants, still separates us, River Styx style, from giving our offerings to the world. But, despite our best efforts to neatly box up our bodies’ needs, when nature calls, sometimes we have no choice but to squat down and answer.
ABBIE
I have known Abbie since I was a child. She was the first person who saw me as a soon-to-be-woman, and she was the first of my peers to treat me as something human but not as something dirty. Her ability to listen to her own body and communicate her own soul is a gift. I asked her the same question as everyone else and here is her answer:
Instrument:
In the original versions of nature,
The body is an instrument for instinct.
It returns everything it uses,
Intimately re-gifting itself.
Woman - get low,
Bring your body to the earth,
You are an instinct,
This is the way your body moves.
FIREHEART
When I moved onto the farm in January, she turned 7, and that year she changed her name to Fireheart.
Spending any amount of time with a 7 year old human brings you eye-to-eye with our bodies: farts, poo, wee and bums are all prime topics of conversation and are useful if you need a cheap laugh. Fireheart had been brought up on the chicken farm with a compost loo and a tree bog, but for her, anywhere in the woods was an acceptable toilet. In her mind wee and poo were part of the living world, she did not separate herself from other animals.
When I asked her what she thought about wild wees she told me, quite simply, that they watered the plants. The implications of that statement are actually pretty amazing when you think about it: it’s taken me 27 years to figure out that human waste is a gift to nature and Fireheart grew up just knowing it intrinsically, she grew up with the same wisdom as the dog and the foxes and the chickens.
We certainly have a lot to unlearn. And a lot to learn from children and animals.
In these unprecedented times we are separated from everything that connects us to the earth: we excrete into a flush toilet and our sewage is fired out into the sea, which, quite frankly, could do without it. We are not allowed to squat to relieve ourselves, or feel the soil and grasses beneath our feet, or put our hands in dirt and clean, living water. Sometimes it feels like we are not even permitted to work the land, or live on the land or close to the land, or accidentally wee on our own foot.
What I'm trying to say is that pissing outdoors can be a profoundly healing act, like a golden thread rejoining us with life, the living world, the earth. And if I’ve learned anything from the women in my life it’s that we already half remember this and only need a gentle prod to work the magic.
Perhaps the most miraculous part of all this is that the golden thread is connected to the parts of us that society tells us are most shameful and dirty and bestial. If we are willing to listen to them, our hidden, filthy bodies can show us a way back to the holy dirt. Follow the yellow brick road, the yellow river, the golden thread into the black earth.
Watch it soak away, down into the dark.
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