Six: What John Clare Found in the Fields

John Clare walked this landscape. These meadows, this river, this particular quality of Northamptonshire light falling sideways across water in the early morning — he knew all of it on foot, in all weathers, across a whole life.

He was a farm labourer. He worked with his hands in the same soil that covers Roman mosaics. He had almost no formal education. He wrote his poems on scraps of paper and hid them in holes in walls.

He left us one instruction, which is also a kind of question:

I found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down.

The Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called it interbeing — the recognition that everything is already connected, already alive, already speaking, if we slow down enough to listen. The flower contains the cloud. The field contains the poem. The ordinary Tuesday contains everything.

And beneath even interbeing — beneath the beautiful teaching that the flower contains the cloud — there is something more intimate still. Not that all things are connected. But that all things are one thing. That what looks through my eyes at this field is the same awareness that animates the yellowhammer in its nest and the grass bending in the wind and the light on the water. Awakened consciousness does not find beauty in the world. It recognises itself.

What if the extraordinary is not somewhere else?

What if it is here — in this field, this morning, this body, this ordinary day that I am already in the middle of and have not yet decided to pay attention to?

Clare noticed things that nobody else was bothering to notice. Not because he had special equipment. Because he looked. Because he went slowly. Because he understood that a yellowhammer’s nest or a stand of autumn grass or the light on the Nene at dawn was not a lesser subject than the grand themes of Literature with a capital L.

What if my life — the actual texture of it, the unremarkable Tuesday of it — contains more than I have given it credit for?

What is already here, in the field I am standing in, that is waiting to be written down?

What poem am I walking past every day — and what if I am not the one who writes it, but the one in whom it is already written?

The fields around Cotterstock have been generating astonishment for centuries. I can confirm: they have not run out.