A feeling of home

A while ago the team gathered for an amazing workshop led by Roi Gal-Or from the School of Storytelling at Emerson College . We explored the power of storytelling and it inspired me to dig even deeper into the childlike wonder of the world inside of me. 

It’s a Friday and I’m late getting into the garden. It’s been so hot that I can’t sleep. As I awake I realise I've missed my alarm and the clock on my phone reads 9:40. I’m still half in my dreams, but with no time to make coffee, sit in bed a little and ruminate, I throw on my clothes, search for my keys and go.

The air is still hot as I leave my house, but not so hot that it chokes me. When I reach the garden I feel a slight breeze, it sneaks into the office ever so occasionally, blows through the leaves and at lunch becomes a nuisance as it blows the pages of the Metro as we try to do the crossword. I realise it is new, this breeze, it hasn’t been around at all this week.

Sophie, our gardener, asks me to make some ‘water me’ signs for the plants. They are dry and calling out for rain and this weekend the garden will be full of families and passerbys. I search the garden for scrap bits of wood, as Sophie finds paint to refresh the A frame chalkboard, the text it holds always changing, creating layers of days and events and information. I grab my trusty stabilo woody 3 in 1 crayons, they can write on anything! And on this windy hot sleepy day I am grateful I work somewhere where I can step away from the computer, step into the garden, and enter the realm of play. What is at first a few signs scattered around the garden, a watering station equipped with watering cans and a moveable barrel of water, becomes more elaborate by the second. I look over and Sophie is holding a reddish pink string: “I thought it could be a watering trail!” she says, as she creates pink lines from sunflowers’pots to planters full of lavender.

She ties bows around some trees. I add a note at the bottom of the big chalkboard, instructing people to follow the pink thread, to know where they should water.

I cross the garden at the end of the day, through the raised beds, remembering to look down at my feet, so not to trip, as I often do, and I hear it beckoning me, wind chimes blowing in the gentle, much needed breeze and so I follow it, to the wooden sculpture erected in the garden by community artist Lucy Sheikh and I stand and I am still. 

Standing inside the sound sculpture, the wind begins to blow faster, the wind chimes get louder, metal thrashes and the earth below me begins to spin, or I spin, or we spin in unison. And in the tornado under my feet, I am transported to a balcony in Kentish Town, sounds of the pub at the end of the road float up.

We are growing things in pots. We are making a mosaic with tiles a neighbour leaves outside for anyone to take. I’m transported to the garden of my GP practice, I am crocheting amongst plants, listening to women older than I, putting the world right. My hands are in the soil, I'm looking down at the crack in the paving stones, I'm watching fennel grow. I'm uprooting it. I'm taking it home to the balcony. I'm watching it die.

I have lived in many houses and many places since I moved to London. I have fallen in love with corners, mastered different routes, counted stops on the Victoria line, paving stones on the way to the homes of friends and lovers. I’ve had trees I've watched change as the season did. Kicked off my shoes upon entering many doors. I’ve fallen in love in kitchens I will never see again, laughed so hard on balconies and rooftops and gardens, that somebody else now inhabits. And as time has gone on, I've come to learn that home, truly is a feeling, it can’t be bricks and concrete, we must find it in our heads, for to live in London, is to float.

I’m transported back to the Scottish Highlands, I'm chopping down rhododendrons, I'm hiking an hour to the pub with a new friend, bonded in the strangeness of the experience. I’m riding the train from Glasgow to Manchester. I'm opening an email, from Silvia, asking if I would like to be a fellow. 

I’m transported to the first time I entered the Story Garden: I’m eating snacks, I'm listening to Silvia Pedretti tell the story of Taniwha, the dragon and spirit of the hidden river Fleet. I’m feeling her weave through the city, meander through the streets. I'm feeling myself on the Heath, I'm watching Taniwha rest, lay down and become the hills. I feel lost and found all at once. I feel London as home and London as a prison. I want to run. I want to stay.

I clap my hands, I try to get back to the Friday from which I've come but I land somewhere else. I land in an afternoon of map making, I fall into the weeks that follow, just me and a tiny sketchbook and a tiny pencil. Of wanting to draw and document all the things I could see and feel.

I land in afternoons of paper making. Days of hands in clay. Walks along the canal recording the sounds of the waterways with microphones that reach down far and hear a different reality to ours. Summer days painting murals, visits to places near and far. I land in annual reports and spreadsheets and emails. The messy landscape of my laptop’s desktop, files in all kinds of places with unhelpful names. And suddenly I am the size of a beetle and I am inside my cardboard house that sits on my desk. And I am waving at my colleagues and they are laughing, “Why are you the size of a beetle?” And kids bop is playing and we are wondering how it is already 4pm and how our ‘To Do lists’ aren’t any shorter. 

And there I am, a little piece of me, scattered around the garden, my drawings, my strange goblin gnome creatures. I can’t remember the cross over from being Office Assistant/Fellow to becoming Designer and Operations Coordinator. A title we collaborated on to bring to life. How funny to think all this time you must find a box that fits, how beautiful to be in a place where boxes are made. 

The Story Garden is the only garden, in King’s Cross at least, that I have known. But before there have been many gardens, much floating. How strange to land in something that feels like permanency, but is only meanwhile. I think of stuckness, something about London, the putting up with the house you’ve landed in because you swear you are leaving soon. Somehow 3 years go by and you are still here. I think about home and how we find it when we can’t root. I think of myself as a tree.

I think about endings, moving, how it’s important to slow down, to celebrate and mourn and allow yourself time to say goodbye, amongst all of the stress of moving. I think about new beginnings, what they bring. What we leave behind, what we hold in our memory.

I think about coming back to London when I'm old. I think about passing the British Library, it being different, it feeling strange; “I used to work here” I’ll say to the fellow old women from my book club.

“There was a pocket of green here, and it felt like home. It felt like an anchor, it felt like joy.” They won't know what I mean. There will be a big building, one that fits in with the landscape. They won't be able to hear the sound of children running around, or the shape of the conversations below the office, when the normal level turns to a whisper in the face of gossip, how it still drifts up, how you have to strain a little harder to hear. They won't smell the food and the buzz of someone shouting LUNCCCCCH. They won't see people gathering around the fire, telling stories or sorrows. They won't see the garden growing, dry in the blazing sun, lush when the skies bless us with rain. 

I clap my hands, this time faster, this time 6 times, for the 6 years this land has been the Story Garden. And I open my eyes, the wind is blowing fast, constantly, ferociously. I step out of the wooden structure and walk back towards the office, I look up, so as not to trip, and I see a sea of people, watering cans in hands, quenching the thirsty plants. The pink string has stretched out, it’s covering almost the entirety of the garden, a strange but beautiful spider web. 

I approach the Kitchen, and sure that it’s not the Friday from which I came, but unsure if I am in the future, the past, the present, I ask Sophie, “what day is it?” She says “it’s Tuesday” . I say “I like the string” . She says “I went a little overboard with it”.

And I'm transported to last winter when I went home for Christmas. My dad and I walked his old singer sewing machine to the sewing machine shop round the corner from our house. We needed a new needle. The man took a look and when he took out the spool of thread he declared it very old and so, completely useless. On the walk home I asked “do you really think it’s a meter long?” He said “Let's find out.”  We tied the thread to a lamppost and walked and laughed as it unspun behind us. An almost invisible line that we watched people investigate as they walked around and over and through it. We crossed a road and wondered what would happen if a car were to drive into it. And as we reached the turning of our road, the spool in my hand was empty and the thread behind became slack and blew up in the air, carried by the wind.

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Notes from the Garden