🌾 How to find your place: the power of poetry, and shouting in fields ✨
Last week, we fled our city home … left behind the genteel stoney facades (and the Union Jack and Saltire flying just a few doors down from our home 🙄)… and made for the open vistas and fresh air of the Scottish countryside.
This is a love letter to the Scottish land itself. And to the power of poetry and place.
The Corbenic Poetry Path lies just a short distance outside of Dunkeld, the gateway to the Scottish Highlands. It is open to the public, and is curated – and cared for – by the amazing people who run the Corbenic Camphill Community, a residential care facility for adults with learning disabilities.
It is a path that winds through woodland, across a field, down to the river, and back up to the road again.. punctuated by small acts of poetry.
Sometimes, fresh and crisp and sometimes weathered and gently worn (not unlike me … and how I’ve changed over the nine years since I first came here).
Early in the walk, the poem “Field Holler” invites you to consider what it means to feel at home, in a place.
Field Holler
Today I stand in a field and shout
It is good to stand in a field and shout
To stand somewhere you can call your own
Somewhere you can find a place
Somewhere you can call home
And shout
Last week, this poem hit home different, for a few reasons.
First, in the intervening years, I’ve learned something about neurodiversity (ND), and also about masking* – the conscious modification of instinctive and natural ND behaviour in order to meet mainstream (non ND) expectations around social interaction – and in that journey, I’ve come to accept that we all “mask” in different ways.
And sometimes – like last week – what I’ve got deep inside me, is a shout.
These last few weeks, I’ve had lots of thoughts: Big thoughts. Angry thoughts. Afraid thoughts. Ashamed thoughts.
And instead of shouting, I have been mostly silent.
There are many different reasons why we choose to stay silent, but one very significant reason for people who sit further from power, privilege and social norms – is because speaking your truth (or being your true self) runs a greater risk of direct retaliation just for being you.
And by retaliation, I mean actual emotional or physical harm to individuals.
Today, in the UK (including Scotland) people are harmed, every day, simply because of who they are.**
This has always been true, but for years, we all agreed this was injustice, and it needed to end…now, unless we start making a radical change in how we respond, we can only expect more harm, for more people.
And the end point: everyone – without exception – loses something of themselves, and of the better part of their humanity.
So what’s the answer?
For me, it’s the same as always… (even as I need to remind myself):
🌾 Find your field – the place where you feel like you can really be you
💃 Make your mark – shout, or dance, or write poetry, or just lie on your back, flat against the earth – claim your place, breathe deeply, remember that you belong
🫙✨Bottle the magic – not sure why I have fireflies in mind (summer, childhood), but try to find ways of bringing back the goodness of being you in a place where you belong, to ground you, in your work to do the radical change
…
When you get back, here are some places you can start to make a difference in Scotland, today.
🪧 Get marching at the Scotland Demands Better rally on 25 October – a family-friendly rally against poverty, and for a future Scotland where every household can thrive and prosper
💜 Join the Women Against the Far Right Scotland campaign – to make sure that women’s rights are never weaponised by the far right against migrants, and keep the focus on a safer Scotland for all women
⏰ Join Let’s Change the Act – the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Scotland and secure women’s reproductive rights
…
Thanks for dropping in again on The Long View – I hope I brought you something useful, and brightened (rather than burdened) your day!
🌾Do you have a favourite “field” (either literal or figurative) where you go to do your shouting, and find your peace? 🌾
Would love to hear about that (or shout outs for other campaigns or actions that are about welcome, and not exclusion) in the comments!
* On masking, I’m not seeking to minimise the effort and exhaustion that comes for some ND people when they have to mask in order to get on, or even survive. The effort is most likely enormous, unfair and sometimes quite destructive. I’m just saying that empathising with “masking” is accessible to all of us – because none of us are living, breathing 24/7 models of what socially expected behaviour looks like. For an autistic perspective on masking, here is a video from Andrew Burnett on what masking feels like, for him 🧩
** In my devotion to academic rigour, I started to research and summarise a series of 2024-25 statistics here, to support my point. Then it got too depressing, and I stopped. If readers would like to share what you know about how individuals and communities are harmed because of identity – racial , gender, religious, social class and so on – you are welcome to do so, in the comments.
