March 25th 2026.

After the rare occurrence of a day of all weathers, I finally come to this piece. Both the poem and this accompanying reflection emerge in tandem with four seasons appearing all at once on a day in March, barely a week since the spring equinox. Today it rained, winds thundered through the forest without the resident ash trees to break their sound, soil-dust twistered across the road onto the path sanding my car windows and wowing my children, clouds of all colours swept across the sky, at times its been so overcast there was no sign of horizon, hail literally pummelled us in the playground, and when the sun broke through, it blind everything white like a halogen bulb over a vulva moments before birth.​

It would be wrong to say I just sat here now to write the preceding poem on Dandelion in one long breath. After the gathering in Dudley in February, I’ve gone through pages and pages of handwritten notes, typed them up, cut them into strings of sentences and slivers of words, as if shredding them for the compost, categorised them in their fields to find patterns, fractals, and a way to make sense of the weekend with what I documented. I pieced them together into different versions of communication, sliced a sentence from Lorna in two and interjected notes from a walk where I almost got lost with Georgie (even though I live there, I have no sense of coordination), split speculations from Simon into quarters and interlaced segments of the self-mobile by Katie, sponged uncertainty from those who felt they couldn’t locate their knowledge, and mirrored them with those who could but questioned how to package them into gifts to be composted by the rest of us. We lost our sense of direction - even with instructions - it was as if we’d landed where we are out of nowhere, with no knowledge to share, and also too much knowledge to share; what and how do we choose? and also, too much to take in. Jo covered all bases. It wasn’t the composting, the worm, the beings, the directions, the play-test of what a Compost Party could be, and how our previous experience relates and could enhance the hypothesis - that was the result and what came out of it - it was that we had only known compost and metephoricalised (this is a made up word btw) compost as theory for our work, and dematerialising our knowledge needs practice. There is also something revealing and performative in collating our experiences for others to consume, and in a sense, we look at the potential of our knowledge through the eyes of each other as a way to sift through what we know, and put our choices, our knowing, on a ledge for others to prize through their gaze. This takes courage. The funny thing is, whilst asking all the questions on the worthiness of what we bring and what we didn’t know, we turned up bundles and bundles of the stuff - a paradox in active relation.​

Deep listening had given me a lot to process, and we all felt that post-party, so I couldn’t feel a way into what the poem was going to be until witnessing the literal act of gift-giving between Sam and Sally. At the table after the Honourable Harvest of potatoes, a poster of Dandelion was given to Sally to honour her belated birthday. I looked over Sally’s shoulder at the art, an illustration of a dandelion with symbols such as the infinity figure of eight, the flower as flower and a seed head, medicine, and wish, which gifted me the subject (or voice?) to pull it all together. I saw in that poster on the table surrounded by women in candlelight, watery eyes, smiles lit by the golden hour glow of flames, all of the knowledge gifts and words and strings of sentences I’d collected as individual wish seeds pulled back in time to the flower of life we dispersed from.

I recalled Deb’s inclusions to the heap, hand-tied reflections of knowledge from the Green Man myth, along with a hand-drawn zine of Dandelion from Routes. I recalled our whispiness, uncertainty, excitement, disruptions, and anxiety of the collecting, travelling, presenting and understanding, the worry of not getting it right or not having anything tangible to share or having too much to share or waiting for confirmation on how to pull what they could potentially share together at the very last minute. I recalled the planning, the exhibition, the Council of all Beings, reams and reams of study, Stories of Home, the Spiral Journey, School for Climate Justice, Pockets of Hope, as well as all the experiences we brought to the foreground from our own lives.

It all felt like everything was happening all at once at the same time against the clock, with compost symbolising the slow time we need to process this stuff. My whole body goose-bumped at the conjunction of us all.

​However, Dandelion was projected to me as a concept for the containment and dispersal of this work through the poster, and was not ready to emerge (speak to or through me to make sense of things as a poem) before they arrived in real time with the compass of the seasons. Have you noticed them, returning with the spring Sun as a symbol to stay balanced, as an arrow to the time of year? I’ve never noticed the timing of their arrival before. These two-sided beings rise with the duality of the day, as light and dark even out at the equinox. How could I forget? They poked up between cracked concrete in the grove I was raised in. They danced in my garden as a child. I’ve blown them, picked them, ate them, and never, not once, took a moment to notice their recurring births. This misunderstood flower declared weed was just here all the time in my mind (and this is where I connect the dots) - I imagined them perpetual - imagined. Throughout the whole time we were together, responding to what’s happening out there, the materials of our gifts, and the mapping presentation showing us the more than human in our region in bio-regional mapping, which showed human interferences on land, I kept turning to Lizzie and repeating ‘we’ve lost our senses’ and ‘we’re losing our capacity to imagine’ - the we being society.​

Because we’re primed to keep falling long and hard into the notion that the Earth is abundant with life at all times - an imaginary perpetual summer - productivity rules how we feel about how we spend our time. I never noticed the mutual relationship between the Season, the Sun, and Dandelion. Even now at the cusp of Spring, we’re apprehensive for the long dark night, and must, at all costs, busy ourselves with doing to keep things going. It’s miraculous to me they turn up now, and obvious too. Of course! A flower with a life cycle of one month, half sun, half moon, like one day spread over the cycle of a woman, of the moon, at the point, the whole Earth experiences the same light as there is night. I mean, balance, take your time, listen to the Seasons, these little beings start to scream from the colour of their small round heads. Don’t rush now. Collect us. Take our medicine. Let us start the honey collection. Spread yourself only when you’re tended to.

As if by magic, they rear their heads in long leafed bouquets just as the entire Earth at once experiences an equilibrium of light and dark (it's so magic I must say it twice). And no, it doesn’t seem that equal out there, and it would be wrong of me not to recognise the catastrophes of the overculture's demise, climaxing - or so it seems - into its own implosion. Notice how the infinity symbol, as a figure of eight loops out and back in its own sort of spiral, as if imploding at the centre and spinning back out to come back in - perpetually. Yet here we are, gathered, or we were, together, not knowing all that we know and also knowing everything we have come to experience. We are it you see.  

Even with this spark of wisdom I’d forgotten, and lost sense of, I still felt against the clock and wanted to get the poem out quickly, responding immediately to the gathering, like I did before. Heron came at once, but this one didn’t come naturally, and I was forcing it, but art doesn’t work that way, nor does sense making, nor does nature. Spring hadn’t arrived, the Dandelion had no voice seeded in the ground. These things take time, and we’re trying to make the time matter. This work is so gorgeous, and the side effects of the tech, as an engine for collaboration and play, as a way to map what we’ve got and foresee mobilisation past the implosion we choicelessly a part of. Our choices are here, and we make the best we can. There’s no time. I’ve had a shit time. This won’t work with the time-poor. We’ve got to make time for that. There’s not enough time. We need more time. We’re just so busy. We’ve got to squeeze that in somehow. Where is everybody? What are we doing now? Each of you all said some version of these flippant quotes about time. Time being an issue is embedded in our culture.

It’s a lot, isn’t it? Yes, it’s a lot. Too much even to remember what we’ve forgotten and know what we know and carry on thinking everyone else knows, and then reassuring ourselves out of panic, no one knows what they’re doing. HA! YES! They’re all sensing their way through, trying to do something with the nothing they know.  
We are our own arrows, and the arrows for those we work with or on behalf of. Here, look at this, we say, pointing to a thing we know you’ll like, saving it, sharing it, gifting it. Here, come this way we say, pointing to a new direction, to a space, to a dwelling, a craft, a game, outdoors. Go that way we say, then there, imagine the trees are looking at you, imagine you can smell the rain, this is the sense we’re most accustomed to. Go ahead, give it a go, what does yours look like, where’s important for you, what do you notice? and we point —> look at that bird, look at that hail, the clouds made that, look at where we are going, look over your shoulder at that view, pick and blow that fairy clock, make a wish, isn’t it amazing? We give directions, locations, and pinpoints like the hands of a clock. It’s not time, it’s a map, and it’s here in the Dandelion, well, until the long night arrives come October, and even then they lullaby us into the soil, rest now child, tuck yourself in, share your dreams in the warmth of the Earth.

We don’t give ourselves enough time.
This is how we return, how we find our way home.

This poem is written as poetic witness. A lot of the language in the poem was shared in some form at the gathering. I wanted to put so much of it in italics to show the voices but I was selective.

The showiness of a flower piece was said by Rachel, and this was a phenomenon for me. I always question if I have anything to show, to prove, some outcome, some product, but I witness and relate, thats my ‘performance’. Its not isolated to me, Sam and Simons work is playful and relational. In fact, everyone contributing to the understory’s work is that in some form. We have different roles, but they are much the same.

I’ve written it as a sextet, six lines for each stanza, the last is a poor attempt and making it look like wishes being spread. I tried to do a ‘fractal’ poem but they are ridiculous. A pattern of six felt right.

oss’s is from Sarahs spectacular Black Country language night.

Feeling our way forward is taken from Zara who shared with me at the house that that is her way of working, and as Lorna inquired on if she had intuition, or what intuition even is (also in the poem), the two seem the same.

I’ve layered it together as best I can.
The rest I’ll leave with you. It’s all in there.

Jo - Compost Party Work

With the process of collaging your quotes into the poem, apparently David Bowie did it with his song writing which you can watch about here;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nlW4EbxTD8

Cerys Matthews show on 6 music - Time Zone tinkering and disappearing dialects with Ariadna Güell Sans;
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002srsc

Polycrisis & PostrealityExplaining Polycrisis and Metacrisis -Framing humanity's interconnected crises, existential risk, the prospect of collapse, and differentiating polycrisis vs. metacrisis;
https://www.realitystudies.co/p/explaining-polycrisis-and-metacrisis

T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (oh my)
https://www.lettersjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fourquartets.pdf

The Spiral Journey
https://spiraljourneyworkthatreconnects.org/

Ekho Collective - Routes Dandeline Zine. Debbie.