Isn’t it interesting that society makes doing both so hard?

(This was a piece I had published on Medium this week, in response to a writing prompt about the fires that burn within us…)

From a young age I’ve always been aware of a fire burning inside of me. The itch of writing is something I cannot remember existing without. As a child I was thrilled when I realised I could pen my own words, construct my own worlds and create characters to be friends with. For me writing was just as magical as devouring fiction books.

For many years, that creativity sustained me. It made me who I was, someone I could feel a little bit proud of. It gave me somewhere to go when I was lonely or confused — my own mind. It gave me control. It kept me company. It also fostered within me curiosity about the world and life itself, and empathy for others in the same way that reading did.

There was always another fire burning alongside this one though and I’m not entirely sure how to name it. A love of animals, an affinity with nature, a desire to grow and to tend the land, all became important to me as I grew up.

But like most people, I was deterred from both paths. I was encouraged to put these fires out. And when I look around me now, at where the world is heading and how people are living, or should I say, surviving, I wonder why it was creativity and tending the land that were knocked out of us so hard…

These fires didn’t go out completely though, not for me. There were always embers glowing in the back of my mind while I grew up, went to university, got a job and had children. While I did all the ordinary sensible things the world told me I was supposed to do, somehow I kept those embers alive. I guess I kept checking on them, threw them enough fuel to keep them smouldering in the background. I never stopped thinking about them or yearning for the kind of life they promised; one where I was free to just write books and tend the land.

When I reached my mid-thirties two things happened that further ignited those still glowing embers, and the flames were fed and began to grow stronger.

I read a book one day and one of the characters reminded me of one of mine — one I had created aged 12 and wrote many stories about, one who still existed in my head, and who I made up scenes for every night when I went to bed. The rise of self-publishing and ebooks arrived at the same time and I realised that if I didn’t write this book now, I never would. The fire of writing was roaring back to life and I allowed it to consume me. I didn’t want to ignore it any longer.

Once that flame was reignited, it took hold, set my life on fire. I was addicted to writing all over again and determined never to let it go, never to be talked out of it, never to throw water on that fire that had sustained and warmed me for so long. Twenty-four books later and an income based on writing and creative writing tutoring has seen my life transformed to one based entirely around that fire. Around creative writing. I consider myself lucky every single day. My whole life does now revolve around writing.

The other fire, the urge to tend land, was still there and I fed it when I could. At the same time the writing fire was relit and roaring, the returning to the land fire was satisfied to some extent. We moved to a new home with a large garden and soon I was digging a vegetable plot and getting ducks and chickens. Nearly sixteen years later, I’ve planted twenty-plus trees, shrubs and bushes and the vegetable plot has quadrupled in size and produce. Every year I get better at growing my own food and every year I try something new, such as drying and preserving my own herbs, making my own apple cider vinegar and making my own natural cleaning fluid. I love it and it feels important to keep learning new things.

These to me, are small but vital rebellions.

Both fires are doing well but one is always stuttering and struggling, and calling out to me to tend to it, to return to it in full. Writing is my entire life. Returning to the land wants to be my entire life as well, but I don’t always have time for it and I don’t know how I can give it my all. There are bills to pay, jobs to do, and most of the time the garden has to come last.

I do what I can. I plant seeds every day, then plant them again just in case. I added a second greenhouse. I’ve grown more fruit bushes and shrubs from cuttings. I leave large areas of the garden wild for nature. I read books on foraging and preserving and herbalism. There is so much I want to know, so much I feel has been taken from us.

But still that flame seems to be waiting patiently for me to fully tend it. If writing called me back and won, I often wonder how the other fire can do the same. How can I make a living out of doing the things I know I am born to do? Is it possible? Or will mu urge to tend the land always have to remain a background hobby?

And isn’t it interesting that making a living through art and being free to tend the land around you are so hard to do in this world? No one points you in either of those directions when you are young.  The aim in our society is still very much geared towards the pursuit of profit and wealth over everything else. And people want to survive — they want to have jobs that will pay the bills and buy them food. I wonder if we are constantly missing the point. Shouldn’t we all be returning to the land one way or another? Are creativity and caring for the earth not the two things that make us human and give us hope and life? Are they the two things we need the most right now?

I can’t help feeling that we are being discouraged perhaps even blocked from making a living through art and returning to the land.

I recently reached out to our landlords to ask if they had any land that could be used for a community farm. I live in a small village surrounded by private land. I kept thinking, if only we could rent or buy one field, just one, and start some sort of community venture, to bring people together, to share skills, grow food and care for nature. I felt it would empower people and improve community cohesion.

But of course they said no.

I haven’t done anything else about this idea but I keep returning to it and I keep coming back to the same questions, keep being lured back to the same fires inside me. I want to write and I want to tend the land.

The flame in me that has survived everything is my desire to write and nothing stops me now. I make my living out of writing and running creative writing classes. I am still being called to return to the land but the question is how do I do that in any meaningful way?

I guess right now the answer has to just be bit by bit, seed by seed.