I have had my hands in the earth for the last two weeks. It’s a good way of thinking, obliquely, about all kinds of subjects, by concentrating on something primal, demanding so much attention that one appears not to be thinking at all, but rather existing in a reverie of hard labour. But at the end of a long day, hair caked with dust (or mud, if it’s raining) I find that my mind has been active at a subterranean level.
Gardening is a new activity for me. I grew up in the city and played in the streets. And although I eventually became an obsessed pot gardener on the small terrace of my London studio, it is only in the last three years, deep in rural France (where I wrote the final draft of RAGE) that I have begun to learn about the rhythms of the land. My own rhythm is irregular and itinerant as any filmmaker’s must be, but the earth – chemically abused, over-warming, flooded and catastrophically maltreated as she may be, still produces her wonders.
The first wild flowers, appearing in the spring that comes late at this altitude of 1000 metres, are an example.
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