In August, I married the boy I have loved since we were 17. We met in Dartmoor national park, training for the Ten Tors event with our respective schools. How there was any attraction when we all looked our personal worst, I will never understand. But I guess that’s the beauty of the moors.
He grew up on a farm in Devon, and in many ways it was there that we grew up together. I never wanted a wedding of any extravagance, and shied away from the attention it meant. But as months rolled on, the world got hotter, people got sicker, and life felt finite and immediate. I soon realised that to deny the people I loved most in the world the distraction not just of unity – but the very possibility of it – was to deny joy, and reject hope.
And so I chose to embrace it. The farm was transformed into a hive the weeks before. Wooden pallets were painted and fashioned into signs to put around the village. Seasonal flowers were harvested from the farm and rehomed in jars, milk churns and feeding troughs, or tied with string to be held. Meals were eaten together and at random, in that peculiar feeling of being exhaustedly content in small problems being met and overcome – as a collective. We asked oldest friends and closest family for no gifts, please, and wear something you already own. Gifts instead emerged in the form of violin solos, choral compositions, baking, and time. We sent them home with wildflower seed bombs to scatter.
Tensions only arose when the weather forecast became available, two weeks before. August 2023 was the tail end of the hottest consecutive months on record for the planet, the energy from which was being balled up and hurled back at us in summer storms. Nature was, quite rightly, retaliating. Storm Antoni was the uninvited guest, following our US family as they crossed the Atlantic in a furious hurricane spin. She crash-landed in the dead of the night before the wedding. She sprinted across the roof, shook the windows and rattled my nerves. I recalled many nights spent on Dartmoor’s howling hills, just a few miles away. It felt familiar.
On the day of the wedding Storm Antoni’s plan was to be everywhere. All 70mph of her tore up the church spire where the bells rang. She threw herself down the aisle as I held my father’s arm in the dress my mother had worn on her day and whistled herself into our voices as we sang. We sang louder. My nanna’s ring became his. My father’s became mine. Storm Antoni slammed doors, unbuttoned blazers, broke umbrellas. Her winds flew up in my hair. She huddled us into a tighter group. She pulled toddlers and 85-year-olds into laughter. She lifted petals to the sky.
The storm should not have been there. But, in a strange sense, I respected the audacity and hoped her ferocity might stay, like the rings around our fingers. Like the rest of the natural world, Storm Antoni gave us everything she had.
On occasion, I removed myself from the bustle and observed from the sidelines. I strode barefoot and bejewelled around the farm, but I wasn’t looking for anything. It was all there. I watched strangers conspire like old friends, and fought tears as others reunited after decades of separation. I was regarding a rainbow of humans at their finest, wearing scars of love, loss and hope, as we danced into the night. I stared as if it might disappear. Or like I might blink and it would have all been in my head. Never again will this group collide, I thought.
We’ve created a world that asks us to confirm our humanity by “selecting all squares with traffic lights”. But watching people spin in the spirit of stories and new beginnings was confirmation enough. As social mammals, we are hardwired to thrive, adapt and survive – as a community. We do our species and so many others a dangerous disservice when we dishonour our innate tendency to assemble. It appears we prefer to avenge. But love is our unique instrument of resilience. To wield, and yield to.
Among the most remarkable successes in conservation have been those motivated by a raw understanding and exercise of ecological custodianship, reciprocity and compassion. Love does not swagger down political tangents. Love does not drive recklessly. Love does not abandon. And yet, the birds fall quiet. The salmon don’t return. The hurricanes fly.
I snuck into the farmhouse to observe from an upstairs window. By evening, Storm Antoni had retreated, and the sun prised apart charcoal skies and cascaded through the orchard. I heard the first few notes of the fiddle. The ceilidh was beginning. Joy, and the joining of hands, is activism after all. Care to dance?
