From a Dartmoor tor, Kirsteen McNish throws wishes out to the wind.

After a long period of tumult within which I seem to be swimming in concentric circles, I crash-land into a summer of intense togetherness. I can feel restlessness and uncertainty between myself and my small family rumbling like a freight train between stations, one tension linking another. I feel each morning like I am on the balls of my feet, smiling too hard, trying to simply trust whatever this is, holding on.

I seek salvation now in what I would once have previously considered claustrophobia in this small village. I remind myself often at the sea’s edge and on the moorland hills that what we have lost in security, we have gained in multitudes in countless other ways.

At night my daughter suffers nightmares that keep us awake. I visit her small room back and forth — a spectre of nightly tides. I am told over the phone for the first time by her new paediatrician that these sleep disturbances are potentially caused by her medication that is somewhat ironically supposed to help her ease into sleep. I focus on this information rather than the presence of shadowy things I sometimes feel my daughter can see in her room, as I watch her gaze tracing the same horizontal line past her bed — stopping every time by the door frame whilst gripping my hand with her clammy fingers. I quietly consider the noises we hear clanking in the kitchen when the thick darkness of night sets in. The singing I am convinced I can hear in the garden at 3am. The house seemingly wants to speak sometimes, murmuring in corners.

Things go missing too. The necklace I had made when my sister died cannot be found despite turning out all the drawers, bookshelves and checking all surfaces. I gulp red wine by a raging fire mourning this disappearance, feeling that I have lost the last thread to my lost sibling. Some months later my partner brings it to me smiling, found in one of the places we looked time and again.

Things erupt from the earth here, as if looking for attention. The back garden is handsome, lush, stone-walled, and yet somehow unyielding and I spend little time there as it does not seem to invite it. Thorns and bindweed grow so stealthily it feels like the garden is trying to keep me out rather than invite me in. It feels as if it wants things to stay exactly as they are. The earth rejects the blade of the spade and bends it instead. Rain doesn’t sate the new plants I bring to it. The only thing that takes root is the dancing dill and fennel that cast spidery shadows across the walls in soft light of autumnal mornings. The traditional lemonade-scented roses and hydrangea (I would never have chosen to plant), seem to keep watch, nodding to each other like gate sentries. One day, out front, my partner decides to dig up a tree root he keeps stubbing his toe on by the wood shed, and he recoils from the impact of stone burring through his body like an electric shock. After some digging with his hands, he finds a huge granite curved-edged slab hiding in plain sight. It takes him, our friend, a quad, pulleys, ropes, levers, wooden planks and sheer brute force for them both to raise the stone over the space of a week, bit by bit. I am told by an elderly farmer a few doors down that it is quite likely a standing stone repurposed sometime later as a gate post when the house was built in 1800 upon what was farmland. The stone had lain hidden in the earth covered with ivy and blackberry briars as its blanket. People come out from their cottages in the dark to survey the scene as it unfolds, holding torches as the final wrestle pulls the stone out of its long slumber in the earth and sweat pours down my partner’s face. It feels that when all else was falling apart, and he was out at sea, this was a certainty he could control.

We are told that similar large stones are to be found in hedgerows and field edges up by the imposing square tower of the Saxon church, where it’s said a monastery once sat. I imagine these stones uprooted and spat out, the jagged teeth of a once sacred site, into surrounding fields and our tiny village below. One to be found by us. And to be fondly left when we move on.

As summer starts to eke away under a bright moon that keeps me awake, I dream that my partner and I drive up the steep hill to our home and as we turn the bend by the woods, I see a large white shape beside the road and ask him to stop the car. I realise it is a huge white swan, its wings folded the wrong way and broken. As I approach it, it lifts its head and rests its neck in my palm, eyes imploring, telling me it is dying. I wake feeling shaken and I fear what this portent means for us.

*

Earlier in spring, five women, including myself, joined to plot out a special event made possible by people whose lives are devoted to Dartmoor. We gathered inside and settled at a small kitchen table to discuss how we might dream a special ceremony into being. As we stepped outside together and walked onto the farmland my breath felt as if it has been knocked out of my chest — this place was like nothing else I have ever seen. I didn’t reach for my phone to take pictures: it felt wrong to do so. I stood under a huge ancient tree whose branches curved upwards, creating a cup to catch the water that torrented from the sky. It all felt somehow off the map.

We join forces again when the first skeins of autumn thread through the sky. We walk quietly in a long snaking procession, leading strangers across Dartmoor’s roads to a secret location. Between us we carry a shroud created by artist Yuli Somme with stitches by the hands of many volunteers. Our feet and shins are baptised in the peaty water as we walk through a leat, then pass a clootie tree and proceed to a roundhouse to consider what we have lost and what we might save — the personal and global, the ecological and human, the land of Dartmoor whose peat reserves are shrinking and whose waters are being polluted. A fire burns in the dark and smoke swirls around us, infusing our clothes; so much everyone’s faces blur. People sit, words are spoken, an ancient song is sung. Everyone is quiet and still, but unified.

I think whilst in this roundhouse of everyone who stepped up recently to help me and my family. When the path became broken. When we couldn’t sleep because of clattering worry. When we withdrew from going over our woes with friends because it felt too much to rake over it. I think of those that offered their open hands anyway and pulled us through the swampy and seemingly endless void.

As I walk out watching the smoke winding through the roof, I know I have been somewhere like this before in a fragmented nighttime reverie. My head swims, then a woman touches my arm and stops me feeling like I am floating out into the treetops.

*

On a day of inky skies, weeks later, we travel to the hospital in Plymouth.  We are taking my daughter to an appointment I have been dreading since blood tests showed something is up. I bite my nails to the quick. Walking past the head injury unit I was in last October, my skull tightens in recognition. I feel a lurch in the corridor where my young son sat alone last October, waiting for me as they scanned me.  I think of his steady tenderness in a time of increased male bravado and false swagger.

We soon reach the ultrasound room, and I cajole my daughter’s confused body onto the examination bed. They apply gel and press the wand down onto her skin, peering into the sonogram on the screen above her head. They talk directly to my daughter rather than over her head to me – which I am grateful for – unlike many who presume somehow she cannot understand because she cannot communicate decipherable sounds to the majority. I know I am talking too much and way too fast but I can’t stem the flow — as if positive words and light chatter can magic away what they might find. My daughter repeatedly tries to raise her head and trunk to mine, attempting to escape, all agency taken away from her. After some 20 minutes they turn off the sonogram and tell me she is good to go. They can see a small something, but it shouldn’t cause problems or indeed explain recent issues. The adrenaline settles down and my voice wobbles as I thank them profusely.

It dawns on me some weeks later that my child is in fact using the water in her body to express things that she cannot communicate in words. She is soothed, held and thrilled by the wild sources of fresh and salt water in the way she seeks out in the smallest of puddles to dip her hands into — so why then wouldn’t she withhold water in her body and refuse to drink when she wants to communicate something we aren’t deciphering?

I push her out of the room in her wheelchair and through the too-bright, too-white gaping corridors with relief. As we reach the café entrance, I spot small pieces of knitwear knitted for charity in the hospital gift shop. Seeing these tiny cardigans in bright hues tenderly hanging in the window, made by many caring hands, hits me like a brick. I wonder how anyone’s hands could ever turn to harm another. I think of men and women grasping the small bodies of their small children holding fragments of their garments, livestreamed on our phones. I stroke the back of my daughter’s head with one hand as I push her to the car.

*

On the solstice we chase the sunset and travel to Combestone Tor, a place where the views both bewitch and put our worries into proportion. Three teenagers smoking spliffs huddle under a rock, teasing each other, giggling and shivering in too-thin clothes and pushing each other playfully. A couple in expensive walking gear which makes a loud plasticly swishing sound play a game of hide and seek with their young child that feels more efficient than fun. She climbs to the top of the rocks and throws her arms in the air in joy, silhouetted by the encroaching dark. I wonder how I will protect my children if our luck doesn’t turn soon.

I walk down the slope to revisit the gnarled Rowan tree that feels miraculous spiralling out of seemingly inhospitable stone. The same place my son spotted an adder basking in the sun in summer, and the tree trunk where I placed a phone into its belly and recorded the sound for a radio residency with artist Clare Dearnaley collecting voices of Dartmoor. I close my eyes, and the tree’s rough bark digs through the wool of my bobbled jumper. I watch its branches shake as I throw wishes out to the wind.

Moments later am spun out by a sound flowing somewhere into the ether. As I pace back up the hill, I spy the narrow shoulders of a man wearing a berry-red jumper with long black hair piled on top of his head. His arms are making small swift movements. He faces the hills to the east. I realise what I am hearing is the unexpected sound of a harp lacing the breeze.

Something takes hold of me as my throat swells.  I recognise the feeling that takes hold and rises from my chest.

Hope.

For Terry and for Mike.