On the osteopath’s treatment couch, Louis is rocking me like a parent soothing a fractious child. “I don’t know what to do to make it better,” I say, meaning my problematic joints, meaning myself, meaning this whole shitshow of a world. 

“And your mind?” Louis asks,“how can you look after that?” He is holding my crown now in a way that makes me wonder if I might be being reprogrammed. He talks me through an abbreviated version of meditation practices others have attempted, over the years, to teach me. “I feel,” he says, in a New Zealand lilt like a benediction, “that you, well, everyone, would benefit from meditation.”

The next day, as I make coffee, I remember the exercise. I plant my feet on the ground, tuck in my chin, and straighten my back. I scan my body for tension, releasing it when I find it settled in my jaw. I follow my breath for a minute, thinking I can do this, and feeling buoyed, go back up into the garden.

As I climb the steps I can hear that the hens are upset. In the orchard, where they roam, I find a black and white terrier with one of my hens, Annie, in his mouth. He is shaking her like a rag doll. I hear myself make an eerie, primal sound and bellow it at the dog. Startled, he drops Annie and runs back under the dense laurel hedge where he’d broken in.

I have only been away for ten short minutes, but time enough for the orchard to become a site of desolation. Bloodied piles of feathers are heaped everywhere. I search for the hens and find Annie burrowed in the bramble thicket separating our garden from next door. I gather everything I will need to get her out; a pair of gloves, a long sleeved coat, the hen carrier, some secateurs, the parrot-nosed shears. I can see the gashes on her back, flies collecting on the pooling blood. She has a panicked look in her eye. I cut, carefully, mindfully, for half an hour or more, cooing to her, keeping my movements smooth so as not to scare her any further in, undoing my work. As I cut, I think of all the times I’ve had to do the same, breathing through the briar of various thickets; dental appointments, gynaecological procedures, upsets and injuries. Keep still, breathe deep, this too will pass.

After a week of treatment, Annie is still alive, mostly because she’s a brilliant, bloody-minded hen, and the others are recovered. Although her wounds are beginning to heal, caged in the house her spirit is fading. I move the cage up to the orchard so she can be near the others. Back out in the sunshine and birdsong, the familiar sounds, she brightens. “She’d just forgotten how to chicken”, I chirrup to Glen when he comes home in the evening. “This is why community and environment are so important – they remind us who we are, give us our identity; we aren’t meant to be alone.”  My idealism is quashed however when, a few days later, I let her out of the cage and the others set upon her as a stranger, pulling beakfuls of feathers from her healing back. The magpies circle, calling to each other to take up perches nearby, sensing her vulnerability.

Later I tell my wise friend Em what has happened. “So, I was wrong about community and environment”, I tell her, “it’s just about survival of the fittest.”

“I don’t know,” she says, “I think that maybe what we can learn from this is to be careful who we choose to show our vulnerability to.”

Writing is like this, I think. Life is like this. Who do we trust? Who is it safe to show our vulnerability to? The invasion into my garden, into a space I thought was safe, makes me feel untrusting suddenly of where I live, of how I live. My instinct, a knee-jerk reaction, is to batten down the hatches. But this approach works as badly in writing as in life. Another wise friend, a writer, warns me against closedness in our writing; “People can smell bullshit”,  she says, and it stays with me. How to be damaged but stay open, this is the question, what happens if being open brings only more damage?

On a mid September afternoon I come home to sunshine. I let the hens out of the orchard to be with me in the garden. A fresh breeze is blowing and the garden feels alive again after days of incessant rain and grey. The Michaelmas daisy is buzzing with bees and butterflies. I sit on the grass with a cup of tea in a patch of sunlight. The dog follows me, bringing his toy to lie at my feet. I hear an unusual sound and turn my head to see that Annie has dug a bowl in the soil just up from me. She is lying in it, turning her wounds and spreading her bedraggled feathers to fan in the warmth and light of the sun. She is making an avian purr, a kind of low continuous chirrup of content. Billie the hen comes over and lowers herself down next to me so we make a wonky quadrangle, Cooper, Billie, Annie and me, all lying in the sunshine, drawn to the same patch of light and each other. My heart feels full; they trust me again.

We get some new hens to bolster our tiny flock; a Coucou Maran, a Blue Maran and a new Annie, a Sussex Rock. They are a happy little flock. They have an enclosure now, but when I am in the garden I let them out into the orchard to roam and peck and adventure. They love to climb up onto walls, onto the palleted sides of the compost heap, to roost in the apple trees so I have to lift them down in the half light. They love to chase insects and each other, to run across the orchard, wings spread, to stretch and feel their strength. The two young marans, Cattie and Little Blue, play a regular game. Pretending not to recognise each other they run, all feathers and squawk and bluster, as if an enemy has invaded their space, towards each other. They rise up, bumping chests noisily, before dropping down to continue pecking the ground as if to say, nothing to see here. It feels like watching kittens or puppies playing to test out and learn their defensive skills. 

But a month on and the egg basket is empty, despite the new influx of young hens, the ageing and battle-worn Annie taking on the egg production duties. It is slightly galling, but like my new career, I tell myself, I am investing a lot while the benefits build invisibly. At some point the egg basket will be full to overflowing. Sometimes I feel as empty as the basket, losing faith in the invisible; as if I have jumped off a cliff and am still in freefall, neither in the jaws of the wolves or the arms of the angels, as if I’m the one who is wrapped in briars, turning and turning and making the entanglement worse. What should I do to feel better? 

A fear ranges around my belly, telling me that I have made a terrible mistake. An indifference settles in my chest that says it doesn’t care about anything, that it wants to give up, to choose something else, anything else, knowing that I will feel the same way there, wherever it is. 

And I realise then that I am the briar that I am tangled in, I am the thorny scrub telling myself at every turn that I’m not good enough, that I can’t do it, that I’ve made another mistake. 

How to untangle myself from self-doubt? A regular practice, just as Louis suggested, can help. The briar is a reminder to return to the practice I began as I was fluffing up my feathers in preparation to jump. A practice of writing, of stillness and stretching. These things are the secateurs to my briar. Just as I cut Annie out, I have to be patient and calm and kind. I have to cut strategically and slowly, each cut taking me closer to release, to reconnection with trust, faith in the invisible; an assurance that it is OK to be vulnerable.