I\u2019m not fortunate enough to live in the wild \u2013 not yet, anyway \u2013 so when I\u2019m home in Dublin, I take in whatever slices of the natural world I can find. In the evenings, I walk my dog through the local park, past trees whose familiar shape and presence I depend on. In all the nights I\u2019ve walked these paths, one venerable tree \u2013 a knotty oak, of course \u2013 has lodged its way into my life. When I pass, I cannot shake a feeling, mad as it sounds, that it sees me. <\/p>\n
On clear nights, the few stars that make it through the city\u2019s haze of light pollution become visible. It\u2019s relaxing, staring up. And then something moves at the edge of my vision, and I think it\u2019s a shooting star, until I realise it\u2019s something entirely unmagical: one of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX satellites in orbit. He\u2019s recently applied to put a million of them up there \u2013 the Muskification of our night sky has only just begun.<\/p>\n
I walk up to the old oak and have an improbable feeling of recognition. The poet Mary Oliver wrote that her work was mostly \u201cstanding still and learning to be astonished\u201d. Attention, she said, is the beginning of devotion. And so, with Oliver on my mind, I stand under the oak, letting myself love what I love, and never feel alone. <\/p>\n
A few weeks ago, I spent time with Hannah Page Fox on her sheep and Christmas tree farm in Grangecon in Wicklow. Until last spring, her life was normal, with her husband and three daughters. There had been a few health issues the previous year, signs that might have been missed, but nothing that added up to anything. Then an acute bout of sickness landed her in A&E, and she was told she had stage four lobular breast cancer<\/a>, with tumours that had spread and wrapped around her stomach. Six weeks in hospital followed, with months of nil by mouth, unable to swallow. She is still on treatment, and always will be.<\/p>\n We walked through an old rusted gate into a stubble field of harvested corn, up towards a ring fort, one of two on the farm, which has never been ploughed or touched. Many farmers still don\u2019t plough ring forts, or fairy forts as they\u2019re called. Page Fox and her husband Andy built a series of wood-fired saunas from old horse boxes and antique bathtubs pulled from the hedge, where they\u2019d once been drinkers for the cattle, now fed by a spring. A woman who talks to fairies told her that the fairies wanted the land healed before they\u2019d accept the sauna. The challenge? Walk the perimeter of the farm. <\/p>\n It\u2019s a farm with no neat borders. Page Fox set off with a friend and two dogs. She walked through brambles, across streams, through ditches. It took three hours. Her dogs gave up and wandered home. She was still very sick, and it took everything she had. But she told me, \u201cI have never laughed so much in my life\u201d. <\/p>\n She had not known or noticed what was around her before. She saw a mushroom shaped like a fried egg \u2013 sunny side up \u2013 which she had never seen before. She stopped and realised how astonishingly beautiful it was. The perimeter walk, she said, was the turning point of her hellish year, marking the first time she really laughed. \u201cI had forgotten how to live in it,\u201d she says of the farm. \u201cI was just living on it.\u201d<\/p>\n I asked Page Fox whether it was too insensitive to ask whether some part of her tough year had also been a gift. \u201cI\u2019ve possibly had one of the best years of my life, because I\u2019ve got rid of anything that didn\u2019t matter,\u201d she said. What went was the tidy house; what she wants is to be outside. She spent this March in the lambing sheds helping her brother, which she hadn\u2019t had time to do in years, and she got out for the Christmas tree harvest. At night, she goes out and looks at the stars.<\/p>\n \u2018There are days where the tears still flow. There are days where I wonder what the future holds for my children\u2019<\/p>\n \u2014 \u00a0Hannah Page Fox, farmer<\/p>\n Lobular cancer is the second most common type of breast cancer, but it doesn\u2019t behave like the kind so many of us are warned about. It often doesn\u2019t form a lump at all. \u201cIt acts like a spider\u2019s web,\u201d Page Fox says. It threads through tissue rather than balling up, which can make it close to invisible on a mammogram. It\u2019s particularly invisible in dense breasts. In one survey of breast radiologists, only a quarter said they were confident they could catch it on a screening mammogram in a dense breast. Roughly four in 10 women of screening age have dense breasts, yet BreastCheck does not currently measure density, record it, or tell you yours. <\/p>\n