Nature Writing Workshop from Authors Anita Roy and Pippa Marland
Anita Roy writes books for adults and for children, and nature observations for everyone in The Guardian’s Country Diary. She’s an environmentalist, editor and cloud maker too. She and Pippa Marland have recently co-edited ‘Gifts of Gravity and Light’. On Friday, Anita gave a talk and workshop to liberal arts students.
“Where there is meaning there is care, so choosing to understand oneself as a significant, acting, connected part of a meaningful system is choosing to care for one’s surrounding environment. ”
It is a secret: only five of us, and Pippa’s lovely dog Eliza, tucked at the end of the arts complex. We all have too much to do, but for this morning everything else will wait/waits.
If you are slightly deaf, it is important to tell people you meet so that they know to be patient when you lean forward and ask for repetitions. ‘It’s just because I’m so interested in what you have to say’, is a line I’ve learned, so new friends understand my repeated asking ‘no but what did you say before? No before that?’ is in fact the deepest compliment.
So Anita Roy tells us straight away how her hearing has worsened after twenty years living in noisy Delhi, how, when she moved back to Somerset in search of the beech trees she found herself missing, she found the British ‘so fucking softly spoken’, until the doctor showed her an audiogram and said ‘look, you’ve lost your consonants’.
‘I love you’ says Anita when I tell her I lost my consonants too, probably at birth (perhaps they’re somewhere in my mother’s birth canal, a hissing huddle of sibilance ssss ffff and ttttt). It is a rare pleasure to meet a fellow inhabitant of the half-hearing world; I can count my half-hearing encounters with just more than half a hand.
For Anita, her hearing loss is the perfect example of how a person responds to their environment, and how that means that by looking after the environment, we are looking after ourselves. She seems delighted by the evolution of her own life and body into a walking, living manifestation of her principles.
Anita lives in Wellington Transition Town, which is part of the Transition Network, a community environmental movement, founded by Rob Hopkins. ‘If we wait for the governments it’ll be too little, too late; If we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might be just enough, just in time’, is the movement’s goldilocks slogan. ‘Hope with its sleeves rolled up’ is another. It’s about action and community, says Anita, in our immediate environments, ‘and using your body’. Existential dread, she says, is most liveable when you are doing things with your body. I think of full-bodied exhaustion and the easy sleep that follows.
A quick swerve from dread to death: we live in a death-phobic culture, says Anita. For her, this is the heart of our ‘fucked-up world’. If only we would see death living with us. The story for her novel Gravepyres School for the Recently Deceased started as a way for kids to learn how to talk about death. In her invented school, recently deceased children learn how to be dead; they have to learn to talk to vultures, regulate the River of Time and make clouds.
Also at the heart of the Transition Network movement is imagination; the conviction that imagination is ‘absolutely key to affecting change’. Anita remembers time-travelling in Rob Hopkins’ ‘Tardis 2030 Group Experiment’: every participant closes their eyes and imagines that everything necessary has been done to prevent the climate crisis. What would the world look like, smell like, sound like? Each person opens their eyes in due course and shares their imaginative findings. It’s collective imagination, a way of reaching inside ourselves to stretch the parameters of possibility in a world in which we’re often quick to doubt our abilities to make change before we even try.
Next Anita introduces ‘mysterialism’. ‘I just made it up’ she says, flashing her naming powers, ‘It’s a new philosophical conceptual thing’. Mysterialism is a way of seeing experience as a reflection of environment. A mysterialist chooses to understand themselves as intricately connected to a living, changing system. Obvious perhaps; but it’s often the simplest, most obvious ideas that get forgotten.
I recognise Anita’s mysterialism as what I’ve stored and named in my mind as ‘divine parallels’: a magical phenomenon of perceiving correlation between one’s own thoughts and movements, and the surrounding world. The charming delight, for example, of walking home hungry, wishing for nothing more than a perfect banana, then happening to catch lying at the edge of the pavement, plump with divine notice-me-please readiness, a lovely, entirely sealed banana. (This actually happened; I was enchanted and the banana was delicious). A mundane example, but often I find it happens on small scales; just a tickle from providence or coincidence or whatever you want to call it. That’s the key; ‘whatever you want to call it’, that separates this phenomenon from magazine astrology or religious belief. It’s an understanding, intimate between you and your world, to be named by you and noticed by you, not decreed by any ready-made system. It’s a way of being that allows for meaning and significance. Where there is meaning there is care, so choosing to understand oneself as a significant, acting, connected part of a meaningful system is choosing to care for one’s surrounding environment.
When Anita calls my unspoken, unshared idea of ‘divine parallels, ‘mysterialism’ , she gives our group a piece of vocabulary with which to talk about this wriggling, elusive idea. The word is a tool, in Ursula Le Guin’s sense; a container. Into the container, we pour our understandings of the concept, which are neither resolved nor perfectly shared between us. The word, the understanding-container, allows us to set aside the troubles of intricate, exact, fixed definition and continue in the meantime, with conversation. Such is the practicality of vocabulary, and the power of inventing it. It is important, however, that vocabulary isn’t permanent, nor marked by any user’s name. As we pass the meaning-container (word) between us in discussion, its contents (meaning) evolve, eventually so significantly that its current container is no longer suitable, at which point the meaning must be moved out. The former container may then be understood as dispensable and bio-degradable; (as) something which will slowly, naturally break-down into smaller, re-usable parts over time.
For now, ‘mysterialism’ is a lovely container for this trickily defined mode of connected living, but we mustn’t be afraid to tenderly abandon it when it ceases to contain our understanding.
We take a break. Pippa offers coffee; Anita declines vehemently and runs off for some chocolate.
In the second half of the session, we do some writing. We are asked to describe vividly some kind of ‘encounter’ we have had with the natural world. For a few minutes we write hard and fast, then afterwards we share our work.
Emelye writes about meeting a deer and saying to her sweetly ‘this is my home too’ and Luanna writes about otters as lovely blobs on the beach, seen from the cliffs above. Laura writes about her long distance swim from Western-Super-Mare to Clevedon Pier; how the current almost swept her out to sea, and I write ‘Might Die Dusk-time, twice in three days. Orlá writes about finding bats in a cave, but she isn’t ready to read it to us, so she tell us the story instead. We’re captivated; she speaks beautifully. Some stories are made to tell, not to write.
Sharing one’s writing when it’s wet and fresh out the notebook is an achingly intimate thing. We all read nervously with fumbling voices. But it also feels urgent and necessary: I find myself desperate to share what I’ve written, not because it’s anything particularly profound or prophetic, but because it is only semi-alive until then. The almost maternal instinct to raise it, fully into life, is fiercely visceral.
We tumble out onto busy Woodland Road with a strange mixture of intense fulfilment, regret and fear. Fulfilment from deep listening, writing, talking and stretching. Afraid because such fulfilment is so difficult to come by and hold onto once found; it might evade us most of our lives. And regret for decisions we’ve possibly already made, that make it all the more elusive. Above all this is a frustrated, thrashing confusion: why should we return to the deadlines and pressures that get in the way of such fulfilment, when for a morning, it was so readily found? Why should we leave each other, when we found it together, in each other?
The final counsel Anita gives us is ‘understand in your toes that we’re not necessarily in control. We must be okay with that, we must be nimble and ready to stumble’. I wiggle my toes to check they understand. They do, but they forget easily. The kind of wisdoms Anita shares are fragile: the kind that are simplest, most obvious and grounding though most easily, quickly forgotten. To be reminded, on university campus of all places where these wisdoms are perhaps most endangered, is deeply sustaining, and will feed us for a while.
Written by Rosa Leah Picard
Second Year Liberal Arts, History of Art Pathway