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I’ve written many essays/blogs over the last few years – many available here and covering a wide range of topics from Nightingales to Soul Loss to Chalk streams. Yet there is a recognisable uniting thread behind many of them. Previously, I hadn’t commented on, or attempted to contextualise this growing library of essays, leaving each piece to stand alone without introduction.
When asked as to what kind of writer I am, I’ve tended to say for simplicity’s sake, that I’m a ‘nature writer’. And in recent times this field has certainly been a burgeoning one with many great exponents writing with impressive literary flair and/or extensive natural history knowledge. But for myself, I feel I need to qualify that answer as I feel ‘nature writer’ tends to give the wrong impression. I don’t write about ‘nature’ – at least I try my hardest not to! Instead, I’m attempting to write from my ongoing experience and immersion in ‘nature’.
Animism can be said to be the simple intuition that everything is alive, that everything has its own interior animation, its own pulse and rhythm; that each thing has a degree of agency and ability to affect the space around it.
It’s a fascinating creative endeavour to attempt to write from this animist sensibility, since we modern people are so deeply encultured to see ourselves as observers apart from our surroundings. The English language is not structured in such a way as to easily support this change in perspective. So that’s the challenge: to find a way to write from a more participatory embodied perspective. I emphasise the ‘urban’ aspect in many essays because that is where the majority of people in the world, including myself, now live. For most of us, a relationship with the wild is going to take place in urban, edgeland and brownfield settings, rather than in exotic rainforests or coral reefs. Yet wildness, rather than wilderness, can be found anywhere.
For most of us, a relationship with the wild is going to take place in urban, edgeland and brownfield settings, rather than in exotic rainforests or coral reefs. Yet wildness, rather than wilderness, can be found anywhere.
Why do I feel so passionately about the value of sharing this more animistic perspective?
Simply because we are currently destroying the very living systems on which all life, including ours, depend upon. And if we don’t emotionally feel ourselves to be an integral part of Mother Earth, then we are unlikely to be motivated to do anything about it. We won’t protect what we don’t love. It’s that simple.