Over rushes, across marshes, Owl hushes -
Will you listen with Owl ears for a while?
Let the wild world's whispers call you in?
- from "Barn Owl" by Robert Macfarlane
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I've made a daily habit this winter of walking the 1.5-mile loop of trail that travels from our front door, through the woods and along the river. Each day I stop and take a photo from the same spot, where Curry placed a cedar bench last Mother's Day, looking out over an ox-bow bend in the river.
Because most days I take this walk late in the afternoon, my brain is usually rattling around with the detritus of my day as I walk--turning over a writing project or an editing problem or some irritating bit of administration I've had to attend to, not to mention the heavy weight of the news of the world for that day.
It takes work to get myself out of my head and onto the trail. Sometimes I take along my binoculars and pay extra attention to looking and listening for birds. That helps. Sometimes I take along my nature journal and pause at the bench and make a sketch or a painting. That helps too.
I've also taken to singing to the trees. I came at this notion in a few ways, including this podcast episode about enchanted lands. Long story short: "enchant" means to sing, and enchanted places are those where the inhabitants have sung to the wild things for generations. Does that sound woo-woo? Yes, absolutely it is. But it's also, well, enchanting.
Mostly I sing the names of the things I see, primarily trees: "Hemlock, hemlock, white ash, pine, paper birch, black cherry..." and so on. I've heard that houseplants and garden vegetables respond well to music and human voices, so why not trees?
In addition to singing to the trees, I also write one poem each day to something I encounter on my walk, inspired by the poems in The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane. They don't have to be good poems (they are in fact pretty terrible) or follow any of the conventions or rules of poetry. Mostly I'm just engaging in word-play like rhyming and alliteration and onomatopoeia. And having fun.
There's a lot of hard stuff going on out there--in the world at large, in our country and our communities, even within our homes and families at times. Will singing to the trees or writing silly poems fix any of it? Probably not. But neither will turning it over (and over and over) in our heads. And it might just make us feel better. And if every person on earth could feel a little better, for a few minutes a day, then that would be something, wouldn't it?
So will you join me and give it a try? Go outside and sing to the tree in your front yard. Write a playful poem about a robin or an icicle or a ladybug--the first wild thing you see. Let me know if you try it--and if it makes you feel better.
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February Reads
Nonfiction: Women Writing Nature, an ecofeminism anthology edited by Barbara J. Cook. Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology, edited by Amanda K. Jaros. So delightful.
Fiction: A Quiet Life in the Country by T.E. Kinsey, a light, amusing murder mystery taking place in 1908 and starring Lady Hardcastle and her maid. The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, about the fallout for two families after a young Mi'kmaq girl is kidnapped from the berry fields of Maine.
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Or visit your local bookstore and ask them to order a copy for you
and a few to put on the shelves for other customers.
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Happy enchanting, friends!
~ Andrea
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