Love Notes to Nature: part 1
Essay from the anthology, Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You
Over the next few posts, I’m sharing extracts from my chapter on ‘Healing’ originally published in the anthology Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You (edited by Nick Hayes, Bloomsbury, 2024)
For me, this chapter was always called ‘Love Notes to Nature’. And it’s not just love notes for nature, but for us as nature, for my/our people. People have shared with me how much they’ve loved this essay, how much it’s moved them and empowered them. Books cost a lot of money these days. So in the spirit of democratising accessibility and the message of the essay ~ especially given the recent race riots ~ I hope these words reach whoever needs/wants to hear them. Thank you for reading.
Unhealings
Cooped up in this little terraced house, in this industrial land no-escape,
my cells become red brick and loneliness, caulked to keep a world inside, stacked against the elements and human-creatures outside.
Bricks breathe but their breath is too thick. Opening windows means inhaling the exhales of drills and diesel, all night parties,
screaming children, screaming parents, blaring televisions,
car stereos booooming, buzzzzings, vibrationssss,
washing machines on high spin, invisible skunk fumes that tease nostrils but fail to intoxicate me to elsewhere.
Twenty-four hours of the city’s rhythm on repeat.
The trees have been chopped down and the blue tits no longer call.
Unhealing is searching for sticks by a river and hearing the words:
‘Get off my land’, and ‘I’m going to get my husband
to come down here and shoot you!’
Unhealing is escaping the city to a campsite
and being called a paki by the owner
and being asked: ‘Tell me one single place
which the British Empire did not make better than before?’
Unhealing is a White Lives Matter banner brandished
on top of Mam Tor, Derbyshire.
These unhealings jolt my soma, stir things I cannot remember.
Makes me want to turn and run. But where?
I’m in nature and nature loves me. I they.
Nature is not a white only space to be owned/tamed/fenced/gamed.
Get used to this little Brown post-menopausal,
silver-streaked woman. Because here I am again.
Searching for sticks at the river. Again.
Camping my empire-survivor arse under our stars,
on your campsite. Again.
Being held by the wind on Mam Tor.
Again. And again.
I refuse your refusals of me. Again. And again.
Of refusing nature.
I know that when I escape the city and reach the hills,
the world feels possible again.
My ancestors feel possible again. I feel possible again.
Love notes to nature
“I am never not thinking about nature...because I don’t understand a way we can be honest about who we are without understanding that we are nature.”
Camille T. Dungy
Dear Nature,
Being with/of/in nature. Such a bodily felt experience between you and I, we. We speak in the innumerable languages of vibrations, ripples and waves, wonder and birdsong and dreams, ancestors and ghosts, and gusts of wind. Long time ago we didn’t even need words, we just understood each other and cared for each other because we are kin1.
How do I write about this beauty between us, in the English language of my appropriated tongue? Words reduce the other-knowledges, other-knowledges found beyond the arrangement of letters, beyond ancient and sacred words which have been rubbed raw of magic, nuance and possibility. Your languages know nothing of letters and their ability to put people in their place. Perhaps the Roman letters and words which’ll drip from my pen onto paper are too naive to express the massiveness of how we feel about each other. You are ancient after all. Been here forever. Before words existed.
Last year whilst walking, you made me prostrate at earth’s altar. This time I wasn't bowing to my Guru. My left boot slipped beneath me, for a moment I flew but the air couldn’t hold me. In a fragment of a second my world turned, crashing me nose first and forehead into ground. My lips became red-wet, hot as if you and I had just rough-kissed. This was a hard prayer. You brought me down to earth. I stood up in a different world. Concussed. Brain injured. Fatigued2.
I think you were teaching me something, Nature. If I am nature too, then maybe you are telling me how concussed we all are. How we need to shake ourselves awake. How we need to stop and listen and tell the story otherwise.
On Stanage Edge, Peak District
“Other-wired / I walk edges, partitions, crumbled gritstone spines, a steel halo rings my soul / made by wild gods and stolen wishes”
Dal Kular, (un)interrupted tongues, 2022
Dear Nature,
I remember who I am up here on Stanage Edge, this crinkled three and a half mile gritstone escarpment in the Peak District National Park. Right now, the wind lifts my hat to elsewhere, spinning my hair around my face like a typhoon. I feel the wind and sun etch their languages into lines of poetry around my eyes, making me feel more me and less of the Northern city where I was born.
Years of walking my footprints into their carboniferous slabbed pavement familiarised me with the wonder of Stanage’s inhabitants: the fur-blur of mountain hares through sogging mist, the tremolo from a curlews’ throat quivering over my skin, that buzzard with a ragged left wing riding airstreams, sashaying cotton grass waving at the sunset, and the musk of purple heathering across the moors — a quiet fragrance on my lips. I think these beings recognise my footsteps. Footsteps which come from nearby, with soles holding memories of far away.
We communicate otherwise, you and I. In wordless ways that float across air, caught in a beak and shaped into birdsong, along gusts and through gales, whispering through layers of gritstone, transmissions through stars.
Here and now: raising my arms to the sky, my jumper lifts upwards too, my navel finding escape above my waistband. Filling with cold air — taking in the Hope Valley below – I imagine my navel being my fourth eye, a little dent that sucks in the landscapes of now, and back then, and tomorrow. A little dent where I was once connected to the internal landscape of my Mother, before she pushed me out in the front room of Northumberland Road, Sheffield 1968 and our cord was cut. Back in 1938 in Null, Punjab, we both lived inside my Grandmother until my Mum was pushed out and their cord was cut.
Cords and cuts and edges.
Back then I was a speck of stardust. I wonder if my Grandmother felt me, inside my mother, inside her? I feel you inside me, Grandmother. Did you ever expect to be on Stanage with me, now?
For hundreds of years, as far back as my palm could be read, my people were of the land of five rivers. Full of generational knowledges, they farmed the lush plains of Punjab’s alluvial soil, to the rhythm of moon and stars and seasons between seasons. Landed-lives imprinted into the palm lines of my parents, into me.
I need to keep my ancestors close, remember their original ways of being in kinship with all beings, natural and free. The spaciousness of sleeping on roof-tops under the Milky Way. I need to feel the hot pulse of land inside me, re-order my cells with big sky and barefoot again. The only way I can do that here is come to The Edge, to breathe and unbelong from all the places I’ve never belonged.
On The Edge, what would my ancestors think of me here? That I'm a future ghost walking my freedom, in the shape of Dalbinder, in the aftermath of Empire? Perhaps I am practicing a freedom I may never have had in the Punjab? A quixotic glint of flickering freedom that never existed? Their ground was shaken, this time a sacrificial altar ripped and torn in two by the British Empire. An arbitrary edge blood-made. Nature hurt.
Cords and cuts and partitions.
I wonder if this is it — ancestral healing and repair — if this is the pull to The Edge? My land-practice of walking becomes a practice of remembering and following in the footsteps of my kin. Remembering the original landscapes of my Mother and Grandmother. Women who walked between villages and Gurdwaras. Women who walked across partition lines. Women who died across partition lines.
Living through the brutality of the 1947 Partition of India, we women were not meant to survive. On both sides of the newly split Punjab, estimates suggest at the very least seventy-five thousand women raped, mutilated and murdered3. Countless others were abducted, ended their own lives by jumping into wells4 or killed by their fathers, brothers or uncles to prevent rapes, religious conversions and to restore family honour. Women. Missing.
My mother was ten years old when this happened. She survived. And so I survived too.5
Walking up here on The Edge – this wild partition between the steel city and the Peak District – is a remembering, a recalling of how I am free to be myself in nature. In the now. Where all the layers of identity are blown away. I feel everywhen at once — linear time, chronological time — colonised time collapses. When I remember my true nature, I’m no longer a mechanised, controlled human being; I’m the living miracle of my ancestors hard-fought freedoms, living their dreams of freedom here, because I am not able to over there. I’m bringing them with me with every step.
I’m a mangled geography of happenings across times.
(read the next extract here)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “'Ki' to signify a being of the living earth. Not 'he' or 'she,' but 'ki'. So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, "Oh, that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring." And we'll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let's make that new pronoun ‘kin'." https://theecologist.org/2015/apr/25/living-beings-our-kith-and-kin-we-need-new-pronoun-nature
In 2022 I experienced two head injuries. The first one occurred on 31 March, on the first death anniversary of my Mother where a rusty iron arch fell on my nose on my allottment. The second head injury occurred on 30 July when I was walking very slowly through an out-of-service outdoor sculpture which I felt ‘pulled into’. My left boot skidded and my nose took the first impact (in the same place as the iron arch) followed by my forehead, jarring my neck back, injuring my left shoulder. Taken away in an ambulance, this is the injury I’m still recovering from with the support of the Long Term Neurological Team, Sheffield.
Estimates vary from 75,000 women to over 100,000 women depending on sources. It’s impossible to estimate exact figures. Many women denied they had been raped to avoid damaging family honour or being cast out. In The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan describes, “Children watched as their parents were dismembered or burned alive, women were brutally raped and had their breasts and genitals mutilated and entire populations of villages were summarily executed.” (p.129)
Throughout this period many women ended their lives by suicide as an alternative to violence, rape, forced pregnancy, loss of honour. On March 15 1947 in Thoa Khalsa, near Rawalpindi, whilst their village was being attacked, an estimated 90 women jumped into a well and drowned. Whilst some may have made their own choices to do this, there is no doubt some would’ve been coerced. “As Urvashi Butalia remarked, the lines between choice and coercion must have been blurred. Seven decades have passed since the partition, it is almost impossible to find the truth about what exactly happened there.” (2022) https://www.hinducollegegazette.com/post/partition-and-patriarchy-the-story-of-thoa-khalsa
This essay is dedicated to my Grandmother, my Mother and to women of all faiths, who were raped, mutilated, murdered or ended their lives by suicide during the Partition of India 1947 and those who survived the memories and scars. I remember you. Nature remembers you. We heal together across times.