Love Notes to Nature: part 2
Extract from my essay from Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You
Here’s the second extract from my chapter on ‘Healing’ originally published in the anthology Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You (edited by Nick Hayes, Bloomsbury, 2024)
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.
On Gometra, Inner Hebrides
Dear Nature,
”…as women we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge”
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic, 1978
You see me, love me, get me, recognise me as kin. Sometimes our most sacred encounters feel like wet lips finding each other in the un-civil twilight hours. When sleep releases us from being skin-bound. When we are too doze-fucked to pretend to be anything other than raw and untameable and uninhibited — ourselves. Dispossessed of words. Made of ether and glow. I feel my mind melt, my thoughts evaporate. Becoming something so elemental, so unrecognisable to myself that this is what liberation must feel like, what the real me must feel like, magnificent and mysterious. I’m made of sparkling dust, iridescent and impossible.
We all are impossible and luminous beings.
Nature, I am learning to trust my power. Your power.
I’m reminded that I’m part of this interdependent ecosystem — a mass of cells, fungi, bacteria, all the plants I’ve eaten, the air and the pollen and the pollution and the dust-mites I’ve breathed, the sun I’ve been warmed by. That I originated from the sea, and my body contains sea-water and salt-tears. A speck of me once lived in the sky, in a community of specks. I’m elemental and infinite. I’m an incredible feat of earth’s imagination. An impossibility come true.
So are you. So are we all.
Perhaps our (im)possibility and luminosity comes from our deepest and most irrational and erotic knowledges? The knowledges that English language hasn’t yet managed to word. The knowledges that help us to heal. That’s what being in nature does for me, it unleashes the erotic, the chaos and allows me to be messy and free. I don’t find this same kind of freedom in the therapy room or even through words in my journal. Words get in the way.
This is how I feel when I’m leaning my naked self against a slab of rock on Gometra, a tiny Inner Hebridean island. Being wave-splashed over and over and over again. The city, the colonisations, the micro-aggressions, the shoulds, the partitions — are washed away. Disappeared. For a while. This is a practice of erosion — eroding the layers and forcings of what a racist, misogynistic and capitalist society wants me to be. These are practices of erosion I’ve used over decades — disappearing and dissolving that which does not belong to me. I’m not sure if I knew what I was doing back then. Now I know. This is healing.
In Ecclesall Woods, Sheffield
“If you are doing the right thing for the earth, she's giving you great company.”
Vandana Shiva
Dear Nature,
I’m the rambliest rambler ever. It’s the most natural thing for me to spend time in the woods, soaking up the bluebells. Here, time unravels from illusions and delusions, ceases to exist. I become this slow thing, no longer charging to be somewhere, timing how fast I can walk or how far I can get. I take forever, however long forever is, to get somewhere because of the need to stop frequently — to pause/be/see/hear/feel/listen. Sometimes I hardly get anywhere, sitting for hours on end. Lying on my back staring at clouds floating by. I become ‘useless to capitalism’1,— to the capitalism of nature as a place for adventure sports, as a commodity to be purchased, as a place to do instead of be. I don’t need a forest bathing ticket or expensive gear to sit and eat a cheese and pickle sandwich on a fallen tree trunk. I don’t need an end-point, a map or a phone.
Like a wild flaneur, I roam aimlessly and purposelessly in these local woods — making relations with silky forklet moss, old man’s beard, long-tailed tits and jays, sinking my bare feet into the ground layer of decaying leaves, ivy, fungi and hoof-prints — imagining the secret life of underground mycorrhizal networks, feeding tree families. To become lost and startled. To go home full of wonder and awe, cells made of fresh air and tree hugs. To be made almost Dalbinder by nature. This is healing.
(to be continued)
©️Dal Kular. This extract is shared for educational purposes only.
brontë velez’s question to Tricia Hersey, The Nap Minister, “How will you be useless to capitalism today?” (2021) https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/2021/08/03/how-will-you-be-useless-to-capitalism-today/