Love Notes to Nature: part 3
Extract from my essay from Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You
Here’s the third 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.
Nature healing as abolitionist praxis
“We believe that the only way to create radically safe futures is by harnessing tools of radical imagination, collective experimentation and expansive hope.”
Evie Muir, Peaks of Colour 20221.
Nature healing must be considered as a decolonial and abolitionist praxis unravelling and repairing centuries of harm. As white settler colonisation terraformed indigenous people’s landscapes around the world, they tried (and often succeeded) to terraform psyches, imaginations and eradicate indigenous knowledges. Whilst I believe I’ve had experiences of immense personal healing and reckoning in nature, they feel incomplete. I believe there can be no ‘wholeness’ to healing in nature for us as individuals or for nature, if we cannot reckon with healing nature and nature-healing within the aforementioned praxis of abolition — of healing a racist society, of deconstructing extraction, dismantling white supremacy, capitalism and commodification — of standing in solidarity with 370 million indigenous people, who are protecting 80% per cent of the world’s biodiversity on 20% of earth’s land and water2.
Looking back, I realise my time spent in nature has regulated my fragmented nervous system, helping me to find a truer version of myself. A truer version who more and more struggles to exist in contemporary urban society. I find it impossible to unplug in the city. The city makes me lonely, fractious and anxious. For me, ideas of healing and nature do not equate to a quick fix. Nature reveals my complexities, problematises my existence upon this earth, unravels the assumptions I make of myself, that society makes of me and asks me to question, to re-feel myself into new relationship with the world, with myself and with others, and to extract myself from the relationships and structures which harm me. A questioning of what it is to be a human creature in this world, at a time of great turning and undoing.
I can “forest bathe” to my heart's content, and yes, I am sure the trees will feel me but I need to practice this in the wider social context. My Dad once told me that my Grandfather had prayed for all our future generations to come. That includes me. He knew the world didn’t stop with him. Perhaps we all need to pray? To make our work a healing prayer for nature, for us as nature. For all future nature. This is healing.
Nature helps me to step out of my city skin and become something otherwildly3. As a Brown woman, being/walking/feeling into these landscapes I am taking control of my body and my psyche on my terms, extracting myself from a society of extraction and exploitation, from the unhealings. I can drop the layers of societal constructs, labels and forget my neurodivergence. It’s no longer me that is too intense, too ill, too nuts, too Brown, too woman, too clever, too mad — it’s the overculture; a society that is so out of kilter that to fit into it I have to deconstruct myself to such an extent that I become ill. I’m undiagnosing myself from all the labels psychiatry want to give me and giving them back as a diagnosis for society itself. Thank you, but no thank you. I’m not your diagnosis. I am wild, untameable and free. This is healing.
Nature loves my Brown footsteps and nature loves Black footsteps because they recognise them as fugitive and free. As surviving and thriving. Nature recognises the energy of our ancestors in our soles, of people who come from people who loved nature and worked in symbiosis with nature. Land is not static or immaterial. Land is awake, watching us, deeply feeling of our presence. Feeling our joy, play and imaginations for how a world can be. Us and nature = a beautiful landguage. This is healing.
Dear Nature,
It’s taken decades for me to work all of this out. Mostly, I loved you as you’ve loved me. I’ve felt you in every-way and not one-way. Our relationship has been a wild whole-bodily experience that refuses the separations of us and nature. Refuses the separations of mind/body/spirit/soul. Refuses to believe that you don’t feel me or communicate with me. Being able to unravel, examine and explore myself as a being of nature, and my place within nature has led me to these understandings.
Kissing earth’s altar was a hard prayer. Thank you for showing me that we are all nature-beings of immense healing powers and potential. In our collective concussion we’ve forgotten who we are, becoming fragmented, separated and made less than the magnificence that we are. You allow us to re-practice and repair our freedoms and fugitivity, to be otherwise than the capitalistic world wants us to be. I don’t want to go into nature for healing or rest, to then re-enter a world that wants to strip me of my true self.
This is the kind of nature healing I want for all of us. The kind of healing that makes us useless to white supremacy, useless to systems of power and oppression. I want the kind of healing in nature that makes us question everything, to listen to the wisdom found in thin places, to discover the joy of walking barefoot on gritstone paths, to watching the perseid showers dazzle the deep night, to snuggle down under an old oak tree and sleep, to laugh and cry with friends as we free ourselves over and over and over again. Through our navel fourth eyes, we can dream of all the connecting cords of who we are, ever have been, are becoming. Knowing that if nature is our original home, and we are nature, then we are already home. We always have been.
From the political pamphlet and manifesto ‘Revolutionary Ecology’ by Peaks of Colour. The seeds of this manifesto were planted during a manifesto-building walkshop I co-facilitated in June 2022 in the Peak District, with self-identifying women and gender diverse POC. Evie Muir describes this as, “…a co-curated manifesto that proudly demands racial, gendered and land justice. Ecology is defined as the relationships between people and their environments. It comes from the Greek word for home. Here, we offer you our Revolutionary Ecology: our Home for Revolution.”
Otherwildly is a word which arrived in me during a free-write, for the making of my masters dissertation where I explored the roots of my creativity, identity and wildness through therapeutic zine-making methods. Though I love the word wild, I was troubled by the colonial overtones of the word wild and the commodification and over-use of wild for marketing purposes, thus reducing it’s potency. I wanted to find another way to express how I experienced myself as wild and the wildness around me. As a Brown women, silenced woman (so they think) I’ve experienced a lifetime of othering. Therefore, otherwildy reclaims my otherness and my wildness, creating something altogether otherwise.
