Story as an invitation into relationship
Do you think echidna tells her puggle stories? Yearning for an immersive conjoining with the wild.
Storytime. Story. Stories.
I’ve been thinking about stories, tales, narratives, yarns, a lot lately as I start to work my way through the wish list for The Wild Forgotten book.
One of the writers I most adore, most deeply respect and am, frankly, in awe of, is botanist, bryologist and indigenous author Robin Wall Kimmerer. I love her books Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss. I love sounds so, meh, and doesn’t really encompass my true feelings, but I don’t want to embarrass myself, so I love it is then.
Her writing seems to tickle the mythic written deep in my genes. When she speaks I experience her words through all of my senses, I am in deep, sometimes I forget to breathe or blink I am so absorbed. Her words are a truth that sits deep in my bones, and inspires me in the same way that watching the sun play through leaves does, or watching a swamp harrier circle and hover does - it all feels so right, but also sooo full of magic. Her stories evoke a sort of hiraeth, a grief tinged longing, yearning for an immersive conjoining with the wild. I love the collaborative works she has done through places like Orion, books like the Kinship series, and all the myriad essays she has written, the interviews and podcasts she has participated in and videos of her speaking on YouTube.
Biiiigg fangirl here.
What she says is what my body and brain have been wanting to hear for as long as I can remember. One of my very favourite conversations to listen to is with Jane Goodall on her Hopecast . I find myself listening to the two of them speak in the same way I sat at the feet of my teacher from second grade, Miss Telfer, when it was storytime in the afternoon. I was a veritable physical embodiment of the heart-eyes and star-eyes emojis combined. Cross legged with elbows on knees, balled fists under chin to support the stargazing and ensure absolute stillness so the story could wash over me and be absorbed through every pore.
Hiraeth [hɪraɨ̯θ]
a Welsh word that has no direct English translation, likened it to a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed; a mixture of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness or an earnest desire for the past
Speaking with Jane about stories, Robin (we are on first name basis now) said
“science teaches about, I want to learn from nature - don’t just tell us, invite us into relationship”.
This invitation comes through story, through the very aliveness of a story, the way it moulds to the shape of the storyteller, the way it grows and changes with time with new experience, with deliberate and accidental massage, with the age of the listeners ears and the tellers tongue.
I wish I had listened to the stories of my elders with more attention, because those elders have left and I am walking the path to replace them, but my stories feel few and unfeathered and without the deep power of extended relationship. My elders, by virtue of the time they lived in, and the places and ways they grew up, had a deep relationship with the wild in different ways - with land, with more-than-human persons, with surviving and thriving without the technology and comforts and excess of today.
Thinking about this only makes me want to dive deeper, dig deeper, find connections I didn’t know I was missing, strengthen them, and seek out more. I lament living in a time where future is the only way we face, where pausing to look down and look up and look back and look beside to one another is not productive. I often hold potential and possibility like an ever expanding universe in my tiny human heart - sometimes it is all too much, too large to clasp. Sometimes I think there is no limit to how much that essential organ of love can cradle.
I want to hear ALL the stories. I don’t want to miss a thing.
The conversation between these two amazing women focused on storytelling as a way of inviting people into relationship with the wild, living world. Good stories full of nuance and detail and feeling. Good stories that not only give the writers a way to express their experience or imaginings, but to also sweep the reader up in that emotive language and take them along for the ride too - inviting the reader into relationship with the subject of the tale. Good stories that give life to a subject with which the reader may have previously had little or no connection, or a connection that was tenuous or fragile or marred by wounds or scarring words. Good stories that give us as a reader or listener the opportunity to learn from rather than about.
That is my aim for both this space and for the book that is being born here. It is also one of the big reasons I want your participation here - yes, I will share a lot of my words, my stories, my tales, but I want to share your stories of relationship to the wild, your words about the wild, your version of the wild, I want to learn from you, for us all to have the opportunity to learn from each other’s experience of the wild, not just about it. I want to write good stories. I want to read your good stories. I want to weave some good stories with you.
Pen in hand, thinking, a photo of an echidna in the wilds of Tasmania flashes up on my computer monitor’s screensaver. Do you think the echidna tells her puggle stories as they hatch from their egg, snug and safe in her backwards pouch? I think she must - how else would they know where they come from and where they are going and how absolutely wonderful they are? When did we stop listening to echidna stories, and wolf stories, and seagull stories? Why did we think our stories were more important? Why are we forgetting our own wild stories now?
Brows furrowed, I paused here for a moment as I wrote this missive, tripping on my own thoughts, feeling silly and disconnected and trite and mourning an indigeneity that was lost to my lineage millennia ago.
I took a breath to continue, intending the next line to start with:
“Invite me into relationship”
But my hand wrote
“I write me into relationship”
Beginning to put a line through the words, I listened a moment. I actually cocked my head to the side, and listened, listened to that faint sound, a song of inspiration, in the distance and right beside me and coming from within. A whisper that required openhearted calm to hear.
I write me into relationship.
Both clunky and profound. Was that a little story I could hear?
I rolled my shoulders (that is always how the shapeshifting starts for me).
I write me into relationship.
I write so that swirling thoughts like swallows on the wing can come to sit together on that wire up high, grasping electricity between curled toes, alive and alive on a live conduit, a gathering and a travelling without movement, still but vibrant, vibrating.
I write so that concentration focuses fervent eyes on furtive movement in shadowed water, stillness, statuary, a lightning strike of yellow beak, and the minnow is momentarily aerial before being devoured by serpentine grace.
I write so that rumination and ideation and deliberation takes place in the slow and purposeful walk of furred legs in each other's footsteps, one behind the other, a trail of howls and vicious teeth and tender, warm, licks and thick coats of thunderstorms and rust and salt.
I write so that joy and unbridled elation soars in the thermals on great wings strong enough to bear a beak that can hold more than its belly-can, openhearted exhilaration, a spiral ballet to cotton-wool cumulus.
I write me into relationship.
I write me into wild.
I write so I can interlace my fingers with the wild, so that I can witness and learn from, so I can imagine and mimic and shapeshift and listen and feel and watch and watch and watch and revere. So I can tell their stories, so I can sing their songs, so I can humble my humanity and give space to my wild heart and walk hand in hand with wild.
Will you walk this wild path with me?
We will weave our words into a tapestry of wild so beautiful the wind will sing the story.
I invite you to write yourself into relationship, to write yourself into wild. What words travel to your fingertips to weave across the page? What wild beings embody the stories you hold in your heart?
You do Nature proud, with your word-weaving, Natalie. You are an exquisite storyteller. I love Robin Wall Kimmerer, as well, and will have to check out that podcast. I love both reading and listening to "Braiding Sweetgrass." Truly, one of the best. 💚
“I write so that joy and unbridled elation soars in the thermals on great wings strong enough to bear a beak that can hold more than its belly-can, openhearted exhilaration, a spiral ballet to cotton-wool cumulus.”
This passage was absolutely enchanting.
As I read “I write me into relationship” it took me back to when I was finishing my memoir, the moment when I realised I had been doing just that. It is universally known that our lives inform our writing but I think that this was when I truly realised, and keenly felt, that our writing has the power to influence the way we live our lives.