Wonder as a hinge

Oh, wow! Look!

My middle name is Joy. I am not even joking! It is my mum’s middle name too - inherited joy, that can never be a bad thing, right? But I sometimes think my middle name should be Wonder.

I mean, I use it so many times a day - only wild slightly edges it out. Curiosity comes a close third. But wonder? Oh, it has so many uses, so many feelings. It’s a noun, a verb, an adjective, and it has been all of these things since the 12th Century, or so the internet dictionaries tell me so.

It is how I approach my work, it is what my work gives me, and it is what rescues me when I walk with the black dog. It can be equally applied to the most (seemingly) insignificant object, and to the most grandiose, and while wonder is technically separate from awe (as in you may have one without the other), I have always felt they are closely intertwined, and it is through wonder that I come to awe.

Wonder is also where observation, looking, seeing, becomes relationship.

My experience of wonder is not enthusiasm or being ‘impressed’. It is something both more unsettling and more nourishing than either of those - the experience of an encounter that briefly exceeds the frameworks I use to organise the world.

A philosopher might say wonder is the recognition that something is, when it might not have been. A neurologist might say wonder activates the same circuits as awe, a mild, productive disorientation that opens the mind to new pattern-making. A child... would simply say: Oh, wow! Look! At 52, it seems I am firmly entrenched in my second childhood (perhaps my second wonder-hood) because, wow, like seriously, just look!

Wild Home page in my sketchbook, featuring the Australian White Ibis feather I found

I am rolling around in my creative ecology sketchbook practice at the moment, and I am fast suspecting that this is the thing. The thing that I just might do forever (among other things, yes, I am an artist after all), because I can’t see a time when I won’t want to weave together my wonder using pencils and paint. John Muir Laws (Jack) teaches Nature Journalling, and while it might seem gauche to have heroes in this day and age, the way he approaches being in the world is a huge inspiration - and I don’t say this lightly. I do love men, and the wonders that some of them have created, but I will be honest, I am sick of reading their stories and their thinking. I want to learn from other women’s experiences of the world, from herstories rather than histories. But Jack is a definite exception - so much so that I am taking the Wild Wonder Foundation (yep, wonder) Nature Journalling Educator Certificate Program. He has a framework around foundational observation for nature journaling - I Notice, I Wonder, It Reminds Me Of, and it is from this that the framework for creative ecology sketchbook pages evolved.

I see, I wonder, I weave.

Wonder is always at the core, the pivot point - the very hinge that everything else moves on.

In teaching wildlife art for the last nearly ten years, so much of what I have shared, the curriculum, loose or more structured, has been focused on seeing. Not looking. Not glancing. And much deeper than noticing. Seeing. Making a conscious effort to take in all the information possible through your eyes - and to give yourself time to see - it takes a lot longer than noticing, looking, glancing. Of course, seeing becomes so much deeper and more profound when, you guessed it, a little (or a lot of) wonder is applied. We go from, oh, this raptor’s beak is curved, to ohhh see the angle shifts in that curve! The way the end doesn’t continue the same way as the middle or the start, but instead meets at the point where the under beak is almost 90 degrees. And ohhh, see how not every raptor has the tomial tooth, that little notch on the beak, which is most notable in falcons. And ohhh, see the tiny scratches and flakes of the keratin, the same substance as her talons, of my fingernails - what stories do those scratches tell? How would it feel to touch that beak? How would it feel to have that beak - I close my eyes and imagine, wonder, imagine some more.

And then, ohhh, how can I use my pencils or paint (or even words) to shape marks on my page to express all the wonder that I just got covered in?

Until the last 8 or 9 months I would draw a portrait, my heart filled with wonder, wanting to see more and see more and see more. And when finished, I would be more in love with the being, knowing I had taken them into my body through my eyes, let them roam around through the river-root-branch structures of my neurones and out through my hands - so that onto the page is not just the gorgeous being I got to know, but the being+me. And it is a beautiful practice, one dear to me, again, something I will do forever. But there was also something missing. As much as I imagine, I never become the being. That sounds absurd, because of course Natalie, you can want to shapeshift all you want, the likelihood of it happening physically is… not impossible (there is always hope), but perhaps remote.

Making art is a full body experience, for me, and I suspect it is (or wants to be) for more of you too. I try to engage more than just sight. If I can source how a being sounds, the way they move, I can embrace more of them into my seeing and imagining, but sometimes I want to actually hold and physically feel something too. Wildlife rarely allows me this…rude. So we get creative. We make do. We hold something natural that is right here in this space and time with us right now (I am already supposing that you will come along and do this with me) and we also put that on the page (wonder-full), and then we weave them all together. Sew them together with word-strings of thoughts and memories and quotes and feelings and wonder.

Fiercely Delicate in my sketchbook

I held a wine-red rose from my backyard, and sketched her with wonder. I used a photo of an incredible Peregrine Falcon I took, and sketched her with wonder. And I wove them together, all beauty and pointy edges and the page became Fiercely Delicate.

“I want to roll around in her velvet petals,

The sharp pinch of a thorn.

I want to plummet with fierce determination.

All talons and power and assuredness.

Both dangerously delicate and fiercely beautiful.

This work, my wild journey, is a peregrination

For which I am eternally grateful.”

The subjects of the page were not planned, they came together because I am the green-gold thread that binds them. My wonder. My seeing. My weaving.

Sometimes the held wild comes first - a flower, a leaf, a feather, seed pods, a rock - all natural, alive on their own time scales, made of what I am made of. Sometimes the wild being will come first - from my own photos, from those generously shared by willing wildlife photographers. A photo required because they are too big and beautiful and untamed and wildly alive to be held by my own hands (again, rude). I honour them at a moment in time captured digitally now, rather than on film. They may be beings I have met, or beings that I would love to meet one day and probably never will - they are in my heart all the same. Sometimes a quote comes first, a piece of writing from another wild hearted writer that sparks connection in me. It can even be a single word - nothing else needed.

And always, wonder is the core, the pivot point - the very hinge that everything else moves on.

I revisited a photo of an Andean Taruca that I took in 2009 - found when I was scrolling my files for something else entirely. On another day, at a different time, I held an oak leaf from the now enormous tree that I planted as a tiny seedling decades ago. And I wove a story between them with my green-gold thread of being a wild-hearted being, here and now. This page became Once Upon a Time…

“I’ve dreamt of sleeping under an ancient oak, of touching creatures and seasons in an old wise being, whose feet have been in soil,

Growing and breathing and supporting wild life

With no influence of human angst and anxiety.

To watch sun dapple through green and orange,

And know she’ll be there long after I am gone.

So perhaps unwisely, I planted my own red oak.
She is grand and beautiful, producing little acorns and oaklings of her own.

She teaches me about patience and resilience,

And growing strong in places you are not originally from…

I climbed mountains in Peru, and met the shy Taruca, the north Andean deer

That saw us before we saw them at above 4,000m.

That we saw them at all is such a gift.

Remembering this reminds me of how strong my body is, and that she has

Climbed mountains in South America and Nepal and Scotland.

My wild animal body is stronger than I know.”

Once Upon a Time in my sketchbook

Wonder is not just a nice feeling, it is a way of living in the world, a way to honour the ordinary as sacred, to find the extraordinary in the everyday. With wonder, you become harder to bore because everything becomes endlessly interesting. The light hitting leaves just so while you are waiting in the car for the Drs appointment you are early for. The cloud that makes you almost gasp with the incredulity that they just formed all by themselves and an artist did not paint them so perfectly right there for you to see. The way the waves sound like breath. The purple of crushed shells that glitter in the sand - rolled around for who knows how long in those breathing waves. The beings they once were, the beings they once ate.

And sometimes, being in wonder lets you just breathe when you didn’t realise you were holding your breath and bracing against things not yet arrived but determinedly imagined.

Wonder is a practice - I think without practice it visits our hearts infrequently, and the ability of our hearts to hold onto it might wither away slightly, meaning we forget how woven we are to the wild world around us. I think a lack of everyday wonder in adults may well be why we are in this modern-world-late-stage-capitalism-patriarchal-industrialised-inhumane mess we are in as a species. But wonder is not a luxury - for those of us choosing to live a creative life, it is the very ground we make from. Wonder is free and always available. Billionaires cannot take this from us - though they would no doubt try (when they need to be practicing wonder themselves, it would make them less greedy, that is for sure).

Choosing to see beauty, to document wonder, oh, my love, that’s an act of resistance. You’re creating evidence that beauty exists, and you are reminding yourself that you are connected to that, that you too are wild, that with wonder, you too are beautiful.

This has become too long.

That is the way my (wonderous) mind works. I could edit it all down to be concise and get my point across with less rambling, but who has time for that - not me. And this is me, here, now, sharing - that I can do so from my tiny spare-bedroom studio using technology that will see more of outer-space than I ever will is, well, wonderful. May the experience of writing these thoughts to you become only ever more wondrous as my own creative ecology practice expands.

There is so much wonder still to be found my love, may your heart be open to being wonder-filled today.

P.S. If you want to start your own creative ecology practice, join us in Hedgerow. It is where all the wonder-women hang out, weaving our wild and wandering creative paths together.