Recommitment
Last year, I turned my back on nature. I still grew plants; I recorded each day’s weather; I went outside in my wheelchair or on my scooter when I could; I even wrote pretty words about the things I saw, but mostly I avoided doing all of that, or I did it at a safe, closed distance, treating nature as if it were something inanimate, separate. I was once in a failing marriage. It felt like that.
I had good reasons. It was an act of self-protection. My eyesight is faltering, inexplicably, in a way that has no quick fix - another odd problem with my brain, not my eyes, they think. ‘Outside’ is now a painful, moving blur of light, shape, colour as I wait for appointments to investigate my visual acuity and processing. The rest of my body isn’t faring much better and this is a frightening thing in a pandemic. Outside hasn’t been safe, then, but it runs deeper than that.
I have long known that the two most important relationships I will ever have are the one I have with my own body and the one I have with the natural world it is joined to. These are the only two relationships that will last me the whole of my life and the only two that are non-optional. The two have, over the years, become more and more intertwined in my mind. I look down at my own body, at its disability and its decline, and I look outside and see nature, too, suffering, changing, in unpredictable, horrifying ways. Is it any surprise then that I turned away from the outside for a while? I think, maybe, I felt like there wasn’t room inside me for both our pains. It was easier to put up walls and focus on my own.
And there I might have ended this, but I have never wanted my story to be one of giving up or turning away. Last week, I decided to start writing a different story, one of hope and redemption, and it begins here.
“Let’s try again for a walk,” I said, and my boyfriend, ever patient, set up my chair and got me into it. It was a brave decision as I had fainted in it the day before, spasms shaking me into little cries of distress before we’d got even five minutes from home, but I wanted to try again. I resolved that I would just give myself to the outside as I was and see what happened.
We went the wrong way down our usual footpath - the overgrown old railway line that weaves a wide, wild stripe through my urban industrial estate. I looked at the ground because distance is harder to focus on, the tarmac crisscrossed with fallen branches and twigs turned black. They looked like runes, like language, divination tools thrown by the weather. The night before, I had fallen asleep with the thought, “what if I believed it all to be alive again, me and nature both? What if I had the courage again to see that it is animate, to believe it is speaking?” and I think those words turned into some kind of spell because, yes, now there were messages all around me. Formed. Deliberate.
Eyes up now, braver, accepting the swim and the swirl and squinting through it. The bare branching twigs: I could see now that each one had been pushed out very deliberately, too. Each tiny line and fork marked a decision by the tree, "here" and "this way" and I saw how it had built itself choice by choice. There was nothing accidental about any of it. I soon started seeing language everywhere. The graffiti under the bridges, the rubbish thrown over the fences: each left their own message alongside the fractals of the trees, and I saw that those things were an important part of the wider picture, the wider message. I could see how everything around me had grown itself, with effort, and how easily that effort could be altered, influenced, spoiled, and how easily it could be ignored.
I spotted familiar things, in timid flashes, and remembered their names. The tangle of bare red growth in the hedgerow would be hazel, I knew. The tree carrying both little black cones and catkins that F fetched for me to see more closely: that would alder. I had learned all these things once, back when I felt less encumbered by environmental anxiety, when I was more safely blinkered by a honeymoon enamourment. I want to type that I wept as I saw these things I loved, as I remembered their names, but I didn't. Moments in nature are rarely that dramatic and I was still too wary, chatting nonchalantly with F on other topics as I secretly watched it all and thought about what had changed in me, and about what it meant.
When had I realised that I'd closed myself off to all this? And how had it called me back? Had it been leaving messages on the path all this time, my wheels grinding them into the damp pavements? I wanted to call “STOP!” and bend down to gather up all the twigs on the path, looking up seriously at the sky and the trees. I wanted to show I understood, that I was listening again, finally, at last. I said it in my head, instead, as we rolled along: "I'm listening." Was that enough? It was a start, at least.
And what was it saying to me? I have learnt better now than to leap into projection, but there was something in those small containers of focused sight and discovery that did feel personal, like an invitation, or permission, maybe. It was something intimate and vulnerable, perhaps nature asking to be accepted for what it is, here and now, and it asking me to accept and embrace the ways I have to see it. We were both stripped bare that day, me and the trees, and I think maybe that was necessary for to me face up to the truth: that nature and I are broken, both, and we are going to have to love each other through that, in all the ugly ways that often means.
It came to me on that slow walk, pushed faithfully by the man I love, that to love nature, truly - to have a real relationship with it - is to see that it carries all the hard realities that lie underneath every other real, lasting relationship. It means acknowledging again that nature isn’t here to affirm me all the time or even to heal me, that it exists outside of me and isn’t simply a mirror for me to project every hope and need onto. It can’t always be a glamour to endlessly enchant me and it won’t always make me feel good. It has its own voice and story and sometimes it might tell me things I don't always want to hear. It holds much that can help heal me, yes, and it needs healing just as much, and both of those things can and must exist together equally.
How many times have I written it? Preached it? The importance of balancing joy with sorrow and sorrow with joy? Being brave enough to feel both? Brave enough to accept that I will feel grief if I also open up to joy, and wise enough to keep letting joy in when grief dominates?
I have learnt to do that with my body. I have learnt to laugh when I feel like I'm dying. Can't I do the same with nature? What am I afraid will happen? I know now that joy and sorrow held in balance can't destroy you: that is its magic. I have learned to trust and accept the mornings when I feel like I could lie down in happy rapture on the ground and know the whisper of the roots, and the afternoons when I must lie, shaking with pain and exhaustion, recovering. I have learned to hold both. I believe I can do the same with the world. I believe I am big enough, brave enough, to feel all of it.
We start again then, nature and I.
“Let’s go outside again,” I say.
I am pretty sure it's going to break my heart, all this, but I’m ready for that. Free-fall; joyous and terrifying. Real love.
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