The magic of nature and nature writing

I’m tired. Bone tired. Yesterday, I wrote in my journal for the first time in a week. Looking at my last entry, I mentioned then how tired I felt. I scoffed at my week-ago self. ‘If you thought that was tired …’

I know I’m not alone. It’s the end of the first half-term of the year. Schoolchildren and parents of schoolchildren are feeling it. My daughter came home on Monday, made a nest for herself on the sofa with comfy cushions and a blanket, and I later found her fast asleep. That never happens.

The full moon at the weekend, oh that really messed with my sleep. The irony being it was a moon heralding huge energy shifts and kickstarting our creativity towards the future we want to build. It left me so exhausted as the week started that I could only laugh maniacally at words like ‘energy’ and ‘kickstarting’.

So it’s been a week lived on autopilot. A week where I kept half an eye on not dropping any unexpected balls thrown in my direction, but otherwise focused solely on getting through the necessary with the least hassle possible. Some days I feel like I’m not exactly sure how everything has got done. My head is still rousing itself from the murky depths of sleep by late afternoon, and yet somehow all the little must-do boxes were ticked along the way. Magic.

But the autopilot magic that’s both helped and heartened me most this week is the one that’s driven my wellies to take me for a walk every morning after I’ve dropped my daughter at school. My head, noisily grumbling to turn straight for home and warmth and coffee and the sofa, has been completely ignored by my feet, who have taken it upon themselves to take me to where I obviously needed to go.

I am incredibly lucky to live where I live. A small village on the edge of the East Yorkshire Wolds. A main street with a canal running parallel. Turn off down one of the lanes to the canal and you leave the world behind. Instantly.

Some days I walk with friends. We share and solve. We commiserate and celebrate. We connect. Putting the world to rights one step at a time. A practice borne out of the pandemic. Kitchen table coffee chats moved to the towpath or the woods. An evolution that’s happily stuck.

Some days I walk with a podcast plugged into my ears. When my head was brimming with inevitable chatter in the run-up to Christmas, I found having someone else’s calm words displacing my thoughts incredibly helpful.

On Tuesday, when I took the photo at the top of the newsletter, my feet had once again taken me on a walk my head hadn’t bargained for. I didn’t have a podcast downloaded because, y’know, I didn’t expect to be going for a walk. But I felt this real sense of being out by the canal, soaking in the beauty of the morning, because I needed to be there.

And nature came up with the goods. Oh, she spoiled me. First—no headphones plugged in, remember—I heard a curlew. I felt it thrill inside my muffled self. The ‘going through the motions’ zombified me was being penetrated by the magic. Unfurling and defrosting and beginning to shed the heavy weight of tiredness.

Halfway along the path, I came across the swans you can just make out as tiny white spots in the photo. Always a happy sight (unless they are on the edge of the path looking menacing, protecting their cygnets), especially in the glorious morning light. Neither they nor I were expecting a playmate though. An otter suddenly popped his head up by the swans, which perhaps took them by surprise. One honked and reared up, but the otter just swam on, not overly phased. He swam on the surface, head, back and tail visible, and as he reached the reeds he flipped over and stared at me. Then another swim-flip-staring combination, before disappearing off. I mean, that wasn’t an otter ‘sighting’, that was an otter show. I was absolutely in awe. Mainlining magic.

Nature had done enough. I was charmed and wowed and grateful, so grateful. I turned onto the path back towards the main road. Towards the handsome farm and my favourite oak tree carpeted in snowdrops. And then a fox. It burst out of the hedge just in front of me, ran across the path, through the fence and over the field beyond. Imagine the colour of it in that light. I have seen a fox once since I lived here, nearer home, skulking by a hedge. Not out in the open. And not so close.

I walked on, a little tearful by this stage to be completely honest. Already excited about sharing what I’d seen. Telling my daughter when I picked her up from school. And the tiredness, what tiredness? Evaporated now. Burnt off like the hazy mist above the canal. Replaced by brimming, golden magic.

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This is not at all the newsletter I intended to write this week. I wanted to share my thoughts on the wonderful book I finished earlier in the week, Miss Palfrey at the Claremont (and definitely will another time). But as I walked along the canal this morning (sighting of the day a barn owl hunting low over a field), it came to me that this was the story of my week that I needed to tell. Nature, magic, and the writing that encapsulates both.

Taking everyday delight in nature was also at the forefront of my mind because I’ve been talking a lot about Lev Parikian’s Light Rains Sometimes Fall this week. As I mentioned in my Sunday newsletter, What This Week #2, I finished my yearlong read last week. Parikian writes about daily walks over a year across his British versions of the 72 Japanese microseasons. If you’re regularly out in nature you can read about and notice all the changes he documents happening around you in real-time. That feels magical.

Now is the time to pick this one up. The Parikian year is just starting again. I know a couple of my IG friends are reading this year, and it’s made me incredibly happy to metaphorically be passing on the baton to others who enjoy daily walks.

In the early days of the first lockdown, I wrote a post on Instagram asking for recommendations of comfort reads, and managed to compile a long and nourishing list. One wonderful book that this exercise put on my radar was The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill. It’s separated into seasons and describes country life through the year as Hill experiences it from her cottage in a small Oxfordshire village. (I take extra joy from my secondhand copy bearing the inscription ‘To Mum, Love Margaret. Christmas 1985’. Excellent gifting, Margaret!)

Last year, I read and adored Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s beautiful and powerful book of stories weaving together her knowledge as a scientist and the native teachings she was raised with. Her strong understanding of the symbiotic relationship between us and the earth is underlined thoughtfully and repeatedly, showing us how we can restore what is broken by listening to and relearning what has always been there.

Finally, Katherine May’s Wintering is another read I find really nourishing. Her beautifully written essays are separated across the winter months. It’s not purely a nature book, exploring all sorts of traditions and experiences relating to the darker half of the year, but nature is indelibly woven through it.

Tell me some of your favourite nature reads. The books that allow us to seek comfort and revel in nature’s wonderful magic on the page—even on the grey, wet days when our autopilot wellies might wisely choose to head straight for home.

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