There’s something really magical about places that don’t get phone signal, and times when you’re so engaged that you don’t pick it up. I’ve been having a journey with my phone time lately, reassessing how and when I use it, and Nature, all the wild things, play a big part. My most-reached-for times are when I’m out walking; when I see the gorgeous red berries that almost physically hum with colour, when there’s a perfect single yellow Hawthorn leaf on the muddy path, when I notice a plant I’m familiar with but forgot what it’s medicinal use is, when I hear a bird singing and can’t immediately place it. My phone comes out, the camera app, Google, Merlin (the birdsong app)…and I’m interrupted. I’ve automatically, habitually or unconsciously interrupted my listening, and my communication with the landscape.
This morning as I walked to the studio to come to write, I remembered this beautiful song by Ayla Schafer, about listening to the Earth, and I sang it as I walked. The lyrics feel like an intention and a deep truth for remembering, and I invite you to listen to it (on YouTube here or find it on the platform you use).
Lessons in Listening
Last week I had the absolute privilege to attend the Lessons in Listening residency held by the Land Art Agency & Collective, amongst 15 other artists and creative practitioners, to explore aspects of what it means to listen to our Earth, to communicate with the more-than-human and to establish ourselves as receivers as well as creators. Tied up in this all are threads that have been running through my life for many years - feelings of unbelonging and separation, the secret language of other-than-human beings, community and co-regulation, wild resilience, and remembering. This is something that came up again and again in the container of the residency space - remembering these innate skills, from childhood, from past lives, from our ancestral DNA, from the dreaming of the conscious world itself.
Yes, we went quite deep! Deep into the land of Devon, deep into the green valley, into a small community willing to be open, playful and creative. We learned from the fantastic tracker Kara Moses about walking with much more open and animal-like perceptions, how to identify the passing of creatures and detect what’s happening around us that we don’t usually notice. The woodland at the top of the hill transformed in my mind in one morning, from a quiet square of trees and brambles, to the busy, multi-species community that thrives, engages and communicates with each other all day and night. We came to deeper understandings of how we impact our landscapes and ecosystems, that it’s not just a developer with a digger that can disrupt the daily rhythms of animals, but that even we, walking slowly and aware, taking care to forage sustainably and loving the trees and birds we pass, cause a lot of change in our environments. Not all of these changes will be negative, but rather my understanding emerged from this polarised belief of ‘this is good for the planet, this is bad for the planet’ (and my self-justifying ego) to a wider owl-eyed view that the way we move through the landscape, the way we speak to her with every type of communication, the way we regard the other beings around us, directly impacts on everything else in this web of life. We are not separate because we put on shoes and a coat, or because we don’t rely on only our hunting and foraging skills to feed ourselves. We are not separate when we go back inside our houses after a day of hiking or gardening; the interaction never stops.
From my new studio, in the Barracks in Berwick, my window looks out on a huge Sycamore on the corner of the churchyard. I can hear a Robin sing occassionally, having been attuned to the sound this morning as I walked over the Golf Course. Several Robins were out singing in the new season, and I was so happy that before I’d locked my front door, I’d spontaneously gone back inside to fill up a little jar with sunflower seeds and sultanas. The prompt came out of nowhere, as they often do for me, and I trusted it. A few months or years ago my Mind would have brushed it away, put it off for a ‘tomorrow’ or a ‘later’ or made me doubt whether my intentions were good enough, thoughts of ‘these sultanas might have air miles’ or ‘someone might see me’ would have stopped the ritual before I started. Things like this residency have really worked on my confidence recently in a beautiful way. So I felt in full reciprocity this morning when I gifted my offering to the little strip of woodland I walk through, and heard the joyful songs of Robin in return.
And still, I am holding with tenderness this awareness that the computer I write on, the culture I live in, the phone I use daily to connect with my family and my online communities, have repercussions to the Robins, the animals, the rivers and the landscapes of our world. This is something I will continue to ponder and work with, always adjusting my steps, like we did in the tracking workshop with Kara. Catching myself treading heavily on the planet and remembering to send my weight back to my heels, to slow my movements, to breathe deeper and to listen. And maybe this comes simultaneously in my body, physically adjusting my stance, as well as mentally remembering to choose options when buying, consuming etc that are less invasive to the other-than-human beings we share the world with.
Further exploration…
Kara’s website is here; take a look because it is both beautifully presented and inspiring, and I recommend her as an inspiring teacher with high integrity.
The full lyrics for Ayla Schafer’s song Grandmother are on her website here.
The venue for our residency - On The Hill, Devon.
More about the Land Art Agency & Collective (of which I am a member).
One of my favourite books is Mirrors in the Earth by Asia Suler, and I hold one particular chapter in my heart always, where she speaks about attending a guided walk to listen to birdsong, and becoming aware that the birds sing about us! Have a look at it on her website here, and if you use Audible I recommend the audiobook read in Asia’s own voice. You can also find Asia on Substack -
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I’d love to hear what this stirs up in you. How do you listen to the landscape you are in?
Thankyou for being here,
Jo xx
Listening is so important, but it can be too shallow to really notice what is going on. It takes effort to dig deeper, but it is so worth it.
Beautiful writing Jo. I would like to live in a way that is more connected to reality and not my phone 🙂