Image: ‘Jimmy Brown’, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-2.0)
I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field.
———Mary Oliver
In the time that I loved god and bent before him and wept for him to reach down and touch my face with a holy-spirit-shiver I had a dream. Not a vision in the midst of prayer but at night in sleep, the subconscious realm being lush and spiritually fertile. In my dream I was at a carnival in a field at night. I walked away from glowing yellow globes strung over hay and wood until they were a distant haze. The air was heavy and the grass wet. I lay on my back and watched the stars of the sky unleaf themselves from their heavenly seats and fall to earth in slow, glittering majesty.
God’s glory, I thought when I woke up. God’s glory falls to earth.
*
Like many I only really noticed nature during the first lockdown. I was living in Dublin, and the world was maybe ending. The streets were empty and the birdsong loud. The only public places indoors were supermarkets where strangers eyed each other suspiciously, trying to discern the potential whiff of death. The independent cafe-grocer around the corner from my house was allowed to stay open under government restrictions, and my twice-weekly visit for almond croissants from the sweet humans behind the counter became my only source of community.
As I lined up, shrill tweeps called my gaze to a nearby roof. Swifts—I’d seen these birds in Rome and Berlin in summertime trips. With forked tails, they weren’t much larger than my hand. They looped high in the air then dropped sharp before shooting up again, victorious.
The birds I could hear from outside the cafe had travelled over Spain and West Africa, quite possibly from as far as Liberia or Mozambique.
These were migratory birds who nested in Europe in the summer months and wintered in sub-Saharan Africa, travelling up to an astounding 27,000 kilometres in pursuit of a good meal and the right breeding conditions. Swifts can spend up to ten months in the air without touching ground, with bodies accustomed to feeding and sleeping on the wing. Swifts arrive in Dublin around April each year. The birds I could hear from outside the cafe had travelled over Spain and West Africa, quite possibly from as far as Liberia or Mozambique.
The world was maybe ending, but lo! Up high! In a chimney near my saviour-cafe, the birds were building nests!
*
Not long before Ireland, I broke up with god. I wanted to be free from patriarchy and its politics of domination.
Glory fell from above; the hierarchy between god and humans replicated in the hierarchy between humans and earth. In the first book of the bible, god gave Adam dominion over the earth, and thus the Abrahamic religions an anthropocentric cosmology. A belief system invokes a moral philosophy, and to me, this one sponsored conquering, colonising and extractivism, and the neoliberal race to destroy the planet.
Despite the immorality of this ideology, after leaving I felt an absence: of the moral philosophy, a clear ethics of relating. And of the stars, falling to earth—I missed a sense of the sacred.
*
The person I was in love with invited me to stay at a botanist’s cottage he was minding in Clarinbridge, County Galway. It was August 2021, and we’d only been allowed to travel cross-country for a couple of months. In the city I heaved my sky-blue bike into the luggage hold of a bus, and at the village near the cottage, the coach pulled away and we began the six-kilometre cycle past cows, farms, and one fairy grove with a gnarled tangle of hawthorn trees. It was a day of intermittent storms and when the floating rain became hard and slant, we rested our bikes and backs against a dry-stone wall. J produced from his pocket a cherry tomato wrapped in a napkin—he’d plucked it from the botanist’s greenhouse vine, and now offered it to me on his palm like a jewel.
When the rain cleared we pedalled toward the seal-spotted bay. Arriving at the thatched cottage, he opened the door to the barn so we could rest our bikes by rickety ladders and rusty secateurs. Zipping around us were tiny birds with forked tails.
After leaving I felt an absence: of the moral philosophy, a clear ethics of relating. And of the stars, falling to earth—I missed a sense of the sacred.
‘There are swallows nesting in the eaves,’ J said. I stepped towards him. Moons ago, when we were mere acquaintances, he’d sent me a Christmas gift: a swallow-shaped brooch made from wood, bought in the south of England on a day with its own mist-filled magic.
Swallows and swifts are unrelated, yet are often mistaken for each other, and both follow astonishing migratory patterns. They do have similar, streamlined bodies; but while swifts are sooty brown, and in flight have a crescent or boomerang shape to their wings, Barn Swallows have blue upperparts, long tail streamers, and pointed wings. The swallows in the barn had made mud-nests high above our heads. When they dashed out to the fields, their agile and swift flight meant they caught and ate insects mid-air. This feeding regime was also training for their long-distance flight, soon, in September.
In the dim barn, we watched swallows dance like tiny playful ghosts. Everything was dusted with light.
*
When I say I long for the sacred, I mean that I desire images and encounters that provoke a sense of reverence and awe, that hint at ecstasy and point to something numinous beyond the material world.
The gift and terror of apostasy is its creativity. Before, I was told what to do, how to move, what meaning to take; now I must make my own. Before, the locality of my worship was the church. And now…what? Where?
In the heart-sore days after I left my faith I replaced morning bible readings with Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, gifted to me by a dear friend. Oliver was a master of simple language and extreme close-ups: deer’s eyes, buzzing summer insects, the ocean’s curled lip. Counting the individual leaves on a tree made her ‘half crazy with the wonder of it’, and ‘full of earth-praise’. The spiritual imperatives of Oliver’s nature poems were close to sermons. Attention, she wrote in Upstream, is the beginning of devotion.
The gift and terror of apostasy is its creativity. Before, I was told what to do, how to move, what meaning to take; now I must make my own.
While reverence for nature is seen by Western literary culture as Romanticism, it’s nothing new to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, whose practices have survived strong and proud for over 60,000 years, through invasion and attempted cultural genocide.
‘In the Aboriginal worldview,’ writes Margo Neale in Songlines, ‘Everything is living–people, animals, plants, earth, water and air. We speak of Sea, Land and Sky Country.’ Spirit is Country, and engaging with the land is a way to be in touch with ancestors and creator spirits.
As a white woman living on stolen land, these practices don’t belong to me—but I hope to learn from their wisdom.
*
As a writer, I’ve written about the personal and the political, about religion, about place. Not nature, yet, not up close. But this could be a way to touch what I seek, could propose an ethics of relating, could motivate a response to the biggest structural issue of our time. I want to put myself in the way of beauty, to observe and then record. To shift the subject of my obsessive journalling, my essay writing and big projects, beyond the self and the body in the world and towards the non-human bodies in the world. I want to make pilgrimage to the earth’s holy sites, to sit with the wisdom of places, to touch awe, and to tell these stories with words.
I want to put myself in the way of beauty, to observe and then record. To shift the subject of my writing beyond the self and the body in the world and towards the non-human bodies in the world.
‘The ultimate way in which we relate to the world as something sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder,’ American author and philosopher Sam Keen writes. Wonder incurs love and its sister, devotion. ‘You need to love something first, before you can protect and defend it,’ Naomi Klein writes about showing her four-year-old son the yet-to-be-bleached section of the Barrier Reef. This is Donna Haraway’s ‘making kin’: to love is to enter into an obligatory relationship of mutual responsibility.
Likewise, First Nations ways of relating to nature subvert Anthropocentric concepts of domination, says Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and author of Braiding Sweetgrass. ‘Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.’
The sacred bond invokes what late Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called ‘interbeing’; the knowledge that we co-exist, interdependently. He wrote: ‘Everything relies on everything else in the cosmos in order to manifest—whether a star, a cloud, a flower, a tree, or you and me.’
Or, I suppose, a bird.
*
This year I returned to Kaurna Country, the land where I was born. Gifted with a spare hour, I sat to watch evening sun sparkle on Karrawirraparri, the River Torrens.
I recognised their acrobatic movement first, their rapid turns, their quick flutterings: swallows? Here?! Feasting at the water’s edge! Hundreds of them, like a whirlwind, dipping down close to the river then rising high over the footbridge, not a murmuration but a collective, a loosely-connected body, always shifting, never still.
These were Welcome Swallows—named thus as they do not stray far out to sea, so when sailors sighted them they knew land was close—distinguishable by a black breast band, and white underparts. I’d never seen swallows in Adelaide, I thought.
But these birds were native—I simply hadn’t paid attention.
I want to pay attention, count leaves, and allow wonder to radicalise my heart. To enter into the sacred bond. This is the process of moving from a philosophy of domination to one of interbeing. Nature writing, then, is my devotional practice. Glory doesn’t fall to earth; glory is the earth. May words be my song of praise.
