Listen Deeply To Awaken Your Wild Scribe

Photo©JozefPolc/123rf

The long months of Covid were a time when the human world grew still. With fewer cars on the roads and planes in the sky, with less activity and motion, busyness and noise receded, and nature came to the fore. You could hear the rustle of leaves and the quail in the underbrush. You could glimpse coyote pups playing in the meadows or scent the fragrance of rain in the cleaner air. Even in the city, the dawn chorus sang loud and true. The world we had effectively kept at bay through our constant activity found us again.

While lockdown prevented many of us from seeing our families, hanging out with our friends, even attending the hospital beds or funerals of loved ones, there was another energy and relationship crying out for attention. Whether carried on the wind or the swoosh of raven wings, we heard nature whispering to us: I am here, all around you. I have always been here. Are you ready to find out what we mean to each other?

Keeping a nature journal is an age-old tradition particularly popular with the Victorians, who catalogued plants and animals with scientific precision. They added enormously to our knowledge of the natural world, and we owe them a debt of gratitude. But we live in different times.

We seek fresh language that forgoes mere observation of the natural world to embed us more deeply within it. I call this “wild language,” and it is about the magic that happens when the voice of nature commingles with our own. You discover what it is to communicate from a rooted place, filled with wonder for the living, breathing world in which you are enfolded.

Nature is bursting with creativity at every moment. You contain a unique expression of that creativity. The world wants and needs it to flourish. Journaling in nature, you will journey into and discover your own inner wild.

What Does Wild Language Mean To You?

For me, wild language carries the breath of subversiveness. Like a tendril of ivy that works its way into the bricks of an old building, dismantling structures wildly and beautifully, it erodes as well as erupts. It acts like the wild iris pushing through the cracks of a paving stone, knowing that it can do the impossible: bring new life into a world that is increasingly devoid of grace.

Wild language vaults from an image of a waterfall during snowmelt to the loss of a loved one and senses the resemblance. It shifts from a description of a tree to our desire for roots, wind becoming spirit. In this way it weaves the human and nonhuman worlds together. It invites widening circles of association, juxtaposing one thing against another until a resonance is found. Above all, it exposes the numerous and numinous ways in which all of life is deeply intertwined.

Covid, for all its horrors, did for many what we could not do for ourselves: It disrupted the almost unbearably fast pace of our lives. And while our work and social connections shifted onto Zoom, we streamed more shows than we can recall, and many of us felt shut in, claustrophobic, lonely, bored, or simply stressed, the pandemic also rooted us in place. For nearly all of 2020, lockdowns meant we couldn’t go anywhere. We lived like very small children, our world constrained to our backyards or our neighborhoods.

For my husband and me, our world was Pacheco Valle (no “y”), a bucolic spot in Marin County, California, where prior to the arrival of Europeans, a Coast Miwok village once thrived. We’ve lived here for decades, and until Covid struck, we felt we knew it inside out — this high-sloped box canyon studded with madrone, oaks, and bay laurel — at the mouth, the meadow with its ancient Miwok midden, and heading the creek, a series of seasonal waterfalls that appear after heavy rains. We knew it like the backs of our hands, or certainly like an old friend. But was there more to learn?

During the first months of Covid lockdown, rules prohibited us from driving anywhere to hike. Hundreds of local, state, and national parks were closed to vehicle access. We could only walk out our back door and savor what was there. The horizontal life, of moving here, there, and everywhere became the vertical life — a life of depth and detail and deep attention. Since we couldn’t explore farther afield, we had to find freshness in our own backyard. The challenge was to look deeper, longer, to appreciate more.

This was the perfect opportunity to employ beginner’s mind, or what some call Zen mind — to let go of preconceived notions of what our neighborhood was and simply become open and curious, as if discovering it for the very first time. That energy of discovery — of truly seeing — was an antidote to the depression and ennui of being “stuck” and isolated. It was, in fact, a portal to freedom and joy.

The daily practice of paying attention to the natural world, wherever we find ourselves, is always going to matter. This gentle attention to the world is what the poet Mary Oliver refers to when she says that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” To love and become devoted to a place is to cherish even the smallest or subtlest aspect of it. It is to treat your front door as a threshold into a world that only awaits your noticing before it offers up its magic.

Invitation To Start

Settle in a comfy spot outside and spend a few minutes breathing gently, inviting your body to relax and become receptive to the place you are in. As you breathe out, release any nagging thoughts or distractions and come present to the moment. When you feel ready, begin:

At this moment:

I see . . .
I touch . . .
I smell . . .
I hear . . .
I sense . . .
I feel . . .

Name what you are experiencing and noticing. After you’ve written your responses, give yourself some feedback. What do you observe? Did anything you wrote particularly surprise or delight you? This is a useful daily warm-up practice; it only takes a few minutes, but it opens you up to receive the wisdom and wonder of the world about you.

The Wild Scribe: Words That Emerge When Human and Earth Voices Entwine by Mary Reynolds Thompson (Inner Traditions, 2026) www.innertraditions.com. Excerpted with permission of the publisher.

Mary Reynolds Thompson is a certified facilitator of poetry and journal therapy, a life coach, and an international instructor in eco-writing and spiritual ecology. She is the author of several books on nature and transformation, including The Way of the Wild Soul Woman. www.maryreynoldsthompson.com

Find holistic Writing Resources in the Spirit of Change online Alternative Health Directory.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Altered State Writing For Past Life Exploration
Going On/Transformed By Writing