Love letter?
This writing is from the pollen summer archives. I decided to wait a while before sharing it and this morning feels like a good moment. This piece was mostly written sitting on a Megabus from Cardiff to Sheffield in May 2023.
This morning I woke up to a message from my Mum, telling me that she’d been kept up last night speaking to the police. The text explained that there had been a fire in the nearby woods. My body tightened unpleasantly. Still, I don’t know much about the fire. I wonder about who wrote the news articles I have been repeat-reading today and whether they know what the burning place means.
I know that my mum, Jason (a rabbit) and Amber (a dog), were unharmed. They are my family and are, of course, a first thought. I know mum was physically unaffected but I wonder how she slept and how much we’ll speak about it later today. I wonder whether she was unsettled more by the idea of the burning or discussions she had with Police outside the house. If the damage done by this fire is ‘minimal’, I wonder whether people will talk about it at all. If we talk about it in person, I wonder how I’ll express myself, whether I’ll just reply or if I will really respond.
To help, I thought I would try to express not how I feel about the fire, because I know hardly anything right now, but how I feel linked to the woods:
Even in moments of strain, the place gives me peace. That’s a word that I do like for talking about this. Peace. Speaking of words, I want to pause on ‘family’. I used it a moment ago, listing those members who were at home as the trees apparently burned (Jason, Mum and Amber).
[note: I can’t work out from the news updates if the flames are fully out. It's 20:26 now, I’m still on the coach, I’ll add a note when I’m home]
Family is more than blood. Hence my inclusion of a springer spaniel and a large rescued rabbit in the list above. Further, I don’t share any relatives with the people who I grew up in the woods with, but they are my family. I feel properly lucky to have friends who share an adoration for the place and now share so many memories of existing there together.
Since moving away from the area for university, I’ve come to understand the familial feeling loves I have for the life flowing there. With each year that slips by, I realise how little I understand of the nature that defined my teens. There are so many plants there that I can’t name, rhythms and processes that go on unbeknownst to me. Considering this, I considered that I am perhaps less related to the wild world than I’d like to think.
I cannot walk through the woods and recall the scientific names of every shrub, shoot, tree or creature. Nor can I say much about the decade-by decade history of the place. So, on what level can I say I have any ‘connection’ with the woods if I know I lack certain sorts of understanding?
Quietly, I sit for a while. Challenging my feelings of relatedness with the woods. After a lot of searching for words to explain it, I realise I can give some substance to that feeling by asking myself what makes me connected to my human family. This stems from many places and the deepest of them is by no means factual comprehension of their inner or outer lives.
I don’t necessarily understand my mum, a person who I am undeniably related to. Further, my late grandad experienced many things that I never will and many I will never even know of. I’ve little doubt though that he is a real and unshifting part of me.
I know a fraction about my grandad’s life. I know what made him smile in his latter years and I know that my perception of him as peaceful, graceful and immensely patient wasn’t just because I was his granddaughter. We all felt that. I know that ‘how’s your garden?’ could generally elicit a longer response than ‘how are you?’. Considering all my Grandad would not speak about, all the parts of him I could not begin to describe, I feel more comfortable saying that I feel something of a familial connectedness to life in and around the woods.
As the sun starts slipping into the moorland, I know how much further I can go without missing the last of that day's light to get back to my house with. I know the clearings in which I feel the most welcomed by the woods and furthest from personal concerns. So many of the plants, I know by their shapes and textures and the way that they sound and move when the winds grow stronger.
I feel at home there, much like moments with my Grandad. I feel at home in the most certain, warming, way that I ever have in a place. That might be why the idea of a fire burning makes me think ‘I should be there’ much like I would want to go to someone I loved if they became unwell. I can’t speak to the forest through the phone. Perhaps that’s why the short reports today have felt so useless. It’s not that they aren’t informative, I think I’ve found them such an irritation because there’s nothing in any of them that expresses something like respect or adoration.
Whilst I have spoken here about the limitations of the language I grew up with, I must also note moments of learning which helped to fill some of the gaps. In "Braiding Sweetgrass" Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the term "species loneliness" to describe the feeling of isolation that humans have from what she calls the “more than human world”. Throughout history, members of the human species have separated themselves from the understanding that we are a part of a community of coexistent species.
When I am in the woods without any other people, be they friends or strangers passing by, I do not feel alone. There, I am accompanied by the most beautiful lives and I realise that the time I spent here growing up shaped me more than many conventional sources of influence like school or cinema or books at that stage. I can’t speak to the woods down the phone when I am not close in body. Those woods do not speak like we do and perhaps our loneliness as a species has come from the fact that we wait to be spoken back to when the life in question communicates in far more special ways than our imaginations tend to allow.
The woods do not exist for humans to pass judgement upon their beauty. They are not desolate until the moment we enter them nor abandoned on our departure. When there, we are with all of that non-human life. The woods taught me about the opposite of loneliness and I am now accepting the fact that I will never be able to, nor need I, force how that feels or what that means into words alone.
Note: combing through reports online, I learn that the blaze was attended by tens of fire engines and mostly damaged the moorland close to the woods itself. The wildfire is neither the first or last of its kind in the region and I hate to think how long it will take for all of the bonds of the ecosystem to be rebuilt. The fire began on Tuesday evening and could apparently be seen right across the city. A dramatic vision to say the least. The fire was mostly extinguished by the 1st June.
Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions.
BBC (2023). Majority of fire near Sheffield plantation extinguished. BBC News. [online] 1 Jun. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-65774833 [Accessed 4 Sep. 2023].
