One morning, only days before leaving my childhood home for the last time, they cut the cherry tree down. We watched from a bedroom window as the tree was circled by men in red hard hats who began to strip its crocodile-skin bark, exposing lighter wood-flesh within. Keening creakily, branches peeled ground-wards.
The cherry tree had stood a few yards beyond my bedroom window throughout my life. Every year its pale blossom heralded spring, barely held in its loosely clasped hand. Parked cars were covered in a snowfall of petals. Over the years the cherry’s roots clenched and knotted, splitting the pavement and tousling the bricks of the neighbour’s garden wall. It was this rumpling that eventually secured its demise.
I brooded over the cherry tree all day. I could take the coincidence of felling and leaving as an omen of change; after all, cherry blossoms have long been connected to transience and melancholy beauty. But the tree was precious outside of symbolism. Comforting to think it would guard my first home, anchored against waves of suburban humanity, possessing its own system of time and being. With the bite of an electric chainsaw, the tree had gone from physical to imaginative existence. What a gift. What a loss.
Wanting to retrieve a piece of wood from the open truck as a keepsake, I felt too foolish to ask amidst the calmly efficient destruction. But when I got back home that evening my mum said she had something for me. In the corner of the living room was a small wedge-shaped log.
Natural longings will be a fortnightly newsletter exploring humans’ complex relationships to the non-human and natural world. It will feature creative non-fiction, reflections on books, visual arts, exhibitions, and environmentalism, culture recommendations, and anything else that takes my fancy. A new issue will be published every second Tuesday.
The word ‘longing’ encompasses both optimism and despair. For someone my age (b. 1995), nature is inextricable from the climate crisis, the experience and anticipation of loss. As a child being driven around Cumbria in high summer, squabbling with siblings in the backseat, I remember the windscreen spattered with bodies of bugs and flies. Now it remains spotless. I’m jealous of the reminiscences of elders and my parents (b. 1950s) about their closeness to wildlife and nature in their youth. What a cacophonous Eden they evoke. It also makes me angry, for the post-world war two period accelerated the ecological destruction that continues up to this day, the consequences of which cannot be reversed, only mitigated.
The boundaries of a person are not set in their skin. Humans are continually re-dimensioned, contracting or expanding in relation to the vagaries of existence, their experiences, values, and fallibilities. Our being encompasses landscapes of memory, relationships, histories, travel, migration, displacement, animals, and plants. The culture we consume, the pollution we inhale. Encounters with nature are not always mystical; they should be mundane. Climate change, imperialism, racism, class systems, and socio-economic inequalities have done much over centuries to define such relationships as rare, precarious, or privileged.
And yet, still, the natural world is inextricably connected with the way we inhabit our lives. We can take time to notice it all around us, inspiring us to keep seeking sustainable living, a proper politics of care for the environment and each other. Certain experiences might touch transcendence but that is no moral obligation. In her essay ‘Lissen Everything Back’, Kathleen Jamie considers the adoption of an attentive gaze:
Why not privately mark a moment of attention as a moment of resistance? … We are not doing what the forces of destruction and inattention want us to do … It’s the simplest act of resistance and renewal.
Jamie emphasises the playfulness of this way of being, making sure to differentiate it from self-seriousness: ‘Joy and spontaneity are part of the supple weave of resistance.’
Where my parents live now in west Cumbria, home to my late maternal grandparents, we hear owls at night, spot a hare on the bank, taste the scent of wild garlic in early spring. The everyday soundscape is created by a river’s rush and the rasp of sheep grazing in the field. On higher ground we observe the Isle of Man out to sea, its outline sharpening and smudging depending on the atmospheric pressure, and the Sellafield nuclear power station, with towers like an ancient city site. In my flat in southeast London, I often wake up to the squawk of parakeets outside and the trundle of the nearby trains. At night, scraps of moonlight and streetlight are caught in the cool gleam of a fox’s sideways look.
Each day I try to notice the changing colour and shape of the clouds, their many moods and mannerisms. This can be done on a long walk, on the train home from work, while lying in bed by my window. I’ll take any opportunity to pet a friendly neighbourhood cat. My mother taught me always to blow a kiss to a magpie. I like to imagine whales in their oceans or snow leopards on their mountains; perhaps I may never see them with my own eyes, but it is enough to know they are there. To paraphrase Zadie Smith, I don’t want to sleepwalk through the world, although I do believe in the potency of dreaming.
I’m looking forward to sharing thoughts on these themes in each issue, and hope you enjoy reading them. Writing about nature is an amorphous thing. Like a plant, it lives both packed underground and outspread in open air. Often you wend your way into writing more than you intended, crossing borders into unexplored terrain. Let’s salvage the logs. Stop cutting down the cherry trees, or, when we must, make sure to plant more of them, not a tree for a tree but a forest for a tree. For all those who live in the forests, be they real, imagined, remembered, or longed for.
Channeling the Log Lady from Twin Peaks.
I urge you to read Kathleen Jamie’s essay ‘Lissen Everything Back’ in its entirety, from Little Toller’s blog The Clearing.
If you’d like more of a taste of my own writing, here are a couple of extracts and links:
Sealskin for DearDamsels, on the experience of living with eczema:
Every body is multi-formed, embroidered with scars, marks, textures, lines that merge and morph into our human being. I try to appreciate the constant reminder of humanity’s creatureliness. There is a constant loss and creation within our bodies. We have fish scales, lizard tails and snake skins.
Selkie Song: Female creativity in Margaret Tait’s Blue Black Permanent for Girls on Tops’ blog Read Me, celebrating women in film.
Blue Black Permanent was Tait’s only feature-length film, and the first to be directed by a Scottish woman. She made over 30 films during her career in Edinburgh and Orkney, mostly self-funded. This work encapsulates the key themes of her filmography: the relationship between people and their landscapes, her love for Scotland, and the poetry of everyday things. Tait also documented women’s lives with quiet pride, as seen in Portrait of Ga, which builds up an affectionate picture of her elderly mother through observing her gestures, from the way she deftly unwraps a boiled sweet to how she rolls her cigarette.
Many of Margaret Tait’s works are available through the Moving Image archive for the National Library of Scotland (NLS) online. Her ‘film-poems’ are beautiful and very calming; I watched them often during the first lockdown.
You can find natural longings on twitter (@naturallongings) and I also have my own Instagram account (@glenwoman). Follow on those platforms for more celebrations of the natural world in imagination and materiality, as well as tidbits about the next newsletter, coming 15th December. Until then, take care!
The cherry log
Absolutely loved this! It really made me consider the green spaces that I frequent and how they provide a space for me to pause, reflect and reconnect. Also, of course, the log lady from Twin Peaks is an absolute icon and someone to model your day after. Cant wait to read the next one!
Reading this beautiful piece helped me to take a few minutes out of my day for myself and really got me thinking. Living in a city with pretty poor access to green spaces I've come to see trips to the surrounding countryside as a 'treat', and more often than not these ventures are met with huge numbers of others seeking the same breath of fresh air at the close of a working week. It had never really dawned on me how much these very actions are a product of capitalism, though of course they are!
After recently reading Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier I've noticed myself longing to know a hillside in the same way that Mary Yellan learns, to know where every path leads, and to recognise the trees, plants and rocks that decorate the land. I think this knowledge for me represented a kind of idealised control over my time. Anyway, I love the idea of resistance through noticing and will almost certainly remember the ideas presented in this piece when I'm gazing at my own kind of cherry trees. Thankyou!