Earth Day: Writers on Nature

I’ve been thinking about writers, and Earth Day. I went looking for quotes, and found passages so quickly it stunned me. Is it so easy? Or are these the books I’m drawn to?

Henry David Thoreau, in Walden:

“In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute, and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest.”

Barbara Hurd, in Stirring the Mud, writing about skunk cabbage:

“– but I cannot rid myself of the image of its thick root, like a pale arm, plunged into the wet ground, the fist on the buried end tightening its clench around some iron bar of survival each time we tugged.”

Wallace Stegner in Wolf Willow, writing about the flatness of the prairie:

“Desolate? Forbidding? There was never a country that in its good moments was more beautiful. Even in drouth or dust storms or blizzard it is the reverse of monotonous, once you have submitted to it with all the senses. You don’t get out of the wind, but learn to lean and squint against it. You don’t escape sky and sun, but wear them in your eyeballs and on your back. You become acutely aware of yourself. The world is very large, the sky even larger, and you are very small. But also the world is flat, empty, nearly abstract, and in its flatness you are a challenging upright thing, as sudden as an exclamation mark, as enigmatic as a question mark.”

Maureen

Wildlife in the City

After an early morning session in the garden, skunk-proofing around our deck (at least, we hope it’s now skunk-proof!), before the next storm arrives, we watched crows tugging soft bark off a honeysuckle vine, to cushion their nest.

We seem to have more wildlife than we used to, even though we’re more solidly in the inner city, as the city has grown up around us. Perhaps it’s because the trees are large, and we set out seeds in winter, and water in the summer.

I’m looking forward to the butterflies and bunnies and neighbour cats, and, I hope, an absence of skunks.

Maureen

Writer-In-Residence

Today was my last session as WIR at a local elementary school. I spent the morning with the grade 5s and 6s, using weird bug photos for an exercise in description.

I chose the strangest bugs I could find (and a few strange non-bug images for those phobic to insects), so the kids couldn’t rely on standard descriptions, but would have to look really carefully.

I worried the entire project could be a colossal failure, either because the kids found the bugs too creepy, or the description simply too difficult. Instead, they wrote wonderful pieces, turning their creatures into characters, and sometimes, stories.

The one drawback? I’m going to be a little creeped out this spring, as bugs start crawling in my garden, and I imagine them huge, or infesting my pillow, or camouflaging the world around them.

Maureen