Category Archives: Wilderness

Ecology, technology and learning: education for sustainability

This blog has always felt like a strange tangled mess. I’m only starting to value how important it is to me to have all of this cringe-worthy writing collected in one place. I started writing here because I was on a precipice — an unknown learning experience.

Here I am again, 19 years later.

I’m finally about to pursue a longing that has haunted me for at least 16 years. It’s something I have said many times in writing that I wouldn’t pursue. However, it kept pursuing me. The idea of it.

I start my PhD (Society and Culture) in 2024.

My plan is to use this space to reflect on my research over the forthcoming years. At the broadest level of explanation, my research spans three great curiosities of mine, particularly in those magical spaces when they converge: ecology, technology and learning.

All I know is that everything is interconnected. I know that somehow, there are strands related to the gentle way of learning design that has been mulling; the unobservable universe of learning; and even, way back, there is quiet design. There are also connections to where I have left big gaps of silence in between posts here, where there are no words to hyperlink to.

More to come as I start this new adventure in 2024…

The Fear – The Dark is Rising

“It was then, without warning, that the fear came.”

Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

Oh! The beautiful opening chapter of The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, which I’m reading in a massive worldwide book group on Twitter,  has brought back all my inexplicable moments of nature fear – or just The Fear, as Will experiences.

Have you felt, The Fear?

Those times when you find yourself alone in nature and for some reason, your sense of awe and comfort switches immediately to a feeling of pagan animism about everything around you. As if you are so very trembling and small in the scheme of tall tree things.

Being alone in nature is something I am quite comfortable with, and actually sometimes really crave now that it’s virtually impossible to have. I did have some pre-dawn walks for a hour or so earlier this year when we were camping in the remote Flinders Rangers. My husband were still asleep in the tent and I went out by torchlight. There was a slightly similar experience to the one I’m about to tell. Perhaps because I had my dog with me, or because it was morning, or even because I grew up around this wild land, I felt awe, but not fear at the strange undersound I heard as I got closer to the hills.

 

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Watching the sunrise in the Flinders Ranges

 

There have been a handful of times when THE FEAR has involved not a wild place, but a known place, like it was for Will.

THe last time I felt it, I was feeling comfortable. It was July 2015 and I was outside our rural holiday cottage in Cornwall. A house full of my children and nephews, in-laws and husband asleep. I was outside at midnight with my astrobinoculars and camera taking night sky pictures.

 

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Cosy light from the room when my young children were asleep

 

Maybe it was because I was marvelling at the novelty of seeing the emerging waxing moon traversing the sky backwards and in reverse around in the northern hemisphere after so long in the southern hemisphere (link explains this if you’ve never realised that there are differences). So, things had been changing in a different way.

 

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Waxing crescent moon in Cornish summer skies

 

 

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Watching the moon travelling ‘backwards’ in the northern hemisphere – Cornwall

 

Anyway, for some reason, being out there in the dark, even after a long night of Summer light, turned, er,  well, frightening.

It began with a sound from the fields. The gardens were surrounded by tall hedges, puncutated by one small archway cut out with a gate, with fields beyond. The sound had a hint of human cough or maybe throat clearing, but un-animal enough to confuse my senses. It wasn’t a growl, and I’d lived rurally so it wasn’t a cow or sheep or fox sound. Or bird sound. It was just, unidentifiable. Odd. Weird.

Instinctively, in that moment, when my brain could have rationalised, it didn’t. The day spent exploring ancient nooks and crannies of Cornwall took over, and I, the I that might laugh at my reaction,  was gone. THE FEAR had me.

That sound, had set my heart thumping in a rhythm for running. And I wanted to run. I just left my bincolulars and camera on the tripod and ran across the lawns to the sliding door and clambered in to the dark of house and the comfort of the lounge. After a few moments, I realised I had left all my gear outside.  As I tried to slide open the door go back to get it, I tried to let the ridiculousness take over. It wouldn’t.

I forced myself, swearing in whispers,  to go back out and fumble to detach the heavy binoculars, fold down the tripod and pack away my camera in what seemed like an eternity spent in the now thick ominous darkness. It was somehow, one of the most bravest acts against myself.

And that, is The Fear. I’ve felt it only a handful of times.

If you have ever felt it, you will understand.

Just as Susan Cooper must have understood, when she wrote it for Will to experience.

Have you known, The Fear? I would love to hear your tales.

 

Learning to talk with small gods

Because although I still have a lot to learn, my valley is claiming me through small gods.

whispering voices of sheoak

the different rhythm of the feet of my chickens that tells me they are excited to follow me and makes me laugh out loud

the sound of a blue-banded bee long before it can be seen that tells me if it’s flying with or without pollen-covered legs

the bank of clouds hugging the hillside at dawn

the swing of wind to cool southerlies

the beckoning of the wild island in winter

the first time I notice that the sun signals autumn, something about the afternoon shadows is different

the keening cry of the black cockatoo heralding a rain storm

the burst of green through soil

the unfurling leaf

hearing the blue-tongue lizard trying to walk silently on dried up leaves which betray his presence

the resurrection of moss after the hot summer

the gaze of the magpie that makes me feel small

the longer afternoon light bent through the plum tree

the warm night-scent of native franjipani under a clear night sky

coming home to the valley I live in and seeing it tucked in against the hills, cuddled by trees and feeling its welcome

the trembling of wet leaves in the sun after a rain storm

 a flash of red in the fading strawberry leaves, the slow secret ripe strawberry

a face full of spider web and the apology to the spider

magpies in conference, they meet in a circle,  talk and hush as you draw near


I’d love for others to write about their small gods as a way to begin, but first, listen to Small Gods by Martin Shaw  or find out more at drmartinshaw.com  because writing these down may be a mistake of mine, but I’m still learning how.

 

 

Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons

Sometimes a piece of writing rustles and stirs the dry leaves that fall too quickly on the pathways of our bustling lives.  Like an inexplicable breath of floral-perfumed warm wind, in the harsh bite of a winters day. Rewilding you from inside.

This is how it felt reading Sometimes a Wild God by Tom Hirons. You can read Tom’s poem here on his blog, but before you click…

…know that you will remember when and where you were when you first read this. You will learn that words conjured together even when read in the cold clinical light of a computer screen, can take you to a campfire in the wilderness where you huddle alone, reading words with only the flickering firelight and lamplight of the moon, with only the winking trail of the Milky Way as company.

Rewilding from the inside…. The blood red flower is the beautiful scarlet bloom of Australian native ‘Running Postman’ Kennedia prostrata.

Receiving the book was even more startling. It’s an odd thing to open a modern envelope, delivered by planes and wheels and inside find something that almost makes you think you can hear an ancient chant or drumbeat. A beautiful, tactile and totem-like book that feels like it was written and posted from deep in the wild forest.  Together on the page with the incredible art of Rima Staines which is itself another soul-trembling delight,  in this beautiful small book there is that alchemy of word and art in an ancient dance on paper.

The book is small and beautiful. I feels like something to be carried in a favourite coat pocket, a touchstone for breathing in the woods, feeling the old paths, when the yearning strikes. A thing to read to someone, or share because the length and format is perfect for doing just that.

I purchased a second copy, to be released into the wild. When the time and place is right to leave it there, a stranger will find it, just there on a bench or table or shelf. The note inside will ask for it not to be kept, and for it to be read, purchased if the reader has the means to, and most importantly, for the wild copy to be passed on to awaken someone else.