Thanks for reading my occasional newsletter (Substack calls it a newsletter, but there is no news here. Perhaps it’s a meditation? Reflection? Thought-letter?). This month, author and essayist Barry Lopez shares writing and living advice. There’s also some recommended reading, plus a poem and a photo. My thought-letters generally relate to inner and outer landscapes, books and writing, politics and development (albeit slant). Do comment or get in touch - I’d love to hear your thoughts.
In the first essay of his collection About This Life, travel writer Barry Lopez describes a teacher in the English Department of the University of Oregon who pointed him toward anthropological research that showed other cultures did not separate humanity and nature. “They recognised the immanence of the divine in both” he writes. This research, and the company of “scholars and other insightful people from outside white, orthodox, middle-class culture” led him to seek out others from outside his cultural bubble, finding himself drawn to people “who had not dissociated themselves from the passionate and spiritual realms of life, people for whom mystery was not a challenge to intelligence but a bosom.”
20 years ago I craved this too, though I couldn’t articulate it, didn’t even consciously realise it. Instead, I lived it. I became travel editor of the student newspaper, and volunteered abroad, itching to escape the medical degree I was studying for. I eventually did, and walked off the beaten path (more on that in a future letter).
Lopez, who died in 2020, goes on to explore the roots of his early writing, including his feeling that “these other voices were being put asunder by ‘progress’ in its manifold forms.” He wanted to report what others were thinking, and share their stories so that “suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives” and glimpse “how to live without despair.”
How to live without despair is a question I get asked in all sorts of ways as a locally elected politician - do I think the Council is making any difference? What’s the point of making individual lifestyle changes? Why bother doing the right thing when our leaders are so corrupt? Like Lopez, I increasingly find myself writing in order to process and share encounters with other voices, places and lives, in a bid to reimagine patterns and find new possibilities.
Lopez came to see that “a writer’s voice had to grow out of his own knowledge and desire” and that when voices are silenced, there is “a depth of cruelty inflicted on all of us.” He shares writing advice with a 15-year old girl who wants to be a writer, paraphrased here by me:
1. Read what interests you.
2. Don’t just pass on information - discover your own beliefs, speak to us from those beliefs, discover what you mean.
3. Get away from the familiar (perhaps by learning to speak another language, or living with people other than your own), then when you return, you’ll be better able to understand why you love the familiar.
He says “it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.” As the essay closes, Lopez describes what he wants to accomplish as a writer - to “contribute to a literature of hope.” The idea of “contributing to a literature of hope” landed like a stone in the river of me: decisive, announcing itself, rippling outward and recasting my work in a new light. I’d like to contribute to that literature, to hope, too.
Lopez describes elsewhere how “landscape is integral to the development of personality and social order.” I thought about this recently during a trip to Amsterdam. Travelling by train from the UK, I watched the fields change from the small, wonky, red-soiled fields of Devon, to the long and ordered fields of The Netherlands. It seemed to me that the fields almost echo the people who live in each place – or vice versa – short, ruddy and weathered in Devon, tall and elegant in The Netherlands; landscape soaking into people and local rhythms. I thought about other places too. In Zambia, where I lived for a while and have travelled many times with my work in international development, the landscape is big and open. Fields and savannah merge into each other. The landscape merged with me, too, expanding me and making me see bigger than the smallness of landscape I’d known to that point. And, as Lopez suggested it would in his advice, it made me recognise that I love Devon too with its ancient wonky fields, and familiar hedgerows, and its slow, deliberate accents and lives.
My own shape is formed partly by the ancient hilly fields of Devon, and partly by the open savannahs of Zambia. Their red soils and the life they sustain join together in my shape, asking me to watch, to look for patterns, to try to set them down and maybe, in doing so, glimpse beyond despair and contribute to a literature and a life of hope.
Zambia and Devon show me what Barry Lopez found too — that humanity and nature need not be separated, that ‘progress’ is not always progress for everyone, and that I’m drawn to people who have not dissociated themselves from the passionate, mysterious, spiritual realms of life. Now, I’ve pulled back from day-to-day involvement in international development, and will not be standing for local election again in 2023. Instead, I am taking what I’ve learned and imagining other kinds of progress, other kinds of politics. These worlds which promise progress have shown me that progress does not always mean better, that there are other ways to create change, and that change might get closer to wisdom if we let spirit and matter relate a little more.
I worry that being less ‘hands on’ in these worlds will give me less authority to talk about them - that I should carry on, should create change from the inside, should do more. But I have a vast crop of learning and encounters to harvest and share and use, and my shape is changing - from hands on to hands open, from head down to voice out, from project documents to documenting a new world. I’m drawn to looking into what is, and what could be, and finding the hope and “immanence of the divine” in all of it. Barry Lopez has shone a light into the dimness of the ‘shoulds’ that can surround.
What shapes you? What patterns and stories do you hold or see, that might help us reimagine our lives? If you’re a writer - or not - what would you like your words to contribute to?
I’d love to know.
Books and articles I’ve appreciated:
Book - Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, by James Lovelock.
Scientist and author James Lovelock died yesterday (27th July). I read his book when I worked at Resurgence Magazine, in about 2010. As well as learning about science I also learned about the role of creativity, intuition and synthesis in the work we do. Lovelock’s Gaia theory was ridiculed when first introduced but it now forms the basis of much climate science. His way of working felt searching, visionary, connecting, never pigeonholing.
Book - Let Your Life Speak, by Parker Palmer
I re-read this short book every couple of years. It feels like a meditation on the gifts we have within us, and the detours we often take before we claim them. Palmer’s question "is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?" sticks with me.
Essay - The Patrescene, by Amy Irvine in Orion magazine (click here)
I’ve been thinking about our ancestors, and wrote an essay (forthcoming in Plough magazine) that draws on a trip I made to see the Stonehenge exhibition in The British Museum. And so I was drawn to this essay, which looks at our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and how “when men hold the power, humanity fades.” It’s a fascinating blend of science and imagination. “In dozens of samplings of mitochondria and genetic markers, hunter-gatherer societies are matrilocal—women who were related stayed together and were a collective force that balanced the community’s more individualistic, competitive, and violent males. Agrarian societies are often patrilocal, which means related males stuck together and dominated.”
A poem I like:
A Reward, by Denise Levertov:
Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled
to leave the house and search for what
might lift me back to what I had fallen away from,
I stood by the shore waiting.
I had walked in the silent woods:
the trees withdrew into their secrets.
Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk
over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.
Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies
afloat on their element as I was not
on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.
But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again
to linger, to look North before nightfall — the expanse
of calm, of calming water, last wafts
of rose in the few high clouds.
And was rewarded:
the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying
widewinged toward me, settled
just offshore on his post,
took up his vigil.
If you ask
why this cleared a fog from my spirit,
I have no answer.
A photo from a place I know:
Harvest is almost here, and my husband and I have been walking along paths through fields of wheat and barley. Living in rural Devon, I see how farming is (or should be) a partnership with nature, part of its cyclical rhythm. That has been hard lately, with very little rain and record-breaking temperatures. Food and farming is something I think about a lot, and connect with via Council work, writing, and neighbours and friends who farm. The Orion essay I mentioned above, and a Stonehenge exhibition I went to in The British Museum, have got me thinking in new ways about farming, regenerative farming and more. A subject for a future thought-letter.
Hello, I recently discovered your newsletter from a recommendation and I’m enjoying it! Good advice and reflections, thanks for sharing. “The idea of “contributing to a literature of hope” landed like a stone in the river of me: decisive, announcing itself, rippling outward and recasting my work in a new light. I’d like to contribute to that literature, to hope, too.” In regards to your question towards the end, as I a writer I would like to help others see and feel the grandeur of beauty in the world. Keep up the good work, and hope to read your next piece soon.