Seasons: A Conversation at the Tate Modern

Transcript

Emmanuel Vaughan-LeeThank you. I’d love to introduce the panelists who are joining me this evening, all of whom are contributors to this latest edition and whose work and words fill its pages. Joining us is Melanie Challenger. Melanie is a researcher and writer on environmental history, bioethics, and philosophy of science. She is a founding member of Animals in the Room, an international collaborative working on models for representing the nonhumans in decision making. She has written the books How to Be an Animal and On Extinction, and she has previously written for Emergence on animal intelligence and communication. Welcome, Melanie.

Melanie ChallengerThank you for having me.

EVLI’d like to welcome my good friend Sam Lee. Sam is a folk singer, a song collector, and a conservationist. And many of you may know him from the film that we made about him and his work with singing with nightingales. His albums include Ground of Its Own, The Fade In Time, Old Wow, and his latest song, Dreaming. And he is the author of The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird. Welcome.

Dara McAnulty is an author, naturalist, and conservationist from Northern Ireland. He published his debut book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, when he was fourteen years old. He is the youngest ever winner of the RSPB Medal and received the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing in 2020. Dara is a prolific environmental campaigner and is an ambassador for the RSPCA and the Jane Goodall Institute, and is studying philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge. Welcome Dara.

And finally, we are joined by Kerri ní Dochartaigh. Kerri is a writer from the northwest of Ireland. She’s the author of Thin Places and most recently Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year. She’s written for The Guardian, The Irish Times, the BBC, and has previously written for Emergence on the themes of mothering and mammalhood in the time of crisis. Welcome, Kerri.

So before we begin this evening’s conversation and an exploration of everyone’s work and their contributions to this issue, I wanted to read the “Letter from the Editor” because it offers hopefully a deeper orientation into how we approach the seasons, our frame, our thinking, but also because an earlier version of this letter was sent to all of you and was sent to all of the contributors who participated in this issue, all the writers, artists, photographers, to help orient them in how we are thinking about the seasons, but most importantly, to share the questions that we wanted to ask, questions that you all responded to in your work. So I want to share this with you as well:

“The seasons are a primary gateway connecting the human world with the ongoing revelation of creation, renewal, growth, decay, and death that underpins the cyclical nature of the more-than-human world. Each season, regardless of how it manifests and expresses itself in a specific place, offers a myriad of experiences that can deepen the ties of kinship and reciprocity between the human and the more-than-human, while also creating wonder, awe, fear, and ultimately a reverence for the living world.

“From the very beginning of the human story, we depended on the seasons for the many life-giving forces that sustained us, be that rain, sun, warmth, growth, or food. Whether we gathered, hunted, or farmed, our ability to nourish ourselves was tied to their rhythms. Generation after generation, the seasons shaped our diverse cultures and spiritual traditions and our many rituals and ceremonies honored the cyclical nature of creation. Just as each season has unique ways of expressing the nature of a place, each place and the cultures that emerged from it had unique ways of enacting these expressions of kinship. These offerings and ways of paying homage were expressions of reverence, helping to align us with the many of the rhythms and patterns present within the living Earth.

“The modern world with its mechanization, systemization, and technological prowess has dampened our ability to live in tune with the seasons. Today, most of us have a life insulated, literally and figuratively, from the subtleties and nuances of the cyclical nature of the seasons. The many ceremonies and rituals that deepened our ties of kinship and reverence have mostly become hollow if celebrated at all. We have imposed a simplified version of the northern hemisphere’s seasons—spring, summer, autumn, and winter—with rigid start and end dates, on the rest of the world, adding to the legacy of colonization. Like our relationship with time, we think of the seasons as something we can control, evident in the draining of our ancient aquifers, the hum of our air conditioners, and the availability of seasonal fruit year round. And amid this reality, sustainability circles, environmental movements, and the farm-to-table food world speak of a return to the seasonal. But what does that even mean anymore? Is it simply replicating the watered down version of the seasonal celebrations that have survived? And in a world where the birds who once marked the beginning of spring are silent, where summers are so hot crops wither and die, where the trees who have shed their leaves in the same land from millennia come autumn are moving north, where a land of snow has none in winter, what even is a season?

“Change is afoot. And yet amid this change the seasons still turn, albeit to a different tune. And despite our best efforts to ignore them, the gateway to kinship they offer still beckons. The seasons in their unpredictability, in their state of flux, and in their grief are calling to us to pay attention, to begin to return to a space of receptivity and connection and reverence for the cycles of life they embody. If we hear their call and turn our gaze again towards them, how should we respond? How do we return to an ancient understanding of the nature of seasonality, of place, and of cycles? How do we bear witness to the death of all seasons, not just winter? What forms of celebration from the past do we keep? How do we free ourselves from the shackles of imposed seasons that were never tied to place and no longer reflect the world we live in? How should we celebrate cycles and seasons and life in a dying world? What must evolve and change and how?

“These are the questions we asked our contributors to consider for this year’s edition, offering them space to reflect on our evolving relationship with the seasons through the themes of requiem, invitation, and celebration. And while these themes are presented here as chapters, they unsurprisingly overlap, revealing paradoxes, contradictions, and the complexity of the times we are in. And yet in the midst of all this, I find myself in a state of awe, for regardless of the great loss that the annual turn of the seasons reveals, the Earth in all Her ever-giving abundance and grace, is constantly inviting us to return to Her. This, if nothing else, is cause for celebration.”

[applause] Thank you. So I want to begin our conversation where we begin in the volume, which is this chapter of “Requiem.” And I want to turn to you first, Melanie, with a question about this, because you described this so viscerally and relatably in the piece you wrote for the issue, which is called “The Springing Time,” not as an abstract idea or with data about loss, but as something felt in the body; that one of the ways we have always related to the seasons, and mark how they change and unfold, has been by using an inherent biological intelligence within our own bodies, by using our senses and responding to them. And this meant that the seasons were as present in and as much a part of our bodies as they were in the more-than-human world. And so the seasons were this great connector between our bodies and that of the world around us. But so much of that has now changed. And, I’m wondering if you could talk a bit about how you feel an embodied response to the seasons is diminished when we withdraw from that kind of sensory dialogue with them.

MCYeah, thank you. So, in this book the challenge I set for myself was to go back into my memory from when I first realized that spring was not when it’s marked in the calendar, which was when I moved onto a narrow boat and I lived on the river. So I was no longer on land, I was no longer in my element. And I was surrounded—especially when, you know, the light goes down and everyone sort of, the human world starts to retreat a little bit. If you are on water—it’s the same when you’re on a sailing boat— if you’re on water, you are absolutely surrounded by other species. And so I started to notice that in February I could see the change, I could hear the change, in the spiders, I could see it in the activities of the birds on the water. And I began to realize that the animals around me and the plant life around me knew when spring was more than I did, that they knew something that I didn’t know about the living world.

That sort of planted a seed in my mind. And this is a long time ago now, this is like—I don’t even know, I don’t want to count—but it’s like maybe fifteen, twenty years ago, yes, before I had my children. And it planted the seed in my mind to inquire into that. How do they know? How do these living beings know? It’s taken me a long time to answer that question. I spent the last, well, most of my working life, trying to answer that question: how do other living beings know? And of course when we ask that question, we’re also asking that question about ourselves. How do we know?

And so really we can’t answer that in its depth now. But ostensibly, we know because our entire bodies are holes of meaning. They’re translators. That’s how life works. That’s what a living entity is. We are these remarkable open holes that are constantly trafficking and passing signals from the world into us. And what is so incredible about life and our bodies and the living body is that you translate that into meaning and change. We are never the same thing. You will have gone on a walk today. Your body will have been—regardless of what your mind was doing—your body will have been listening, responding, and absorbing everything that you—you know, the wind on the surface of you, the scents, the chemicals in the air that have come into your body. And with the power of a lightning storm every second, your body will have been translating that into an internal physical change.

So we hold the seasons, we hold knowledge inside our bodies, and we transform moment by moment. And on the one hand that’s, you know—the danger we have now is that we are so muffled and we hold ourselves in artificial environments that we’re not allowing our bodies to have that kind of immediacy of knowledge and transformation with the living world. But the positive of this is that it’s always there, it’s fundamental to what it is to be a living being, and it’s instantaneous. So if we shift our habits, so will meaning shift with us. So there’s celebration in that as much as there is requiem.

EVLThank you, Melanie. Sam, in your work as a folk singer, as an artist, you’ve cultivated a deep personal connection to one of England’s most beloved expressions of spring, which is the nightingale in their song. But the presence of this bird each spring is waning, and the nightingale is predicted to disappear from this land within fifty years. And I know you feel the weight of this imminent loss profoundly, and yet in the face of this grief, you return again and again each spring to sing with the nightingale, to live there for those weeks in the woods. Can you talk a bit about this relationship between love and grief in your bond with the nightingale that speaks to the paradox present in this moment of requiem?

Sam LeeFunny, is asking that question to point, as we tip into the time of darkness, to envision one of the greatest expressions of light that ironically expresses itself best in the shortening nights of spring? The love of the bird goes hand in hand with, as you are saying, the bird being a kind of principle, the higher zenith of the expression, the electricity that fires out the black thorn bush that is in itself connected to the root system. It’s all about light and darkness. And my love of that time is where the shift starts to happen, the awakening. The bird’s song is kind of cellularly connected, I think, with us as humans, as an expression of the return of life. As you are saying, these ambiguous points: Where does spring start? I mean, it’s such a human concept. It’s moments of intervals, of expressions, of reactions at a cellular level. And the bird is the decoration. And they come because of an abundance; because at that point they know there is enough life there in the land to sustain themselves. They’re responding very intimately to a whole load of other conditions on a biological level, on a chemical level, which is all connected to the turn of the Earth, the rotation, the angle of light, the length of the day.

So as you’re saying, it’s more than just about nature connectedness. It’s about the almanac for each being being responsive, and all those little conditions and little emergencies and little wriggles and blossoms find their way to the top of the thicket and explode in song. And for me, the love of that is—that’s the most perfect example of an artistic expression. And so that’s, for me, the joy. The bitter sweetness and the sadness within that is knowing that every one of those moments of revelation is struggling, is out of balance with each other. And this idea of a sort of a scientific assessment that the breakdown is beginning and the conditions that allow it to happen are being broken. That is a state of being that I hold there within that space, the intimacy with the nightingale, but allow it to kind of encourage a deeper appreciation. Because it reveals both in the power of it the fragility at the same time, and my accountability to that fragility.

EVLThank you, Sam. Kerri, we asked you to write about light for this edition, and we just heard some of your very poignant words about light and about darkness in the film. And your piece is really an evocation of the interplay between lightness and darkness in our moment, which is increasingly being characterized as a dark time of growing violence, of divisiveness, of ecological destruction. And in relation to the seasons. We’re in a time where we’re fundamentally altering this form and expression as we warm the planet. And you ask in your essay: How can we hold this? How do we hold everything at once through this grief? How do we hold anything at all in this dark? So, I guess I want you to answer the questions that you ask. How do we hold this duality of light and dark in this moment?

Kerri ní DochartaighSuch a beautiful question. Thank you.

EVLThat’s your question.

KnD[laughs] I think we ask more questions; to answer our questions through questions. So I feel like increasingly we— Well, we have late-stage capitalism where we’re at, with how imbalanced things are globally and how sort of set against one another we are. We’ve kind of been fed this idea of light and dark, or spring and autumn, or a northern hemisphere / southern hemisphere, perpetrator / victim. And I feel like an interesting thing is happening. I don’t know if any of you have noticed this, if it’s just where we’re at now, but as I say in the essay, many of us are choosing a different way. We are actually allowing ourselves to step into that really interesting womb-like space that is just not defined by—yes, defined by darkness—but where darkness takes a different kind of a shape, where it kind of dances in a different way in uncertainty, and darkness can be quite a nourishing, healing, sustaining, enlightening creature.

And so I suppose this idea of holding for me is—I really explore it in the essay—holding has always been an idea for me. I’ve always been really taken by this idea of holding things, particularly women, women holding things. And I suppose increasingly we begin to understand that what we’re seeing is things being taken away more and more; there’s an inability to hold things close. And that looks like people being forced to work too many hours because landlords are charging too much money, or it looks like people having to do additional work and just keeping their home safe from encroaching climate emergency, or in some countries, people being forced into sending their children into childcare far too early for them. And this idea of holding is really core for being—like, we have hands for a reason. It’s really important what we do with those hands. We have a heart for a reason. It’s there for a really good reason. And I feel like maybe what we’re moving towards is a more childlike—we were talking earlier about science and the childlike inquisitiveness that would’ve initially defined what we would call science now. And I feel like—really genuine, just for a second, okay, just for a moment, if everyone could close their eyes or soften their gaze just for one second. And with your right hand just hold your left hand, whatever way feels comfortable to you, and just like hold it. And maybe you can move your hand around a bit, but don’t let it go. And then swap it over where your left hand is holding your right hand, just like hold it. And I mean, there’s something really that—they’re your hands, and they can do really beautiful, powerful things no matter what we are told. So yeah, I’m not sure if I answered the question.

EVLThank you, Kerri.

KnDBut I’m Irish. I’m actually from Derry, and that’s what we do. We just meander. And then the Irish—in Ireland, everything is cyclical, everything is a circle. Our songs are circular songs, our stories are circular stories. Our homes are generally begun as being circular. So yeah, we’ll meander, but we’ll come back.

EVLThank you, Kerri. Dara, the piece you wrote for the issue, which is called “The Thread of Belonging,” feels like an ode to the seasonal moments that hold meaning and memories for you.

Dara McAnultyYeah.

EVLLike welcoming the cuckoo’s call on spring walks with your family or picking blackberries at the height of summer. And in the context of a requiem, the essay is really a heartfelt praise of all that continues to flourish within the seasons. It rejoices at that which has not disappeared, but that which still returns. And I’m interested to hear you talk about approaching the loss present within the seasons from a place of honoring what returns, and how, while there is work in tending to what is disappearing, there is also work to be done in noticing the beauty that remains.

DMAYeah, and I think the beginning place that I took is that the seasons that exist, these circular motions, are constructed by humans; they’re also constructed by individual humans, by our memory, by the moments that happen in our lives. All of us have our individual little cycles. Like we remember when we first met a loved one. We remember when we first walked into that forest, when we heard that bird. In the piece I talk about this moment when I was with my friends in Grantchester Meadows, and we were having a picnic and it was a bit misty, which was strange for the summer. And a barn owl just started flying over us, and it just kept staying there and staying there. And now every single year we come back to the same place to reexperience that. And that has become a part of our seasons, our circularity.

These are individual things. And when we honor what we have lost, whenever the seasons start to shift, these seasons of our minds become especially important. Change is a natural thing that in this case is being driven by—I’ve been thinking about this—that what humans do to the planet is natural in the sense that we cannot see ourselves as separate from the natural world. And we are now becoming a part of the cycle of the world and we are shifting the cycles of the world. And we are causing this monumental shift and realizing that we are also a part of those natural cycles. And those natural cycles of other species have also shifted it. And in this case, it’s causing irrevocable damage to the way that the cycles could be working. And I don’t want to say should be working, because these cycles have shifted many, many times over the Earth’s history.

And so whenever we say that we are honoring what we have left, whenever Sam talks of the nightingale, there’s some sort of grief, whatever is lost—that grief is an honor to the changing. Death is a natural form of the cycle, and life. And we should fight to protect and maintain the balance of these cycles so that they don’t start spilling out of control. But our greatest way of honoring is to come back to these places at that time to have a memory of whenever we saw these creatures for the first time, when we saw the people that we love, when we saw these animals at these different times, when we remember when the leaves used to fall, when we remember the first snow. And then, of course, then there’s no snow. I have not seen snow in three years in Ireland.

There’s a grief that honors the changes through our memory, because the memory builds up these cycles. We are in a room now of many different people, all with our own different cycles. And that seems to me like a whole lot of joy about those cycles, because grief is just an expression of negative joy, really: To feel grief about something, you have to have felt joy about it in the past. And whenever you realize that that joy and grief combine into this beautiful mosaic of cyclical structures that make up our human society, that is when we can truly honor the cyclical nature of the world.

EVLAmen. I think we’ve already jumped in there, but I want to move more directly into this theme of invitation, which is a section of this edition. And Kerri, there’s a line in your essay I love: “The earth is always speaking to us, and I have begun to understand light as one of her most loving whispers.” Tell me more about these whispers and how they have shifted and impacted your relationship to the seasons.

KnDThat’s a beautiful question. Thank you. So when I was sitting with the— I mean, I write about light a lot. I need to be honest. It’s kind of my, it’s my bread and butter. And I have thought about it from a lot of different angles. But something that always continues to come back to me again and again and again is that no matter what you think in the dark at 3:00 AM in the morning, as soon as the sun rises, it’s going to feel different. It is going to feel different. We are going to be different as soon as the sun rises on any given day; as soon as the aurora borealis are dancing in the sky, we are right back there around a fire with the skins of animals that we, our ancestors, have hunted. You know, there are these whispers that can be really delicate or can actually be shouted as well. You know, so something like a lightning storm; something like watching, you know, a storm dance across a delta; or even, you know, I want to say a shooting star—that there’s something in what light does, or the receptors in us, as was so beautifully brought up. Just this idea that there’s something in us that is, I don’t want to say triggered by light, I don’t want to say healed by light, but is kind of returned to; so kind of like returned to an ancestral way of being, returned to an original way within us, or returned to whoever, whatever you believe. But there isn’t really, for me, anything else that exists that has that ability other than light. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love to hear wren’s song. I love to watch a flitter, and a baby oak becoming a bigger oak. I love those. But they’re all just light songs. They’re just this song that light sings in a different way. So I feel like we are reminded every single day, multiple times a day, no matter what part of the planet we are on, that we are able to return, we are able to return to the loving hands of Mother Earth. We are able to return to old ways of being that were more gentle and delicate and tender, or ways that need to be more strong as well. Because there’s merit in that too. But yeah, it’s just light for me.

EVLBeautiful. Dara, your writing demonstrates a practice of immersing yourself again and again in small and often fleeting details of the living world. And there’s a line in your essay about how these moments seep between the cracks and make you whole. And, and you reflect on how the depth of sensation within these moments nourishes you in a way that knowledge alone cannot. Can you share more about how noticing these subtleties can serve as a doorway to making you feel whole or, I guess, inhabiting the seasons in a more embodied way, a sensory experience, if you will?

DMAI think that there are many different types of this knowledge in the world, and then there’s these sort of other knowledges that exist, and some that we don’t even really feel. They come in the things that we almost subconsciously notice about the world. They seep into our brains and into our skin, and we sort of like absorb them. And the way that that makes us whole is that in the process of becoming aware of the seeping, and aware of the noticing, we understand that our observation of everything else around us, our existence in this other external place, is also us. Our senses and the world are both us and everything else. And so the wholeness that I feel is that whenever the seepings and the cracks aren’t showing and nothing is getting in, well then there is now a disconnection between what is me and what is out there. And without everything, how can you say you are whole?

There is no you, without saying that you’re someone else, that you’re an individual. There is no difference between the line at that point. The line between your mind, then, almost floods both outwards and inwards, and that creates a wholeness that is essential to being. Because being is something more difficult. It requires these noticings. And I think a key point of it is that it’s not the things that you usually notice that make up notice— They’re almost … I’ve come up with a new word: noticelings. These little noticelings that sort of flicker into your mind, that build up into this picture of the world, but seep into all of the little pores. And those are the things that whenever you become aware, you become self-aware, because you realize that the self is not just you, but it is also the other.

MCDid “noticelings” happen just right now?

DMAYeah. I was just like, noticings?

MCWhat else can we get tonight?

DMAI was like noticings, noticings, noticelings?

EVLMelanie, your piece speaks to the fact that we can no longer pretend we are impervious to the seasons. And that as they grow more erratic and unpredictable, our culture should be more sensitive to our biological reality, which at its core is that we are completely reliant on the Earth for survival. How do you think the seasons can be a gateway to bringing these two worlds, the cultural and the biological, back together?

MCIt’s not even— I’m sorry, I’m still on noticelings. But I’ll try and get myself back. It’s not even, how can they? They will. You know, we are animals, we are organisms. More importantly, when you really look at how life emerged on our planet, we’re Earth mirrors in a very literal sense. So we basically came from the matter of the Earth and then enclosed the matter of the Earth into a form. That is what life is and how life emerged here. And so we always are in conversation with the Earth because we are the Earth. I mean that in a very literal sense. And I call us Earth mirrors because I mean our state—the state of, that sort of intelligent state that I was talking about earlier—that state, because we’re Earth mirrors, means that our bodies both take in the Earth and then reflect them in health. So if our environment is polluted and unhealthy, our body will also be polluted and unhealthy. And likewise, if we are in a nourishing environment, we will reflect that. Similarly, we’re in a constant two-way conversation with the Earth, because we have to be, because we come from the Earth. So we draw our energy from it and we export our energy back into it. So the Earth also reflects what’s happening inside of us. And that is true physically, and that’s true psychically also.

So I think, you know, of course it’s a two-way thing, but of course as the seasons become more extreme, which they will do, as we are exporting more energy out into the world, we are creating more disorder in the world, and we will have to reflect that within ourselves. And it’s an interesting time, that our societies are so disordered at just the time that we are generating vast amounts of disorder externally through our activities. So we will inevitably, as Earth mirrors, come to reflect what the seasons are doing. And we will adapt, because that is what life does. And there’s good and bad in that. You know, that’s a sign of hope as much as it is something for us to consider with grief. But it’s hopeful as well, because we are intelligent, we are always in conversation with the Earth that gave rise to us. And I do, I have hope for that actually.

EVLThank you. Sam, as you shared, you’ve been singing with nightingales each spring for many years, yet I’ve heard you describe—and I experienced this firsthand when we made the film and spent time in the woods together in nightingale season—how each night you go into the woods, it’s like a new experience, like a new invitation that the nightingale offers you, and that you reciprocate. And it seems that presence plays an important role in being open to their invitation here. Talk to me more about the importance of being present and the role that plays in your work in singing with nightingales.

SLYour questions are so wonderful, Emmanuel. And they also— I feel like I should come up with one juicy point, which is always impossible because—

EVLMany juicy points.

SLBig juicy points. I’m always looking for a juicy point. Being present is such a—there are key things that are wonderful, and it carries so much into what you speak about within the points of light, and also the darkness and these liminal places. The nightingale is sort of the keyholder to the darkness in so many ways. You know, they’re the lure for people to step outside the comfort, the security, of the front door. And the warmth on chilly spring nights. But they’re also a kind of sonic guide and line through the impossibility of a dark forest. So what occurs when we are there is that we have to shed a lot of the assumptions and controls and abilities that we are so dependent on, the crutches we have: which is sight, how much we are a sight-driven species these days. And we have made redundant so many of our other senses. And the beauty of this place of immersion into a natural setting, being around the fire, letting the light fade through dusk into darkness, is that by making the time to be there, not just a nice day out in the countryside, but actually seeing the night, is that we start to employ our other senses. And the sort of wild beings that we have inside us switch on, you know?

MCCan I? That really made me think of something. Sorry to—

EVLNo, no, please.

MCBecause I used to live in a forest, and I’ve also been listening to nightingales, and yeah, I know exactly what you mean. But having lived in a forest for years— The point of a forest is it’s actually very noisy. So on the one hand we think of it as quiet, because if we’re deep in a forest, we don’t hear humans, but the forests themselves are really noisy. Now, I noticed something when I lived in a forest, and I’d be interested to know if anyone else has this. Well, I’m sure you all have this. So if you haven’t thought about it before, then I would ask you to do it, which is that you can’t listen and think at the same time. Such a simple thing. But you can’t do it. So if you want to switch off your human rational parts—

EVLStart listening?

MCAnd let those other senses stop and really listen, just like really listen, to the susurrus of a tree, or a bird song. I promise you, you won’t be able to think at the same time.

SLYou can dream, though. You can definitely dream. So, I mean, I like that a lot, because I think that part of thinking is about removing all sensory awareness and you stop being present. You are suddenly there in your thoughts. But when you are tuned in—and you talk about the susurration, and as the season from mid-April through the end of May comes, there’s these phases of emergence. And my favorite one in the woods is the frass, when the caterpillars blossom, an extraordinary moment where you get the rain of caterpillar confetti and all sorts of other things, and caterpillars themselves. And it’s like walking through a dripping woodland. And these are sensations that start to attune you. And it’s actually, you are absolutely right, when you step away from the thinking parts of the brain, and the feeling parts of the body—you are feeling the ground, you’re sensing through your nose, the aroma of the exhalation of trees, and the aromatics, and the pollens, and all the things that are communicating—you suddenly become the forest. And the nightingales themselves is, as you know, a distant sound that you are listening so hard for. It calls in such a sense of precision that we all have, and so rarely practice, that we do become present. But I think what we’ve become is vibrational. And I think we start to feel ourselves and our hearts and those things where you are listening so hard that you have to steal your breath so that your own exhaling doesn’t block your sense—the way you walk, the way you soften—so that you are making less noise. It’s all these things that are about being present and actually stilling ourselves so that we become more treelike.

EVLWell, I think that’s a good place to move into speaking about celebration, this way that the sensory experience that we all have inside of us can open us to experience this abundance, like the caterpillars and the raining down of the forest. And Dara, I want to talk to you about joy. And it’s interesting that you just described grief as negative joy, which I hadn’t heard that term before, but it’s quite poignant. And you’ve been really writing about this for a long time, since you were very young. And you’ve described the natural world as your entire joy. And you’ve talked about there being a way to keep our relationship with the living world rooted in joy regardless of what’s happening in the midst of ecocide, destruction. How do you manage the joy of emerging with the abundant expression of celebration present in the seasons with your awareness of where we are headed, and just how unstable our sense of what a season even is, and what that will mean in the future?

DMAOoh. Yeah. It’s a difficult task occasionally. But I think whenever I say that grief is negative joy, what I mean is that whenever you’re out in the natural world, you— I lose the grief, occasionally. I can see the constancy. I can see the place that I love so, so deeply. I know lingering under the surface there are horrendous things going on. But whenever I become whole with the natural world, as I was mentioning there, then the grief slips out of the brain, because it’s now intermingled with everything else. And now I have the joy that is just racing in now. And I think also there is a joy that I think is necessary, because I would say grief is not the opposite of joy. It’s negative joy, but it’s not the opposite of joy. The opposite of joy is fear. And this is fear for the world. A great, deep-setted fear, which I think paralyzes you: You can’t do anything. You can very quickly go into hopelessness, and after hopelessness, well then we find it very difficult as humans to believe in action.

And I try to then go, okay, well if I cannot feel fear now for the natural world, because that would take out the joy of the natural world, and that would then mean that I wouldn’t be able to do anything. I couldn’t wake up, I would sit back into that apathy, that lethargy, which would mean that nothing would get done. And so this joy becomes both this ultimate sort of driving into of the natural world, that takes away the grief, but also the fear; this sort of triumvirate of—one is the anti-joy, one’s the negative joy, and I would say that then that joy can turn into what I think might be another surprisingly positive emotion, which is anger. And anger can get motivation, and motivation can then get us to do further things. And it’s by managing these sort of four ideas of emotion that are all fueled by the natural world.

Because, the fear that we feel from the natural world comes from the natural world, because we feel protective and we don’t want to see it go. But the joy that we can feel from the natural world, I think, can drive us further and further outward and into actually trying to define change, and movement, and passage of people, and people coming together. And joy brings culture together. It brings in order from these disordered systems. It almost coagulates people together. Whenever we go into these apathetic states, we’re not talking to each other. We’re not actually relating to each other. It’s hard to relate to someone’s fear. It’s surprisingly easy to relate to someone’s joy. And this means— Because whenever we then come together as a cultural idea, that is when humans start to do more, that then becomes more of a system; we become as a culture, then, more in tune with the land; we become more in tune with who we are, what we are, where we are. And that requires us, as a culture, to come together and down into the Earth. And then the Earth brings the joy back, and it all comes back into these cycles again. And that is where my joy comes from, is knowing that the natural world is this constant process of cycling emotion in and out of our brains. But by understanding which emotions allow us to keep that cycle going, maybe we can work together, and then maybe we can make a change in the world.

EVLThank you, Dara.

MCDesperate for joylings. Joylings?!

EVLNoticelings and joylings. [laughter] Melanie, in your essay you write of the flourishing present in the springtime, the coots making nests, the emergence of spiders from winter crevices, and your own pregnancy that took place during this season. And you suggest that when we perceive this flourishing as life forms actively creating change, we can understand spring not as a unit of time or even as a season, but as an embodied knowledge. Can you speak about this?

MCYes. I don’t remember writing that, but I’m sure I did.

EVLYou did.

MCYeah. So let me think back to that moment, because, yeah, I was on the narrow boat pregnant with my first child. Actually, memory is unsurprisingly not so great from those years. But what I do remember was, as I said, thinking about … thinking, I mean, when you’re pregnant anyway, your kind of knowledge of self starts to shift because there’s more than one self at large within your form. So, you’re questioning, and also you’re so desperate for knowledge when you’re pregnant for the first time, because you want to be in control of this thing that you’re not in fact in control of. And yet you have to surrender to your body, because, in fact, your body— That was the lesson I certainly had to take from being pregnant, and I would imagine there’s a lot of women who will know what I’m talking about: that you have to surrender to your body in the end to know what it’s doing.

And likewise, when I would watch these animals, who knew, clearly, something that I didn’t know; they knew the seasons were changing. Well, even on the narrow boat—and it was flipping cold on the narrow boat, but even so—I hadn’t sort of sensed the changes that were afoot. I then spent years trying to understand exactly how we know and how other living beings know. So literally what happens when the light touches and the body transforms, exactly what happens in a very reductive sense. And I know that sounds like that’s really kind of mechanical and reductive, but it’s in fact extraordinary, it’s really extraordinary, the way that light falls on the skin of an organism. And the exact kind of quality of red is understood by the body of the organism. And what it isn’t— And the whole purpose of the work that I was doing was that, what I was sure was that, the story that we’ve been told about other living beings—that they’re kind of like objects, they’re kind of like machines, they’re doing what their genes tell them to do, they’re programmed a bit like a computer, and it’s the gene that’s making them do these kinds of things. And you know, there are even papers, whole fields of research being done about the kind of uncoupling that would happen between organisms as programs and seasons that are changing. And the fear was that pollinators wouldn’t find flowers anymore, and the natural world will fall to pieces because it’s all machine-like. And if the information is wrong, they’re not going to be able to figure it out. It’s not true. Organisms are not gene-led in that kind of way. They are not objects, they are not machines. They are abundantly bodily intelligent. And of course, what the science is now showing is that organisms respond to the change. It takes them a little bit of time, but their bodies are intelligent and alive. And in fact, that’s the good news story, which is that the kind of great fears that the pollinators would be uncoupled from the flowers and so forth, has not quite come to pass, even with the intensity of the perturbations and challenges that we are throwing at the living world. Somehow, that bodily intelligence is just about hanging on. And that’s the big sort of good news story for me, I think. And there’s hope in that for us.

We are slower, sadly, because our minds get in the way. If we just listened with our bodies, we would find that they were much more likely to lead us down the right path. But we are deeply cognitive organisms. And so our cultures, our politics, our ideas, our misconceptions, our false ideas get in the way a little bit to be able to have a sort of really truly intelligent, sort of embodied, intelligent response to a changing world. But the other living beings, they’re ahead of us. They’re stealing the march on us in that regard.

EVLThank you, Melanie. This edition includes a conversation I had with you, Sam, and this was actually back in COVID. But the conversation and Sam’s work felt so pertinent to this issue that we included it. And in this conversation you talk about how the nightingale is an unlocker of hearts. How its song has a certain ability to bring someone completely into an experience of intimacy with the living world. And in the world that we live in, this modern world, we sometimes have to work quite hard to have a palpable experience of connection with nature. But there are often gifts in each season that are present—the song of the nightingale being one, the eruption of blossoms in springtime, the fullness of a harvest moon in autumn, the darkness of the transitionary moment that we’re in—that can find the cracks in the system, so to speak, and have the power to bring us into a state of communion with the living world. And I guess this question relates to the one I asked you about presence: How do you feel we can remain attentive to these gifts that hold the promise of communion within them?

SLBy showing up. By showing up. There’s lots of ways to answer that. We are sitting here in this kind of wonderful crux, as Samhain takes hold. Tomorrow is All Souls’ Day, which I feel is the most, one of the most, beautiful moments in the calendar. It’s the time where the Ancestors are at their closest point. You know, it’s the kind of zenith of that proximity. You know, as Kerri says, the veil is thin. Listen, I feel very much that that might refer a lot towards, and it’s, I feel, something that particularly this Samhain, this has been an abundant year, a mast year of everything. I’ve never seen more blackberries, more serviceberries, more, you know, apples on trees. We have a lot of thanks to give, and tomorrow is the day that we should be doing it, most of all, to be saying, you know— And it’s a community. The ancestors—you look after them, they look after us, as you are saying, Dara.

So the showing up, the saying thank you, is very important. But also, the showing up is a harder thing. And talking about this kind of sovereignty over our bodies and our emotions and our ability, there are so many parts of society that deny us that ability to step out into the darkness. We need art, we need guides. We need the people who lead and make those paths visible or traceable.

And there’s something that happened to me a few days ago that was a story that I will share. And it goes in with that sense of joy in the dark times in this kind of, you know, and the grief and the awareness and the feeling of impossibility of survival of life. How do we stay present in that? And what is it to be in this place of saying farewell, the kind of the nursing out of existence of species like nightingales, and others; the saying goodbye, the “hospicing” is the word I’m looking for. I have to think of it like, you know, God, when I’m on my deathbed, do I want everybody standing around being really glum and sad and…? No! I want joy and party and singing and dancing and laughing and telling the good stories. And actually this is something that—we have to learn how to be joyful, we have to practice all of these behaviors. And the story that happened to me: I did a concert last week, and a woman came up to me. She goes, I have to say thank you. I came as an audience member to the nightingales, and I brought my husband, and he’d just been diagnosed a year before with cancer. And it was not looking good. And he’d been in an absolute stupor for the entire time, just could not get him to face it. And he came to the nightingales and went out into the dark and we listened. And the next morning he had a new lease of life. It was like that had unlocked him to face the journey he was on and embrace the privilege of being alive. And I mean, that’s an extraordinary example. I feel like we’re all on that journey, and eco-anxiety and the terror and the sort of fear to engage on an emotional and a somatic level with that as an entity, and also a beleaguered natural world, as we’ve just found out in The Guardian this morning.

EVLRight. England’s in the bottom list.

SLBottom list of the most nature-connected countries in the world. It’s astounding. But actually there in itself, it’s like, ah, it’s like, okay, let’s get on with the twenty-day challenge and let’s get our nature connectedness, fitness, going. Let’s take that as an opportunity to actually—it’s not just about us being more nature connected. It’s about us having better self-love and love of our identity as being English, British, Irish, and about something to be proud about, and say, we tried, we cared, we did actually care and get out of this stupor that we’re in societally.

EVLThank you, Sam. Kerri, in your essay you talk about acts of holding, and you just already spoke about acts of holding. We all put our hands in each other’s to illustrate that. And I guess I’d like to go a little deeper, because you frame holding as an act of care for the life and light that remains amid destruction. And it feels like you’re pointing to this being a physical act in part. But there is a deeper component to this, a more a spiritual gesture, if you will, of holding space for grief and beauty. And that, for you, this holding is perhaps a radical form of love. And I wonder if we can close out our conversation this evening with you speaking about this element of the nature of holding.

KnDI would love to do that. I am wearing black this evening, which if you’ve ever seen me before ever when I’m on stage, I’m generally in green. And it was a big decision. I’ve started to do a lot more ritual work and a lot more grief work. My creative practices, since this essay actually, began to move in a really different way. And so today is the first day, and part of it was to wear black. And last weekend I was in the Burren, which I’m sure many of you will know. The Burren is this kind of beautiful natural landscape in Ireland, rocky landscape. And we have species there that only exist in the Burren. You know, there’s types of blue flowers that only exist there in the world. And the Burren has a very particular type of weather. It’s very Irish-like: wild. It’s where the Cailleach is from, and lives still, and walks and breathes and dances there. And ash dieback has affected the Burren amongst the worst places worldwide. And we got together and had a, there was an Irish wake for the ash tree in the Burren, a ritual where we came together and remembered the ash and planted and spoke science and heard about resilient ash. And we took some keys away, and we blessed with water and with old ways, we called on the Ancestors. It was the most joyful, hopeful, beautiful day, I want to say—apart from the day I gave birth—of my entire life. I’ve never known anything like it. I’ve never known anything like standing in the torrential rain in October in Ireland, keening, caoineadh, the Irish lament for lost things.

And increasingly, I’m beginning to understand the more I do grief work, the more I work with grief—personal grief, human grief, ecological grief, ancestral grief, nation grief—the more I understand that as soon as we were kind of forced into—through shame, particularly colonial shame in a lot of instances—to silencing our grief, it took a different turn. And we’ve really lost something that connected us to one another, to gathering, to giving, to letting go and making space, and to kind of re-knowing. And so what I would say is that when we hold— Holding for me is really like, kind of, the three Gs: So we’ve got gathering, which we’re doing now; and we’re gathered here because we love and because we are grieving. And then in that gathering, we give; we give to each other wholeheartedly, you know, wholeheartedly, wholehandedly, give our full ears to listen to each other. And then, what happens then is that we enter into proper relationship with both holding—so holding the grief, holding the joy, holding the beauty. We’re entered back into deep relationship with ourself, we’ve given to one another, we give back to ourself. And then we really are able through that gathering, through that grieving, we are really, really able to give, like the proper giving, which is giving in a way that doesn’t demand anything back; giving in a way that’s giving thanks, that’s giving joy, that’s giving grief—like sharing our grief, sharing our love, and sharing our resources. And that brings us back into what gathering can do. And it’s kind of this continuation. So I don’t see grief as being something that I ever need to set down. I don’t see it as something that removes our hope, or removes our joy, or stifles anything down. I see it as, the more we can enter into proper relationship with all of these things, that’s when we enter into proper relationship with self.

So I’m rereading, and I would thoroughly recommend it, if you haven’t read it, Francis Weller’s book on grief, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. It’s just beautiful, like, it’s so beautiful and so rich and so important. But he talks about another man, I can’t remember his name, who says like, when we feel sorrow or when we feel worry or anxiety or fear, really what’s happening is that we are aware that there’s an absence. There’s supposed to be this beautiful wild otherness there, right? So we know what we are missing. We know that we have a hole that’s the perfect size inside us for that wild, beautiful other that I can tell you exists. And you know it exists across this planet. It’s not really missing. We just need a little bit of space, time, togetherness, and support. We need to be held, we need to hold each other so that that wild, beautiful otherness feels comfortable enough to step back towards us.

EVLAnybody have something to add to that as we close out that beautiful, beautiful offering?

SLI might ask if we have time for a little, a little song that I—

AllYes!

SLI don’t want to be greedy, but also, if anyone wants to share anything before that—

MCNo, I’m all for song.

SLOkay.

KnDLet’s sing.

SLIt’s a Northern Irish song, which speaks so much to that. And something you said earlier, the holding the hand: When I was song collecting—I’ll just share this—that the real singers, when you were listening, they take your hand, and circle. So I’m going to ask— Because this is a lament for deforestation, very old from Portmore. It’s the Bonny Portmore song. It speaks from the point of view of the birds lamenting the loss of their home, as well as the locals, of this cutting down of this oak and ash forest. But I’m going to ask, even though you might be sitting next to strangers, could we all hold the hand of people in our row? Whoever you can reach, you can cross backwards over. And just remember, this once was normal.

KnDStill very adorable.

SLIt’s still normal.

MCWe’re doing it across the divide.

EVLOkay.

SLAnd just that kind of, this time of connection. So this is the Bonny Portmore. And the ornament tree was the ancient oak, very ancient oak, at the center of the forest. The holder of all the stories and songs, and was felled. So this is about the Portmore.

Oh Bonny Portmore, I am sorry for to see
The woeful destruction of your ornament tree.
You’ve stood on these shores for many is the long day
Till the longboats of Antrim came to float you away.
Oh, Bonny Portmore, you shine where you stand.
And the more I think on you, the more I think long.
For if I had you now as I had you before,
then the lords of Old England could not purchase Portmore.

For the birds in the forest so bitterly weep,
crying, “Where can we shelter and where can we sleep?”
The oak and the ash, they have all been cut down,
and the trees of Bonny Portmore are all fell to the ground.
Oh, Bonny Portmore, I am sorry for to see
the woeful destruction of your ornament tree.

MCSin-é.

SLSin-é.

EVLThank you, Sam.

SLAnd the hopeful bit at the end of this story is that that was the 1700s, and now where the Portmore forest was is this little lake by Lough Neagh, it’s now an RSPB nature reserve. And it’s a very important place for migratory birds. So out of that tragedy comes new life. Nature recovers quick.

EVLThank you Sam. I actually had a little note, “Bug Sam to sing.” I’ve done enough of these things with you, so If you don’t do it yourself, a little prompting will get you there. So thank you so much for that offering. And thank you to Kerri and to Melanie and to Dara for all the beautiful offerings of this evening and your words and your contribution to the edition, and to all of you for coming and helping us celebrate this evening. Thank you so much.