I noticed a theme in my reading recently – lots of books with ‘Wild’ in the title! I am reading and writing about nature/bioregionalism/ecology/contemporary spirituality….so I guess ‘wildness’ is a thread through all of these things.
The Wild Places, by Robert McFarlane
Wild, by Jay Griffiths (This book remains my favourite book IN THE WORLD EVER.)
Wild Mind, by Natalie Goldberg
Maybe I would read anything with WILD in the title?
Robert McFarlane’s book led me to…
Waterlog, by Roger Deakin – a remarkable account of Deakin’s desire to swim in as many wild waterways as he could across the UK. (Roger Deakin was an incredible person who seemed to live almost in an alternate universe where he was part-tree himself. )
In fact, this is the trajectory so much of contemporary nature writing takes – a person leaves the urban environment and takes off to the waterways or the wilds, the forests, the mountains and then experiences the edges of their pathetic humanity and learns a pile of stuff about themselves. It’s compelling stuff! Escape, edge-dwelling, deep nature….
As inspiring and firing as these books are, though, I cannot write this kind of book. I am a mother of two children, tethered by family to a small suburban piece of land in a medium-sized, unsensational city. So my challenge is how to extrapolate a compelling narrative from my own situation.
To my rescue (to some extent) comes bioregionalism, Urban Resilience movements and Transition Towns giving me a steadfast political framework to staying put in the urban environment and making the best of it, or making it better more to the point.
I am on the hunt for any books which address the URBAN ‘wilds’, or ‘domestic’ nature narratives, so please do suggest some if you know of any.
One I read and thoroughly loved recently was ‘Feeding Orchids to The Slugs’, a book about a woman becoming a Zen Retreat cook.
How do you write a compelling nature-based narrative when you live in suburbia and can’t stray very far? This question is at the heart of my project.
So far, I’m finding it’s all about ATTENTION, rather than literal travel. That the ‘wild’ is as much within as without.
‘To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.’ -Mary Oliver
Helen Lehndorf 
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