The Radiant Life of Animals by Chickasaw novelist, poet, and essayist Linda Hogan is a gorgeous collection of poetry and prose about the tenor of our daily relationship with the more-than-human world -- including wolves, crows, foxes, bears, mountain lions and horses, as well as the land that sustains us all and nurtures us body and soul.

In the book's Introduction she writes:

"A geography of spirit, an individual and collective tribal soul, originates with the larger geography of nature, of the ecosystem in which we live. For tribal peoples, this has always been a constant. The animal realm, sacred waters, and surrounding world in all its entirety is an equal to our human life. We are only part of it, and such an understanding offers us the bounty and richness of our world, one to be cared for because it is truly the being of the human....

"Nature is even now too often defined by people who are separated from the land and its inhabitants. In our time, with our lives, we usually include primarily only a majority of the developed world. Such a life is one that carries and creates the human spirit with more difficulty. Too rarely do we understand that the soul lies at all points of intersection between human consciousness and all the rest of nature. With our bodies and selves, skin is hardly a container. Our boundaries are not solid; we are permeable; therefore, even as solitary dreamers we are still rooted in the greater soul outside of us. If we are open enough, strong enough, to connect with the surrounding world, we are capable of becoming something greater than what we are merely within our own selves."

Soul loss, Hogan explains, is what happens when our relationship with the nonhuman world becomes frayed: 

"In contemporary North American Latino communities, soul loss is called susto. It is a common condition in the modern world. Susto probably began when, as in many religions, the soul was banished from nature, when humanity withdrew from the world. There became only two things, extremes viewed from our point of understanding -- human and nature, animate and inanimate, sentient and not. 

"This was the moment when the soul first began to slip away and crumble. 

"In the reversal of and healing from soul loss, Brazilian tribal members who tragically lost their land and place in the world and now dwell in the city often visit or at least reimagine nature in order to become whole again and have their souls returned to them. Anthropologist Michael Harner wrote about the healing methods among Indian people who were forcibly relocated to urban slums, usually from the rain forests. The healing ritual most often takes place in the forest at night, as the person is returned, if only for a while, to the land he or she once knew. The people are often cured through their renewed connections, their 'vision of the river forest world, including visions of animals, snakes, and plants.' This connection brings back the soul that has returned to these places. Unfortunately, in our time, these homes in the forests may now only be ghosts of what they once were.

"The cure for susto, soul sickness, is not found in books. It is written in the bark of a tree, in the moonlit silence of night, along the bank of a river, and in the voice. This cure is outside our human selves, but it becomes the thread that connects the outer world with our own."

The marvellous, spirited sculptures today are by British ceramicist Sophie Woodrow. She graduated with a BA in Studio Ceramics from Falmouth College of Art in Cornwall, and is now based in Bristol. Woodrow's work is informed by her love of natural history and a fascination with the Victorians' relationship to nature: the ways they both embraced and feared new theories of evolution, while often misapprehending them. Her sculptures "are not visitors from other worlds, but the ‘might-have-beens’ of this world,"  as she seeks to "assemble creatures from the strange notions of what we define as ‘nature’ and of each other as people – as ‘other’."

To see more of her art, please visit Woodrow's Instagram page, and the Messums Wiltshire gallery site.

The text above is from The Radiant Lives of Animals by Linda Hogan (Beacon Press, 2020). All rights to the text and art in the post reserved by the author and artist. Some related posts: The language of the animate earth, On language and mystery, and The philosophy of compassion.

Carrying on from Tuesday's post, the second book I've been re-reading this week as a means of coping with grief is The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich -- a collection of interlinked essays on life in the mountains of Wyoming, where the author settled after the death of the man she'd intended to marry. Ehrlich writes beautifully about land and solitude, about the turn of the seasons and the changes of life. In one essay she describes the waning months of the year in the high mountain country like this:

"The French call the autumn leaf feuille morte. When the leaves are finally corrupted by the frost they rain down into themselves until the tree, disowning itself, goes bald. All through the autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe, the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite.

"We feel what the Japanese call 'aware' -- an almost untranslatable word that means something like 'beauty tinged with sadness.' Some days we have to shoulder against a marauding melancholy. Dreams have a hallucinatory effect: in one, a man who is dying watches from inside a huge cocoon while stud colts run through deep mud, their balls bursting open, their seed spilling onto the black ground. My reading brings me this thought from the mad Zen priest Ikkyu: 'Remember that under the skin you fondle lie the bones, waiting to reveal themselves." But another day, I ride into the mountains. Against rimrock, tall aspens have the graceful bearing of giraffes, and another small grove, not yet turned, gives off a virginal limelight that transpierces everything heavy....

"Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near the water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

"Today the sky is a wafer. Place on my tongue, it is a wholeness that has already disintegrated; placed under the tongue, it makes my heart beat strongly enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to. Now I feel the tenderness to which this season rots. Its defenselessness can no longer be corrupted. Death is its purity, its sweet mud. The string of storms that came to Wyoming like elephants tied trunk to tail falters now and bleeds into stillness."

In another essay, Ehrlich writes of Wyoming's winter months:

"Winter looks like a fictional place, an elaborate simplicity, a Nabokovian invention of rarefied detail. Winds howl all night and day, pushing litters of storm fronts from the Beartooth to the Big Horn Mountains. When it lets up, the mountains disappear. The hayfield that runs east from my house ends up in a curl of clouds that have fallen like sails luffing from sky to ground. Snow returns across the field to me, and the cows, dusted with white, look like snowcapped continents drifting. 

"The poet Seamus Heaney said that landscape is sacremental, to be read as text. Earth is instinct: perfect, irrational, semiotic. If I reading winter right, it is a scroll -- the white growing wider and wider like the sweep of an arm -- and from it we gain a peripheral vision, a capacity for what Nabokov calls 'those asides of spirit, those footnotes in the volume of life by which we know life and find it to be good.'

"Not unlike emotional transitions -- the loss of a friend of the beginning of new work -- the passage of seasons is often so belabored and quixotic as to deserve separate names so the year might be divided eight ways instead of four. This fall ducks flew across the sky in great 'V's as if that one letter were defecting from the alphabet, and when the songbirds climbed to the memorized pathways that route them to winter quarters, they lifted off in confusion, like paper scraps blown from my writing room."

Ehrlich relates but does not linger on the death that drove her from New York to Wyoming -- and yet loss and grief are the subtext of every essay in the collection. It's a book about ranching and sheep-herding, yes, but also about the challenge of creating a new life from the ashes of an old one. The narrative voice is clear-eyed and unsentimental; it is also reflective and poetic; and the skillful juxtaposition of both modes of writing is one of the reasons I love Ehrlich's work. As she writes in the book's Introduction:

"The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities of earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impermanence have taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life."

Today's featured artist:

The imagery here is by the great animal photographer Tim Flach, who has "an interest in the way humans shape animals and shape their meaning while exploring the role of imagery in fostering an emotional connection." He is based in London.

The photographs come from Equus (2008), Flach's exquisitely beautiful book on the subject of the horse. His subsequent books are wonderful too: Dog Gods (2010), More Than Human (2012), Evolution (2013), Endangered (2017), Who Am I? (for children, 2019), and Birds (2021).

I urge you to have a look at his website, which not only shows you the breadth of his work but also has one of the best opening pages I've ever seeen....

 The photographs above are from Equus by Tim Flach (Abrams, 2008); all rights reserved by the artist. The passages quoted above are from "A Storm, the Cornfield, and Elk," and "The Smooth Skull of Winter," essays published in The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich (Viking Pengun, 1985); all rights reserved by the author. I also recommend her related books, A Match to the Heart (1994) and Unsolaced (2021).

Winter storms are swelling the streams on our hill, and the winter holidays are approaching. It is can be hard to engage with holiday cheer after the death of a loved one, and yet the seasonal rituals are comforting too. To any of you who are also dealing with loss right now -- grieving a relative or friend or animal companion -- I send sympathy and solidarity. A member of my American family died six weeks ago (Sally, who was technically my aunt, but we were just two years apart in age and grew up together in my grandmother's house as sisters); and although the worst of the shock has passed, waves of sorrow still hit with the slightest memory trigger. During such times I am finding sustenance in two favourite books by two remarkable women: Wild Comfort by Kathleen Dean Moore and The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich. This passage is from Moore's Wild Comfort:

"'There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature,' Rachel Carson wrote. 'The assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.'

"I have never felt this so strongly as I do now, waiting for the sun to warm my back. The bottom may drop out of my life, what I trusted may fall away completely, leaving me astonished and shaken. But still, sticky leaves emerge from bud scales that curl off the tree as the sun crosses the sky. Darkness pools and drains away, and the curve of the new moon points to the place where the sun will rise again. There is wild comfort in the cycles and the intersecting circles, the rotations and revolutions, the growing and ebbing of this beautiful and strangely trustworthy world.

 "I settle back on the rock and drag my sleeping bag over my knees. Diffuse light silvers the water; I can just make out a dragonfly nymph that crawls toward the surface with no expectation of flight beyond maybe a tightness in the carapace across its back. No matter how hard it tries or doesn't, there will come a time when the dragonfly pumps the crinkles out of its wings, and there they will be, luminous as mica, threaded with lapis and gold.

 "No measure of human grief can stop Earth in its tracks. Earth rolls into sunlight and rolls away again, continents glowing green and gold under the clouds. Trust this, and there will come a time when dogged, desperate trust in the world will break open into wonder. Wonder leads to gratitude. Gratitude into peace." 

Where, or how, do you find wild comfort?

 The passage quoted above is from Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature, essays by Kathleen Dean Moore (Trumpeter Books, 2010); all rights reserved by the author.

A while back my friend and Chagford neighbour Danielle Barlow began a massive artistic undertaking: to create a new tarot deck, The Witches' Wisdom Tarot, in collaboration with Phyllis Curott. Danielle is an artist and practicing hedgewitch here on Dartmoor; Phyllis is an acclaimed American writer on all things Wiccan. Their project was an immersive one, growing slowly over many, many months: imbued with all the myth, symbolism, tarot lore and deep love of the natural world these two women carry between them.

Danielle often uses family and friends as her painting models, so when she called for models for this project I nervously agreed to help. It's not that I haven't been painted before (in this faerie picture by Brian Froud, for example, painted back in the 1990s; or this one in David Wyatt's "Mythic Village" series, 2011), but I've crossed into my older years now -- a stage of life when the image in the mirror rarely matches the ageless self we still inhabit in the mind's eye. I'd be no faerie sylph this time, but an archetypal elder. 

Furthermore, my health disability was at an especially low point then: I was physically frail, anaemic, shaky on my feet, not feeling particularly "magical" at all. The day Danielle came over with her camera was the day I learned the card I would be posing for: Strength. I laughed when she told me, it seemed so unlikely. "There are many different kinds of strength," she told me firmly. "Trust me, this is the right card."

Some time later I saw the finished painting (pictured at the top of this post) . . . and Reader, I admit, I cried.

Today, as the dark of winter approaches, as a new variant of Covid looms and our cultural/political discourse seems to grow more divisive by the hour, we're all in need of strength, and of the reminder that it comes in many forms. Danielle's words, imagery and hedgewitchery helped me to remember and re-imagine mine. I hope this story will do the same for you. Sometimes the quietest, deepest, most individual and paradoxical forms of strength are the ones we should value most of all.

To learn more about the wonderful Witches' Wisdom Tarot, go here. To see more of Danielle's art, including her equally lovely Green Wheel Oracle deck, go here.

"I trained in textiles, and then in horticulture," she says, "before returning to painting, my first love. These days I work primarily in ink and watercolour. I still juggle all three elements -- painting, stitching and herbalism. Deeply rooted in this ancient landscape of ours, my work draws heavily on folklore and mythology, and explores the deep connection, both physical and spiritual, between people and the land they inhabit. The spirit of this land has sunk deep into my heart, and as I wander its ancient tracks, I find myself endlessly fascinated by the shifting relationships between human, animal, plants and land. My paintings above all attempt to capture the elusive Genius Loci - Spirit of Place."

The Witches' Wisdom Tarot was published by Hay House last autumn. The artwork is copyright by Danielle Barlow, all rights reserved.

The River Dart, which gives Dartmoor its name, begins with two primary tributaries up on the high moor: the East Dart, with its source at Cranmere Pool, and the West Dart, starting north of Rough Tor. They join at Dartmeet, then the river flows south past Buckfast Abbey, Dartington and Totnes, turning tidal as it runs to the sea through the estuary at Kingswear and Dartmouth.

The name of the river most likely derives from the old Celtic Devonian language, possibly meaning "river of oaks," "oak stream," or "the sacred place of oak" ... and indeed, stretches of the the Dart still twist through low hills of ancient oak woodland.

I love the Dart...as does Alice Oswald, a widely acclaimed poet (the first woman to serve as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in the position's 300 year history), and a family friend (her husband and mine run a theatre company together). Some years ago, when Alice was still living on Dartmoor, she walked the river from moorland to estuary to create a book-length poem titled Dart: a gorgeous evocation of the river's history, mythology, and shape-shifting presence in the life of the land.

At the start of the book Alice notes that the poem "is made from the language of people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two years I've been recording conversations with people who know the river. I've used these records as life-models from which to sketch a series of characters -- linking their voice into a sound-map of the river, a songline from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margins where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river's mutterings."

The poem begins with the river's source at Cranmere Pool, seven miles from the nearest road:

Who's this moving alive over the moor?

And old man seeking and find a difficulty.

Has he remembered his compass his spare socks
does he fully intend going in over his knees off the
   military track from Okehampton?

keeping his course through the swamp spaces
and pulling the distance around his shoulders

and if it rains, if it thunders suddenly
and all that lies to hand is his own bones?

Tussocks, minute flies,
           wind, wings, roots

He consults his map. A huge rain-coloured wilderness.
This must be the stones, the sudden movement,
the sound of frogs singing in the new year.
Who's this issuing from the earth?

The Dart, lying low in darkness calls out Who is it?
trying to summon itself by speaking ...

The walker replies:

An old man, fifty years a mountaineer, until my heart gave out,
so now I've taken to the moors. I've done all the walks, the Two
Moors Way, the Tors, this long winding line the Dart

this secret buried in reeds at the beginning of sound I
won't let go man, under
his soakaway ears and his eye ledges working
into the drift of his thinking, wanting his heart

I keep you folded in my mack pocket and I've marked in red
where the peat passes are the the good sheep tracks
cow-bones, tin-stones, turf-cuts.
listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking,
rustling and jingling his keys
at the centre of his own noise,
clomping the silence in pieces and I

I don't know, all I know is walking. Get dropped off the military
track from Oakehampton and head down into Cranmere pool.
It's dawn, it a huge sphagnum kind of wilderness, and an hour
in the morning is worth three in the evening. You can hear
plovers whistling, your feet sink right in, it's like walking on the
bottom of a lake.

What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and
down the countours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White
Horse Hill into a bowl of moor where echoes can't get out

listen
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
and
mending
it

and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal
of a river

From here the "muttering voices" include a fisherman, a forester, a water nymph, the King of the Oak Woods, a tin-extracter, a woolen mill worker, a swimmer, a boatbuilder and many others.

"I'm very interested in water," Alice says. "I'm interested in the way that it is a natural art form -- it actually pictures the world for you. You walk outside, and you are suddenly able to see a flat world reflected in the river. It's almost like nature's way of representing the world to you. But I think perhaps more than that, I'm an incredibly restless person, and I really admire the way water sheds itself all the time. I learn a lot from that. I aim to be as fluid as water if I can be. I don't like settling into one kind of character -- I like to shed myself as I go along."

Dart is a gorgeous book that seems to bubble out of the peat of Dartmoor itself. I urge you to seek it out.

About the imagery in this post:

The first picture above shows the tidal portion of the River Dart after it comes off the high moor, running through the south Devon countryside to the sea. (It's a Wikipedia/Creative Commons photograph.)

The other pictures, also of the tidal Dart, were taken by me a few years ago, during a solitary writing retreat at a waterside cabin loaned to me by good friends. 

I lost my heart to the river during those long, quiet days, and the Dart has it still.

The passage quoted above is from Dart by Alice Oswald (Faber and Faber, 2002), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. All rights reserved by the author.