🍃 05 | NatureStack: shared wonder
October 2024: All Soul's Day edition
Today, All Soul’s Day, is a time to honor departed loved ones. The name comes from an old Catholic story about souls waiting in purgatory—that neither-here-nor-there punishment for a life of being . . . meh.
These tense final days leading up to1 the U.S. Presidential election feel like purgatory. My personal purgatory is obsessive podcast-listening, rubbernecking on Twitter, unsubscribing from cowardly legacy newspapers, and binge-watching British crime dramas. Purgatory is when I forget what really matters.
Fortunately, I can turn to nature writers here on Substack to restore my soul. David E. Perry’s recent essay, featured below, reminds me to pause, pay attention, and notice the gifts of the eternal. His glorious photos nudge me to sit on our dock and watch our cove’s resident Great Blue Heron doing her thing.
“Great blue herons, like angels carved by Giacometti. . .”2
Heron embodies stillness, patience, grace, and trust. In a sudden quick burst of movement, she uncoils her impossibly long neck and plunges her razor beaked head into the water. In a trice, she emerges with a slender silver fish clamped. The fish fusses a moment more, then disappears whole down her gullet. She lowers her head for a chaser sip of water, pauses, then stalks on spindly legs, swivels her head around, and returns to stillness. Waiting. Trusting.
In further service to nature writers here, Rebecca Wisent curates this lovely directory of nature-focused writers. It’s organized by region and topic and, if you’re a nature writer yourself, easy to get listed.
Now let’s restore our souls and honor the departed.
🍃 Wonder
David E. Perry, We are asked to face our abuser
I always enjoy
’s posts. This one drew me in with its breathtaking photographs of Great Blue Herons, and rewarded me with its vulnerability, compassion, and wisdom. I texted it to all my dear ones and am happy to share it with you now.“I can no more save you from having to breathe through these triggering days than you can me, but I can remind you to look away when it gets to be too much, to find something beautiful, even if it is standing right in the middle of the swamp. Train your eyes upon it, breathe. Ask yourself to stand a little taller. Breathe again, this time a little deeper.”
Jessica Becker, The opposite of anxiety
In this essay full of glorious autumn photos,
asks, What if gravity is love from the earth? Years ago at a retreat, David Abram made the same point that gravity is eros. I’ve thought about it ever since and was delighted to encounter the same idea from Jessica’s perspective. As a bonus, she cited the exact same part of a recent post about Hannah Arendt that had moved me: “[P]eople who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to ‘escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”You say imprisonment, I say ecstasy of eros.
“What if gravity is the earth loving us? What if the stunningly beautiful display of fall color is a soothing hug before bed, a way of fueling “sweet dreams” through the winter?”
Jason Anthony, Reimagining rain
No one puts ideas together with such intellect and heart as
. His post-Helène essay about rain is a masterpiece. I’m incapable of choosing a single quote so here are two teasers for you.“Mostly it sleeps: in lakes and mountain glaciers for decades, in shallow groundwater for a couple centuries, in the ocean for millennia, in deep groundwater for 10,000 years, and in Antarctic ice for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Its time in the atmosphere, in contrast, is a lark that lasts only nine days.”
You really must read Jason’s essay for the full effect.
“As much as we talk about the importance of the web of relationships that underpin the natural world, I think we’re still mostly thinking about a relationship between things. But species, organisms, organs, traits, genes, cells are not things; they’re nodes in the relationships. Energy passes through Earth systems and networks of life, nutrients migrate along magnetic fields in the shape of birds, births and deaths are both transient wombs.”
Pamela Leavey, Poem of the day: winged bird
More herons! Can never have too many herons.
🍃 Kinship
Troy Putney, Promise Kept
Death arrived early before our table was even set, before I could give my best boy a walk, a promise I intended to keep. Ten ravens converged on our corner, one for each year we had together, reminders of how a murder can be kind when the suffering is too great. Time has stopped in our home, every clock ticks in place, and I am desperately afraid to allow them to begin again. Begin again is what I wish for you, in the space your good dreams live, in a time of your own choosing, where I can find you when I get there too.
~
, from this post.🍃 Entanglement
I’m overjoyed to have recently discovered Gill Moon and
. She’s a landscape photographer and author living on the Suffolk Coast. In a recent post, she reflects on her lifelong connection with the living world.“Nature connection engages our senses and our emotions and it is what drives my image making. Photography for me is not just about seeing, it is about feeling.”
🍃 Immersion
FogChaser, End Scene
It’s a delight to immerse in FogChaser’s writing and images while listening to his mesmerizing compositions.
“I invite you to sit with this month’s song, photos, and poem and make them a small part of your day, whether that’s your morning ritual, afternoon break, or evening wind-down.”
🍃 Story
Pod reads like a fable, with full immersion into the perspectives of a young female Spinner dolphin and a mature male Humpback. They are rendered with sweet otherness, and with longings, affinities and experiences that feel adjacent to our own. Laline Paull’s story ripples with convincing echoes between their mammal lives and our own.
This story touches me with oblique truths. One example: a young whale is orphaned by a ship strike that decimates his large, boisterous pod. He encounters a small pod of troubadour whales who’ve chosen mild equatorial waters over their usual Arctic territory. His new friends want only to sing happy songs, while he incubates pure darkness: the horrible, violent death of his family, the taste of their blood in the water, the excruciating noise of the ship. Unable to bear such ugliness, they evict him from their group. Maybe humans aren’t the only ones who try to hide from pain.
Julie Gabrielli, Shapeshifting
This story involves a heron, who insisted on being included here. Who am I to argue?
🍃 Hope
From my favorite newsletter about climate solutions, Grist, comes a timely story about climate voters possibly swaying this election. To that I say: bring it on!
“In the final days before the presidential election, roughly 2,000 volunteers from all around the country are spending hours calling voters across 19 states. Their objective? Get people who care about climate change to the polls, particularly those who didn’t show up in the last presidential election.”
Read the story.
🍃 Housekeeping
What did you enjoy most about this edition of NatureStack? I love to hear from readers. If you have any suggestions or requests for next month, do let me know in the comments.
If you enjoyed this post, a lovely ❤️ keeps me going. Another way to help others find great nature writing on Substack is to share this post by restacking it on Notes, via the Substack app. Thanks!
Special thanks to for the monarch butterfly photograph.
Read about more marvelous nature writers in the Reciprocity interview series, which so far has featured Antonia Malchik, Katharine Beckett Winship, Jessica Becker, Hadden Turner, Nan Seymour, Kate Bown, Sydney Michalski, Andrea Joy Adams, Susannah Fisher, Michela Griffith and
. Next up: .
In case you missed the NatureStack #04, it’s here:
and, let’s face it, for weeks after
Mary Oliver from “The Ponds”
Thank you, Julie, for including me with such incredible writers in your post today. Each of their works touched me in unexpected ways. And thank you for once again reminding us that nature is the medicine our hearts always need.
Yay for the heron theme and I'm so glad you included yours. Also happy to see your blurb about Pod! That one stays with me.🐬