The making of…
This week The Wildlife Trusts’ 30 Days Wild campaign is all about getting creative with nature, from journaling to sketching, photography to music. Encounter’s founder Melissa Harrison explains how creativity helps her deepen her connection with her nearby wild
When I a kid, growing up in the previous century, it was comparatively easy to be connected to nature. My friends and I played outdoors, unsupervised, in a way that’s impossible for today’s children: we were allowed to roam the nearby woods, common and (on occasion) building sites without anyone knowing where we were. We climbed trees, built dens and dammed streams not because adults encouraged us to, but because we were bored and wanted to interact with the world – because back then, the outdoors was far more interesting than anything indoors. In those years, I was deeply connected to nature but I took it very much for granted and I didn’t relate to it creatively at all.
That came later, in my late 20s and early 30s. Living in central London and increasingly nature-deprived, I started to keep a garden diary as a way of working out what flowered when, so I could plant things out in the bare, rubbly back yard of my rented flat and always have something living to look at. That rudimentary nature diary slowly expanded to take in the natural phenomena I increasingly found myself noticing in the local streets, and I began to take photos, too, trying to capture the natural details I was tuning in to, the things that made my life feel connected and enriched. And the more I wrote in my nature journal, and the more photos I took, the more nature I noticed: my brain was developing new filters, making nature ‘pop out’ to my attention and sending other things, like traffic and litter, into the background. Before long, the urban environment that made up my daily reality was rich in life: it always had been, of course, but I had to something creative with it to develop the eyes to really see.
I’ve come to realise that doing something with the things we’re interested in – sorting, describing or transforming them, even in the most modest way – is an incredibly powerful way to deepen our connection to those things, whatever they are. When we take a photo, even just a quick one with our phones, we put a frame around something, selecting it and separating it from the surrounding world. When we stop and sketch a flower, its shape and form become more deeply impressed on our understanding. When we note down the things that have interested us or brought us joy, or choose the words that best describe how we feel about them, we cement our memory of and connection to those things. Writing, photographic, recording, arranging: these acts signal to our our unconscious minds that the things we are interacting with deserve our attention and should be separated from the general backdrop our lives play out against, and should take their place on stage where they can be appreciated in greater detail. Over time, these small, repeated acts change our experience of reality itself, a process known as ‘perceptual learning’.
This isn’t about how ‘good’ or ‘successful’ the things you create are; in fact, that isn’t even relevant. Interacting with nature in a creative way can be a completely private act, something with no audience at all: a collection of close-up photos of moss stored in a folder on your phone; a set of recordings you’ve made of the sound of running water; an arrangement of fallen leaves you lay out on the forest floor, and then let blow away.
Photo by Sepehr Moazed on Unsplash
Keeping a nature journal via the Encounter app (or in a physical journal) is a great place to start, and the more you add to your journal the richer your experience of the natural world will be. But there are lots of other ways to get creative with nature, if you give yourself the freedom to try. How about making cyanotypes of your favourite plants, collecting and displaying feathers, creating a stumpery in your garden or remixing the song of a nightingale?
Whatever you do, make sure it’s sparked by your own interest and curiosity rather than external factors: your relationship with nature is precious and personal to you, and has nothing to do with approval or Likes. Tune in to what moves you, and find a way to interact with it. It really is as simple as that.
Homecoming: A Guided Journal to Lead You Back to Nature by Melissa Harrison is available here.
