Reciprocity: The Interview

I'm so delighted to join Julie Gabrielli today in her Reciprocity Interview series. At her Substack, Homecoming, Julie welcomes nature writers of every sort into conversation, making her site a welcoming place for all Earth-loving readers and writers. I enjoy imagining that the more-than-human Earth beings are also bending close to listen, to enjoy being appreciated in the community she fosters in this way. Julie's interview questions are rich, and they took me places in answering them that I didn't expect to go. I hope you enjoy!

Nature writer, n. A person who delights in paying attention, being astonished, and telling about it.¹

“We think we can endlessly extract from the other Earth beings because they exist to serve us. When a person contacts the aliveness of a tree or a mountain or the sea, they step outside this worldview. They revel in the love they experience, the beating heart within all the beings and forces of Earth. They are changed.” ~ Priscilla Stuckey

Why are you drawn to nature writing?

The hope I feel for the world flows from the power of nature, so I want to let everyone know!

Long ago, I started writing about nature because I had stories to tell about how connecting with nature had worked powerful healing inside me, had helped me recover from loss and grief.

But writing those stories mushroomed into something larger. I began to understand that connecting-with-nature stories have something to say to the largest problem we face now—the fact that we are attacking the Earth’s ability to provide for us. We live under terrifyingly destructive systems built on a mistaken mental model—that the Earth is soulless matter operating like a machine. So we think we can endlessly extract from the other Earth beings because they exist to serve us. When a person contacts the aliveness of a tree or a mountain or the sea, they step outside this worldview. They revel in the love they experience, the beating heart within all the beings and forces of Earth. They are changed.

And reading these stories can also open the heart. Stories of an alive, animate Earth help us “find tongues in trees,” as Shakespeare put it. New stories open up new possibilities. So I came to understand that telling my stories might have something to offer to this immense project of pointing our whole society in more life-affirming, Earth-loving directions.

I keep on writing about nature because nature is the source of healing, the source of wisdom. All our problems stem, essentially, from ignoring and denying nature’s processes. Capitalism, for instance, is really denial of death in economic form—striving for endless increase instead of being willing to move with the Earth’s rhythm of ebb and flow.

Many of our society’s rules for personal life also involve trying to downplay or conquer the rhythms of nature. Illness is a normal part of life, yet our society fears illness and shows contempt for disabled people. As a society we have no methods for healing from loss and emotional wounding built in to our everyday interactions, and many people remain stuck as a result. We try to stuff our feelings, which makes us rigid and intolerant of others. These are all ways we set ourselves against nature—in this case the nature inside us—and it causes so much misery!

By contrast, connecting with nature enlarges us. Opening to nature’s mysteries challenges our mental models, keeps us alert and awake. It puts us in touch with the moment, with what is real. Contacting the wisdom of a tree can change a person’s life. Feeling awestruck under a starry sky makes us more tolerant and generous, and this is demonstrated in psychological research.² Connecting with nature reminds us how to live well, which means how be humble—how to find joy in our very small place in this miraculous, magical world. When we open our hearts to the beings around us, they nudge us toward our better selves—toward more openness, more kindness. We come home.

If just looking at pictures of nature can calm and soothe people, I hold the hope that reading nature writing can heal us too.

How does writing about nature affect you, in your work or personal life?

The writing always pushes me to go deeper into what is true. It nudges me to ask, “What’s behind this?” or “Where did this come from?” Then, to communicate the glimmer of what I see, writing pushes me to dig deeper for the simplest, clearest words.

Writing is a way of finding out what we really think, isn’t it? In writing, we teach ourselves what we already know. We try to give words to what we know beyond words.

And we do it so that we can create bridges. Little passageways from one person to another that may be thin and precarious as catwalks. But each little bridge from heart to heart, no matter how delicate, gives all of us more freedom of movement.

And then there are the personal benefits. I need to contact nature’s heart myself in order to be in the right place to communicate it to others. To write about the sense of hope and joy that nature gives people, I need to marinate in birdsong so my own soul fills with sweetness instead of despair. To communicate the wisdom and power of the sea, I need to immerse myself regularly in the jostles and swells of the ocean to wash my mind free of its burdens. Keeping my own heart in a good place is a daily practice, and writing about nature does that by keeping me in contact with the “holy wild.”³

And the writing itself reciprocates; it gives something back. A wise person once told me, “It has to heal you before it can heal others.” That’s how I can tell if a paragraph or a piece is working—if it helps put me in a good place first of all. Experiencing nature fills me with joy, and then writing about is like dipping the fresh cookie in milk—it intensifies the pleasure.

While outside, have you ever experienced feeling small, lost, or in danger?

All the time! Feeling small is the very best feeling—there’s such a big world to revel in! Like when we were very young children, eager to discover the next cool thing.

When I swim in the sea, the feeling of being enveloped by such vastness is beyond bliss. I spent decades learning to swim, though I didn’t really have a good reason for why I was trying so hard because I had no plans to ever live near the water. So many years of community pools—sharing lanes, bumping into rope coils, staring down onto concrete floors, the reek of chlorine and gym bags. And now every swim is an exercise in utter freedom. Like a pool that extends to forever.

And yes, it’s dangerous too. The swell and surge of the water changes every day, every hour, and each swim is all about staying alert to the moment. If the winds rise or the water gets choppy, wading out of the water becomes tricky, even dangerous. Sharks are present, and though attacks are rare, they do happen. So you never turn your back on the ocean. No zoning out into bliss; you have to stay vigilant.

Danger accompanies us in every swim, and to me that’s a sign of a healthy eco-community. It’s a sign that the others of nature are living their own best lives outside of human control. They remain ungovernable. The very thing about nature that stretches and challenges us and hones our skills—the unpredictability, the aliveness—can also endanger us. But subtract the danger and we’re only visiting an amusement park.

One recent time that terrified me was just a couple of years ago at the end of a shore dive. During the sixty minutes that my buddy and I were underwater, the wind kicked up in a big way, and we surfaced to gray skies and a gray sea, with a wind that was whipping waves to a dangerous size, even a few whitecaps. I sometimes enjoy swimming in sizable waves, riding up and down on them and feeling held in their dance, but these waves came with a dangerous current. We were trying to swim hard toward the sandy beach where we had entered the water, but the current was sending us instead toward an area of big jagged rocks. I kicked and kicked for all I was worth, but I was no match for the current. Lucky for me, my buddy was very strong. He grabbed my hand and powered both of us around the rocks and toward the sand.

I learned a couple of important lessons that day. I work out now with weights and trampoline to stay stronger, with more stamina. And when I dive I do it earlier in the morning to avoid the wind, which almost always increases at midday. Spending a few minutes fearing for my safety planted the knowing deep in my body that respecting the habits and intelligence of our surroundings is key to surviving.

What's a favorite memory of nature from your childhood?

Visiting my aunt and uncle at their vacation cottage on a lake a few hours away. I was very small, and the water of the lake made my teeth chatter, but I loved staying in until I was nearly blue. The mud was so unbelievably soft and squishy! Like velvet between my toes.

What do you hope for, for your writing?

I hope for it to awaken the heart of the reader. To move them or inspire them or even jostle them to see the familiar world in a different light. To open their awareness to the other creatures. I hope to be a voice, however small or trembly, for the great power and wisdom that the animals or birds or soil or clouds have to share with us. And to help readers make the connections between the story of nature that we hold in our minds and how we treat each other as human beings.

My stories about nature may seem “out there” to some readers because I write about animate Earth, about a world that is alive in ways that our everyday knowledge systems don’t recognize. Years ago I had the courage to begin telling these stories because I was convinced—and I remain convinced—that most people have a similar story to tell.

I think all the beings of nature, the plants and animals and forests and waters and skies, are working overtime to give each person a peek behind the curtain. It might come as a child lying under a tree on a summer day, and suddenly the world crackles with light. It might be getting lost in a forest, and a bird or a deer leads the way home. For every person the experience is different, but each one of those moments opens the heart. Reality unmasks itself, and we get to experience something richer and more vibrant and more loving than the world we usually see.

So I write in the faith that by hearing my stories, others will have the courage to trust their own perception—to believe their own stories and find the voice to tell them.

This is how the world changes—by people telling the truth about their lives.

A writer or other creative artist who makes you hopeful for humanity and the earth.

Every writer who tells the truth gives me hope. I read all kinds of fiction and nonfiction, and each writer who touches that spark of truthfulness fills me with hope. The ones I stay with the longest are those who write their truth with an open heart—because they have so much passion, and they make that love visible on the page.

When it comes to hope for humanity, I turn to Indigenous writers, because of their history. Indigenous peoples have a track record of relating to nature—and one another—in more respectful ways than my own people do. Most of white mainstream culture believes that the dysfunctions in our own society are “just natural”—that inequality and corruption and domination and greed are just “what happens” when people try to live together.

But Indigenous writers attest loudly and clearly that there are other ways to arrange society—other ways of relating to nature, which means other ways of relating to each other as well. Listening to Indigenous voices from every continent reminds me that different stories of nature are possible, and that people can live by them. Every Indigenous culture has accumulated centuries of experience in caring for the Earth and for each other in their own way. They have tailored their lifeways according to the needs of their own locale.

Care and reciprocity and equality—these are not just nice ideas; they have teeth when a society chooses to make them a priority in their value system and in their daily lives. Indigenous writers bring the receipts: a different world is possible!

¹ Thanks, Mary Oliver.

² See the resources at the end of my podcast 41, Why Is the World So Beautiful?

³ Thanks to Victoria Loorz and Wild Church for the beautiful term “holy wild.”