The Roaring Sea

I used to live close to the sea in Devon. Now I live in the mountains in France.

The change is refreshing. My environment is largely untouched by human hand and is therefore teeming with wildlife. It’s an aliveness that endlessly enthralls me. 

But this week I am back in the UK, and with my first sight of the ocean, a wonderful and terrible sense of loss gripped me. I remembered that the roar of the sea was the first truly wild animal that I encountered and learnt to relate to, when I lived for periods of time on beaches in Devon and Spain. Running around on beaches was also where I learnt to play with words, rather than be a prisoner to them.

I used to enjoy walking the shoreline just as the tide turned, and collecting what the ocean had thrown up over night. Each day it gave gifts, wonderful and unexpected: seeds from plants in the tropics, tins of food lost from ships. It also took. I knew a woman who was walking her dog on the beach on a stormy day, when the dog was swept out to sea.

In being in close proximity to push and pull of the tide, the life and death-bringer, I also learnt a lot about the necessary process of creation and destruction in my writing.

So often we are frightened to really experiment, to take the risk to bring something truly new into being. We are equally frightened to edit, to let go of words, phrases, and paragraphs in our writing that do not work. When we hold our writing that tight, are so fearful, our words can never live.

I found that when I stood unafraid in front of the roaring sea, when I could accept the inevitable gain and loss, and find a rhythm in that process, I could also stand unafraid in front of my words in the same way. Then they were free to express their power, to be wild.

The Weekly Prompt

Go to the edge of water. It could be the sea, a lake or a river. If possible choose a body of water that moves, that seems alive.

Write about the experience. How does it sound and smell? What colours and textures are contained within it? Also think about metaphor - if it were a wild animal, what wild animal would it be? How do you feel about being lose to it- does it attract or repel you? What memories or associations does it being up?

A Packet of Nuts?

There’s a tendency to focus on the ways in which we are no longer in contact with wildness.

In his book ‘Feral’, George Monbiot bemoans that the closest we now get to nature is “feeding the ducks in the park”, and “the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts”. In short, he says, civilisation has squeezed the wildness out of our environment, and out of us. When I’m teaching in London I sometimes get rather melancholy about the absence of nature around me. Did you know that when the foundations of Trafalgar Square were dug in the 1830’s, builders exposed river gravels crammed with the bones of hippopotami, straight-tusked tigers, giant deer, giant aurochs and lions?

But the truth is that it’s not all doom and gloom.

We can choose our world view, by choosing our statistics. We can be glass half-full, rather than glass half-empty people.

After all, new forms of wildness are being discovered all the time…

Recently, a species of bird that is completely new to science, The Cambodian tailorbird (Orthotomus chaktomuk), was found - hiding in plain sight in Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh.

And it’s just been announced by World Wildlife Fund, that more than 400 new species of plants and animals have been found in the under-explored Amazon rainforest in the past four years. They include a newly discovered species of monkey that purrs like a cat, a flame-patterned lizard, a vegetarian piranha and a frog the size of a thumbnail.

So how does this relate to our wild words?

Firstly, we should never give up hope that the passion and power that has become deadened and buried through overuse and over-familiarity, can re-find it’s wildness, and right under our noses, in fact.

Finding the wild words is like finding any other wild creature. It’s in the moment of awe-filled discovery that they live. And it’s through the variety of expression and movement that they move the reader.

When those words begin to purr, when they leap and roar, it’s then we know we’ve unleashed the wild in them.

The Weekly Prompt

Write a 1000 word, fiction, or non-fiction piece, in prose or poetry, using the following prompt:

“the greatest trial of strength and ingenuity we face is opening a badly designed packet of nuts”.

First published November 19th 2013