I was so pleased when my application was selected for this event, hosted and facilitated by Elspeth Wilson.
“Un/Natural is a programme for D/deaf, disabled and/or neurodivergent nature writers funded by the Royal Society of Literature’s Literature Matters programme.”
Here is the piece that I wrote from the series of workshops and read on the night of the showcase.
Considering the limits/un-limits of the same window’s view
Imagine the same view – some days, nature is the window where I have placed my chair. When my supply of spoons runs low, nature is my little vale of glass, my crystal clearing, my invisible lake. It brings me its small wonders of sky, treetops crowned with mist. It speaks to me in a language of weathers – I hear its stories of sun, of snow, of nimbostratus clouds.
Even that fly on the pane is nature. Even the mould on a piece of stale bread. The amazing thing about nature is that it never offers the same day twice – if only one second, one zeptosecond, one yoctosecond passes, everything seems different. That distant bird has stopped calling. That bee has flown away.
Sometimes I don’t feel up to going out. Nature doesn’t tell me that I’m weak, or wrong, or strange – that I am coming across as anti-social, that I ought to be making an effort, at least. It shows me how it shivers the jasmine alive along the fence with only its breath. Sometimes I try to make plans. Give up because I have days when I am afraid. I think about barriers – physical, mental, emotional, financial. I think about how it must feel to look down on the world from a mountain’s peak. On Good Days, I have a mile in me before I feel things start to hurt. My hip. My heels. My confidence. I feel ashamed. I aim for home.
If I was to go out into the big wide everything, where on Earth would I start? River, moor, sea? Fen, crag, chalk, slate or field? I dream of stretching my wings but everything seems bigger, more complicated than I thought. It often seems easier to pack my ambition away, stay where I am. I imagine the wind, reaching me scented with flavours of heather, brackish water, sand and soil. It would burnish me with salt, knot my hair, parch my skin, chap across my lips.
I stick pins in a fantasy map. Scotland, for sure – I’d make it to Kyle of Lochalsh, where the Glenachulish floats the Kylerhea narrows. I’d wait on the chill-scumbled shore for the chugging ferry’s approach and ride the ripples over to Skye and sing, like so many other people have sung;
all that was me is gone.
I would visit the Connemara wilds and watch the ponies bloom like pale flowers, hardy and sweet – wait for the sunset to burn upon the stones of Knockbrack Tomb. There is a whole planet still to learn – each pebble, each brook, each landscape enduring its changes of season. This window is where I paint my journeys – there is space here, wide enough to hold the blue Tuscan skies, cherry blossom in spring, Patagonia, Kilimanjaro; light, held on the skin of fjords, the spangled ghost
of the Northern Lights. There is room enough to carry all my dreams.
Note
All that was me is gone – The Skye Boat Song, Bear McCreary
Jane Burn Poet & Artist 