Voices of Forest and Coast

what a litany of Spring flowers teaches us about honouring the names

Apr 21, 2024

(This post may be easier to read on the website by pressing the title above as some mail senders may truncate it)

Welcome friends, familiar and new.

This week was the tenth anniversary of Adam and me getting together. It started with an email about a shark, whether the shark was alive, and has taken us to some amazing places. I’ve been nursing a cracked rib since January and work has been all-encompassing so we decided to head for the coast for three nights.

Before we left I did a walk along the track beside our house that heads into the forest and was thrilled to see so many flowers flourishing — many of them also herbal allies. And then at the coast, a little wooden house by the shore in the village of Plouhinec near Douarnanez, another chorus of aliveness.

We are living in such a precarious world. Our treatment of one another is unspeakable and when we do find the halting, inadequate words for genocide, they can all too easily be silenced. Our treatment of the earth that nourishes and shelters us is just as savage. And yet here is the earth insisting on life and renewal. Wherever we find acts of kindness and courage, wherever we witness the earth holding us with nurturing and joy, surely we need to take notice.

When Robert Macfarlane wrote The Lost Words, exquisitely illustrated by Jackie Morris, he was rightly pointing out how language and what we value go hand in hand. Words were disappearing from children's dictionaries - Dandelion, Otter, Bramble and Acorn, all gone. A generation with less access to wild play robbed even of the words to name animals and flowers in their environments. What we do not name, we do not take notice of, we do not treasure, we do not remember.

After visting Prague a few years ago I was haunted by images from the Pinkas Synogogue, which holds the memory of victims of the Shoah in Czech territories — the pictures done by children in the ghetto of Theresienstadt and the wall of names of those lost. Now another people are being obliterated. Will we remember their names? A Palestinian child is killed every 15 minutes in Gaza, many are babies — read some of their names here.

In the midst of such loss, there’s a natural world still speaking to us of hope, of a different way to live. Every flower and leaf vibrates with colour, communicates through shape and scent, is simply and wholly present. Let us not take part in the silencing of those being massacred. Let us not allow the silencing of the earth. Let us not lose the names…