I started writing this article while sitting in “Environmental Horticulture.” We’re working in small groups to list ways plants are important to/impact the lives of humans. I’ve never felt more confident that journalism was the right major for me because, while my teammates talk about plants becoming biofuel and livestock feed, I’m fixated on the way plants inspire religion and art within humans.
There’s no explanation for it, really. There’s just the undeniable truth that we, as humans, like nature. We like taking care of plants, we like growing them, we like looking at paintings of them, we find beauty and divinity within them. We just find plants appealing and healing – both in the medicinal and mental sense.
This has certainly been true for me. Moving from Arkansas to Missouri has yielded the worst allergies of my life and my first-ever sinus infection. Local honey, “Swiss Alpine Herb” cough drops and tea are the things that got me through.
Nature has also served a crucial role in my processing of grief. Specifically, three novels that explore the connection of humans with nature and its ramifications. On the surface, these narrative accounts of the authors’ interaction with the wild may appear similar, but each of these books has provided me with a specific key to moving forward and being okay with it.
Now, this isn’t to say reading these books will provide you the same catharsis – you may not even like them – but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least give these books their due and acknowledge how they’ve shaped me this past semester. So here, I’ve compiled the title, author, blurb and lessons learned.
Enjoy.
“Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Father and a Magpie,” by Charlie Gilmour
The most abstractly – lushly – written book on this list, “Featherhood,” is an exploration of Gilmour’s simultaneous loss and gain. Gilmour is newly married and expecting his first child at the same time his biological and adoptive fathers grow older and iller. Gilmour finds solace in his unlikely friendship with an injured magpie – Benzene – whom he takes in and raises after she proves unable to return to the wild. Gilmour explores his fears of fatherhood and the future while reflecting on the nature of his own family and his absent biological father’s similar experience with a jackdaw years prior.
“Featherhood,” is one of those books that stuck with me long after I read it. While I initially didn’t feel a strong attachment to it, as time passed, I found myself returning to various aspects of the story. I lived for Gilmour’s descriptions of his resourceful and wise fiancee, Yana, or his insightful dissections of the nuances of family life and structure. Gilmour’s razor-sharp positioning at the cusp of life and death yields revelatory writing about taking cues from the cycles of nature. This is not a comforting view of death as an easy ordeal, but more so a promise that, as hard as it is, the sun will continue to rise and we will hear the call of birds each morning.
“Fox And I: An Uncommon Friendship,” by Catherine Raven
A self-described outsider, Raven is living in Montana and working as a professor when a series of encounters between her and a fox – lovingly referred to as ‘Fox’ – begin. While initially striving to keep distant from Fox for the sake of preserving his wild nature, Raven soon finds herself inextricably tied to him as she watches his development and response to the changing environment around him. At once a question of how nature and humans interact and a love letter to finding belonging, Raven’s memoir perfectly captures the cycles of love and loss in nature.
My mom was the one who encouraged me to read this book, and foolishly, I put it off. What finally – and thankfully – made me open Raven’s debut, was a strangely lucid dream about chasing a fox around the forest. While this is not a scene that plays out in Raven’s memoir, the book is a metaphorical chase of Fox in an attempt to understand his life and the ecosystem he belongs in. More than any other point Raven makes, “Fox And I,” is a reminder that we do not control the world we live in. There is no way for us to gauge how our actions will affect everything around us. So, Raven argues, when we do act, we must make sure it is with good intentions. And, if something does go wrong, trust that time will allow it to right itself.
“Braiding Sweetgrass,” by Robin Wall Kimmerer
A botanist, scientist, professor and mother of the Potawatomi nation, Kimmerer draws on her vast personal and professional experiences to paint a compelling portrait of scientific and spiritual fulfillment found in nature. Each chapter focuses on a different anecdote or plant, highlighting its significance and role in the world at large. What results is a beautiful argument for why man must protect nature so that he may live alongside it.
I will evangelize this book for the rest of my life. Anyone with an interest in plants or animals should read this, but anyone who has ever felt an attachment to a part of the natural world should as well. Kimmerer is an emotive nature writer, relating nature to humans – or more accurately, relating humans to nature. Here, Kimmerer argues there has never been a natural separation between man and nature, but rather a willful separation as time went on. However, despite these efforts, we as a species are drawn to nature and belong to it. This book is a manifesto of conversation and a call to protect the world from which we come.