Connections: When you pick blackberries, ask for permission and say thank you.

The top work is one I have written on. I want to make into a book, as I have probably mentioned before. I completed it the year before last. The other pieces are waiting to be put together to make a whole. Older works that I will use to create a bigger piece.

The studio will be warming up now. It's been warmer for about 3 days now!! It was fridge temperature last week.

So I've been thinking about our relationship with nature and have been reading this afternoon. This blog doesn't make much sense, probably, it's a train of thought, and I have now found I need more books and to do more reading. Of course.

I read this somewhere the other day. I think somebody posted it on instagram. Thought it was lovely. It is by Nicolette Sowder.

May we raise children

who love the unloved

things – the dandelion, the

worms and spiderlings.
Children who sense
the rose needs the thorn

& run into rainswept days
the same way they
turn towards sun…

And when they’re grown &
someone has to speak for those
who have no voice

may they draw upon that
wilder bond, those days of
tending tender things

and be the ones.

Have been listening to Robert McFarlane talking about language and the importance of how we speak about things, how words can under-value and disregard because of the language we use.

I have mentioned this linguistic imperialism before after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass: "In English you are either a human or a thing. .... Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?"

Whilst reading about ecology and nature and the Anthropocene (an era in which humans have begun leaving a permanent imprint on the geologic record), I have come across the word reciprocity again and again. At first I couldn't even say it. Even though I know what it means by looking at it, and as a human being, I like to think that I go through life with a reciprocal attitude, I hadn't thought of it in relation to the natural world. Always say thanks and give back in return for what you have taken. To quote Robin Wall Kimmerer again:

"Though the Earth provides us with all that we need, we have created a consumption-driven economy that asks, “What more can we take from the Earth?” and almost never “What does the Earth ask of us in return?”

The premise of Earth asking something of me—of me!—makes my heart swell. I celebrate the implicit recognition of the Earth’s animacy, that the living planet has the capacity to ask something of us and that we have the capacity to respond. We are not passive recipients of her gifts, but active participants in her well-being. We are honored by the request. It lets us know that we belong."

This blog is me trying to get my head around where my work is going, I need some words for my prints. We should be grateful to the world that gives to us daily.

Climate chaos shows that we are not grateful, that we haven't given back but that we have taken and taken and taken. Our lives depend on the gifts that the earth gives us. We need to clean up after ourselves and look after the world. To restore what we have ruined. The recent pandemic is a direct result of human beings eating stuff that shouldn't be eaten, thinking we are cleverer than nature and because our relationship to the land is broken. We think we are exceptional as humans and are more deserving than other species and so we consume too much.

Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests we make a linguistic switch and that we refer to other beings by name and by not using 'it'. Might we adopt a grammar where we say he or she or kin? Kin is the plural word for our relatives. Kinship with every being. Do not use 'it' unless it's for bulldozers!

I have found some interesting stuff about language and nature.

http://www.languagemakingnature.com/history-of-the-project

Emergence Magazine is on line and worth a look at. Lots of great stuff to read to listen to whilst you are doing your thing.

https://emergencemagazine.org/