Reading Nature | 3 Recommendations 🌳
Titles to turn to when you'd rather be outdoors.
Lately, I’ve found myself reaching for nature books. I know by now that this urge is like a smoke signal from within. It means I’m sad or worried. Ungrounded, stuck in my head. I need sentences that feel like sand between my toes. Windy paragraphs. I need to read a page (or a dozen) about a single hummingbird. I need to remember that there’s beauty all around me. Look. Look. Look.
Today, I wanted to share a few of the titles I’ve been relying on in the last week—one old and two new (to me). If you, too, find yourself craving a little word trip to the woods, follow me. Let’s skip rocks and learn about the gestation periods of alligators. Let’s take a deep in the stream, then find a spot in the sun to eat our peanut butter pretzels with dirt still caked in our fingertips. Grab your SPF, let’s go.
1. When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams
After hearing
of Book Riot recommend this again and again, I finally picked it up. And WOW, I’m glad I did. The lyrical memoir begins when Terry Tempest Williams inherits her mother’s journals, only to discover that every page is (are you ready for it?) blank.What follows is a study on faith, nature, writing, and daughterhood. I’m halfway through and loving every page so far. I find myself reading a sentence and then whispering it aloud to myself. It’s that good.
“It is here, on this edge of sand and surf, where I must have developed my need to see the horizon, to look outward as far and wide as possible. My hunger for vistas has never left me. And it is here I must have fallen in love with water, recognizing its power and sublimity, where I learned to trust that what I love can kill me, knock me down, and threaten to drown me with its unexpected wave. If so, then it was also here where I came to know I can survive what hurts. I believed in my capacity to stand back up and run into the waves again and again, no matter the risk.”
2. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
Peace isn’t the only thing to be found outdoors. Annie Dillard reminds me how gripping, unexpected, and savage nature can be. Female praying mantises are sexual cannibals. The triangle weaver spider can transform its nest into a slingshot. Some mushrooms are a meal; some cause wild hallucinations. These are “fun” facts, sure, but they’re also a wonderful reminder of the complex and varied ways there are to live. In Dillard’s own words:
“Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you're dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there's always room for one more; you ain't so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.”
3. The Birds and the Beasts Were There, Margaret Miller
I picked this book up on a whim at Bart’s Books in Ojai. Miller lived in Santa Barabara and kept careful notes about all the wildlife that visited the feeding stations in her backyard over the years. When I read a chapter, I feel like I’m sipping a cup of tea beside her as we look out the window together. Maybe, soon, a hummingbird will zing up to the window. In the meantime, we’ll wait. We’ll chat. We’ll have another cup of tea.
“Occasionally I am asked what difference bird watching has made in my life. I can only repeat, the days don’t begin quick enough, and never last long enough, and the years go by too soon.”
Reading: All of the above
Writing: Something new
Listening: “Catch and Release” by Matt Simons, Deepend
Eating: Food from my CSA box! Yay!
This newsletter is written and edited by me, so please excuse the occasional grammatical error or spelling gaffe. My Very Talented Mother, Caitilin McPhillips, designed my logo for me. Thanks, Mom.
Love Pilgrim! My all-time favorite is The Old Ways by brilliant polymath Robert Macfarlane. You might like Margaret Renkl’s first book, Late Migrations, as it combines memoir and nature writing. She has a regular column in the NYT.