I recently had to confront the speedy nature of one year passing since my long lost father’s death. He had been a presence that was absent for 55 years. the way in which I found him was a blessing as it was not a few short months before he released himself from his body to be with the Ancestors.
I have not yet been able to fully comprehend his passing as I have not yet visited his grave side. He is buried in American soil and I am few days away from going to there.
When I have been most vulnerable, I have turned to the local parks in south London in all kinds of weather just to feel like I could breathe. A poem that seemed to write itself called “And For My Father” inspired a collage of mobile phone video clips into a short film that help me release some trapped energy that Grief had stored.
I found observing nature and the natural world does something quite magical if you let it. It invites stillness and enables you to see life as a kaleidoscope that is series of rotating patterns that astound and jolt you into calm alertness.
“One of the challenges we face would be the emotional overload, the grief, the overwhelm and eco-anxiety. All of this is in need of expression. These emotions are gruelling to carry, and there never seems to be enough time sit and unpack the graveness of the toll taken on the body to hold them all.
And while traditional nature poetry writing tends to separate the human from the natural and animal world, positioning the human as operating more as an observer to the beauty, the intricacies and viscerality of nature in symbiosis with itself, eco-poetry forces us to recognise that we are a part of this planet's ecology. We are part of the organic matter of its fabric.”
The above quote is from a previous blog, “What Is EcoPoetry?”
What I discovered is the 'Eco’ in EcoPoetry means “home”.
Post the covid pandemic in 2020 to 2022, I knew we would not be allowed to go back to "normal". Not the normality of civil society ticking along as usual, but something more essential.
Our sensibility as humans would not allow it, no matter how powerful the “nothing to see here” need for denial might be, the urge to evolve is in our dna strands. What does collective grief look like after the shock of a global quarantine where there is literally nowhere else to go except to the truth and realisation that this planet is our back yard; it is our “Home”? I want to write about that, and not just about the decimation and doubt about our recovery from an ecological crisis.
How I have been enlightened to just how ‘at home’ I feel in nature came about through the need to grieve and not knowing just how much I needed to grieve. Being in some of the larger parks across London drew grief out of me like soft water draws the infusions of medicinal properties from herbal tea, as a poultice of bentonite clay and plantain leaf draws toxins from a wound.
I also realised that ‘home’ is this Earth and living in a city like London, I have grown increasingly aware of the space cities take in the natural world. How the cadaver of a pigeon caught by foxes, or a fox hit by a car has a symmetry, and that the way that life lives next to death is not a simple blog post. It is a poem.
Life exists in everything, be it organic or manmade, because it all holds memory and intention, and responds to the elements. As season change, new pages are turned, and we are left wondering what happened in 2024? What does the tree at the end of your road tell you and how high will the new high rise building with all the surrounding cranes be?
These questions have approached me while minding my own business and seem more important now, after grief said don’t ignore me.
~Zena~
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