Tag Archives: natural world

Unclothing

Dome tent in the mountains, with the sun just above the horizon
Photo by Kevin Ianeselli

‘What sparked the idea?’

Dr Lauren Ellis’s eyes glaze as if no one has ever asked this intellectual giant what incited the Eureka moment that was to transform environmental research—the translation software that allows scientists to communicate with entire ecosystems, to enable a more symbiotic relationship between human communities and the natural world.

‘I was camping with my boyfriend,’ she reveals. ‘One morning I woke up to see the networks of mycelial threads that stretched out over the landscape.’

Cherchez la femme, they say, or in Dr Ellis’s case, cherchez l’homme. Is the mystery man still in her life?

‘Next question,’ is the curt reply. The man remains a mystery. Thankfully, due to Ellis’s pioneering spirit, the natural world is becoming less of one.

Not boyfriend but first husband, Lauren thinks, mentally editing the article for style and accuracy. 

He’d brought her on the camping trip to confess his affair. When in the early hours she’d ripped the sleeping bag from his body and voraciously unclothed him, buttons popping on his thermal gilet, lined tracksuit bottoms wrenched from kicking legs, he must have assumed he was forgiven. But the desire that raged through her was not a longing for loving union but an implacable will to discover.

Or rather, she thinks, to uncover what lay beneath the tight web of language that formed the noun-phrase containers of his image: faithful husband, misunderstood man, complex depressive, now woeful penitent. When stripping him of the layers of clothing did not sate her, she pressed into him with a passion, not to connect but to unweave the layers of language that shaped the likeness he’d presented, the only version of him she’d ever known, as if the naked heat of such a yearning could melt through his façade and reveal some nascent truth within.

Outside in the emerging day she wrapped her sleeping bag around her and marvelled at the white web of fungal strands that clothed the organic landscape. Not to insulate, she realised, but to connect. 

Something loosened within her, an idea unravelling.

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Possessed

Wolf pack on a rock formation
Photo by Thomas Bonometti

Each fibre of fur is a strand of awareness. Each press of paw pad on the earth a moment of contact. We gather under the full moon in a sacred geometry as aligned with the astronomical expanses as any stone circle. The finely tuned notes of this howling symphony transmit the Earth’s wisdom to the stars.

A litter of freshly whelped cubs is both a miracle and a liability. We watch them each diligently, perhaps obsessively.

At the first sign of possession, a decision must be made. By what might the youngster be possessed? Can such possession be outgrown?

We’re on guard for clear signs the taint is growing stronger. Possession becomes apparent in the grammar of the cub’s eyes as he stares at the mother. ‘Mine,’ he thinks. He notes a unique fleck of white below the dam’s chin. ‘Hers.’

Possession destroys unity and must be stopped before it can grow. A merciful killing is sometimes required. Such measures pain us, though, and howls become mourning songs.

If we are travelling near a place where people live, we’ll sometimes deposit the cub on the threshold of a human dwelling. We stay distant, waiting for the cub’s new owners to discover it there, their miracle puppy, their adorable stray.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 79 of Structured Visions. Subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.