The Wild Scribe

In January 2021, deep in the long strangeness of Covid lockdown, people gathered from across the world for a ten-month writing series I was hosting through the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking in the UK. They came from Bristol and New York, from suburban homes and country cottages, each carrying different burdens, different challenges. We couldn't visit sick parents or hold the hands of the dying or even attend funerals. And yet — and this is the part that still moves me — something unexpected was already beginning.

With planes stilled, traffic thinned, construction halted, the human world receded. Into that hush, nature stepped forward. No longer distracted by daily commutes and constant movement, we slowed down enough to notice. We became aware of trees we had walked past for years, of waving grasses in the early morning–– birds whose names we didn't always know but whose songs were suddenly, startlingly present. Something ancient stirred in us. 

For most of human history, our ancestors moved at the pace of seasons and tides, the slow arc of light across a winter sky. They had time to see. Time simply to be, to honor the land and the more than human companions who shared their world. That knowing is still in us, it turns out, waiting beneath the clatter and cacophony of modern life. In the enforced stillness, it rose.

And so we gathered each month to write — about the streams running through our memories and landscapes, the neighborhoods we were rooted in, the places that returned to us in dreams. What none of us anticipated was the joy. The quality of awe that moved through the group when someone found language for something they had felt but never before been able to articulate. We were not just writing about nature. We were remembering our belonging to it. And that remembering — ancient, cellular, surprisingly jubilant — changed everything.

For my husband and me, it was Pacheco Valle (no “y”) in northern Marin — a place we thought we knew after decades of living here. But with the state parks closed and the instruction to stay put, there was so much more to learn and experience. When my husband's father died of COVID and we couldn't travel to comfort his mother, the valley held us. When we felt stir-crazy and anxious, we opened our hearts wider still. We came to know each deer by name. We watched a raccoon sleeping in an abandoned bird's nest outside our window. We learned the language of the fog and the sun and the slant of late afternoon light. No longer observers, we were participants in something vast and alive.

This is what the Wild Scribe writing group gave us: a quality of wonder that the everyday world had long since trained us to overlook. The beauty of lichen on stone, of bark on tree, of a single squirrel on a limb in a world shut down — these things broke us open. And in that opening, something shifted. We were no longer watching nature from a careful distance. We were nature, waking up to herself.

The Wild Scribe was born from that waking. The world hasn't grown any saner since. And that primary relationship with the Earth from which we all emerged — the one this book tends and explores and celebrates — remains, I believe, as essential as breath.