Book Review - How to Read Nature
This book is maybe a bit further afield of what I usually review in my spiritwork blog, but it felt like it fit well in with some of the things I’m focusing on this year. My read of Braiding Sweetgrass made me want to turn more attention to the world around me, and my morning ritual for the land spirits involves a thoughtful walk through our lush suburban neighborhood, which has made me want to understand better what the land is telling me. It also didn’t hurt that the book was a rather serendipitous find; my eyes just landed on it during an unplanned bookstore trip, and the above connections made me decide to pick it up.
The book’s author calls himself a “natural navigator” and indeed it’s written more in the voice of a hiker or memoir writer than a scientist or mystic. I have noticed that a lot of the less-positive reviews online take issue with the book’s freewheeling tone that they feel doesn’t fulfill the promise of the title. I have to admit that the book is not exactly a how-to, it’s not, as you might expect, a concise list of factoids, noting which flowers open at what hours, or what plants face toward the north. To some extent, it’s possible that if the book was that, it’d be less useful to someone like me, since Gooleys’s experience is mostly in a different biome on a different continent. But in practice, that didn’t matter, because his approach to the topic is actually much more personal and philosophical.
The key message of the book is in the value of engaging with nature, whether that’s through momentary sensory experience, longer observations, or research. The exercises in the book are as simple as listening for all the nature sounds you can hear in one minute and, or drawing a tree, or observing a place when you’re agitated, then again when you’re calm. My favorite, which taught me a lot about myself, was the suggestion to observe an outdoor scene for three minutes, noticing what most catches your eye, then do it again for the same amount of time, trying to focus on the things that seem least interesting. For my part, I found that nearly everything is interesting to my detail-hungry autistic mind… but I tend to overlook the patterns of the ground itself, and when I did look at them, I found fascinating clear signs of things like water flow and walking trails, on what formerly seemed like boring grass and dirt.
The book isn’t totally devoid of specific hints about specific natural signs. Gooley has a lot of discussion of the different tropisms of plants, like how if many seem to be pointing in the same direction, there’s a reason, but it may not always be the sun. It may be the slope of the land, or the prevailing wind, and the only thing that shows it would be more time. The book also drew my attention to a way of orienting by the moon, as long as it’s up and not full: a line between the points of its crescent (or, in general the axis along which it changes phase) will cross the horizon generally toward the south (in the Northern Hemisphere at least). Once I read this, I understood immediately why it was the case, and felt a bit silly for not figuring it out on my own, but now I know I will never forget it.
Gooley is deeply interested in what about nature draws our attention. One part of this is in how he talks about learning “facts” about nature; the scientific names and specific relationships. He observes how this can be a barrier to entry for some folks who find it to be a dry academic pursuit, but then delightfully turns it on its head by showing how those names often provide hints to the history or attributes of an organism. This wasn’t exactly new to a taxonomy nerd like me, but it was really fun to see the author basically infodump on a special interest for a whole chapter.
Another example of thinking in terms of attention is how early on, he observes how much of nature seems to be about conflict: territorial struggles between insects, trees adapting to keep from being eaten, animals adapting to eat them better. This struck me particularly in contrast to Braiding Sweetgrass which focuses on the ecosystem as a gift economy. I realized how both are necessarily true, and indicative of different perspectives and things to draw attention to. Conflict, as Gooley says, tends to draw human attention more, so it’s not surprising he uses that perspective to help people focus on aspects of nature that they might otherwise miss.
Since the book is all about paying attention to, looking for, listening to, even feeling parts of the natural world, it fit very well into my animist perspective. One of the things I’ve really been focusing on this year is engaging my senses, both physical and spiritual, to get a better experience of the world(s) around me. This book was perfect for helping draw me deeper into that sort of experience, and I feel like I’m on the trail of deepening my relationships with those land-spirits around me. And of course, it made it not-so-surprising when the author himself took a brief turn toward the animist at the end of the book, suggesting that when we ask questions of nature, we may be shocked to hear it asking questions back. I’m not so shocked, myself. And I’m excited to find more ways to keep that dialogue going.