I have been fighting for hours with Canva and general computer stuff to do the background. What do you think?

I’ve just heard that Louise Gluck has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She said:

“I think the poem is a communication between a mouth and an ear – not an actual mouth and an actual ear, but a mind that sends a message and a mind that receives it.”

Which I thought was rather a lovely quote.

This is something I think about a lot – the idea of inter-connectedness. Despite in theory we are more connected via social media and the internet than ever before, that’s not ear and mind. Loneliness is a rising concern among all age groups. So is anxiety and depression.

So many people were helped by the natural world, by birds and birdsong during lockdwn, even when our busy lives had made us all but forget about them before.

Raynor Winn quotes John Muir in her new book The Wild Silence

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

 

My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir

It’s so true. Even a humble trip to the shop to buy food is becoming a complex set of worries about carbon emissions, food miles, preservatives, animal welfare, e-numbers personal health, food poverty, homelessness and countless other issues.

Next week I shall be reviewing The Wild Silence, Raynor Winn’s compelling sequel to The Salt Path in which she describes how, becoming homeless, she and her unwell husband Moth undertake a walk of the entire length of the South West Coast Path. The second book picks up the story on their return, and the difficulties of trying to live a ‘normal’ life again.