'Am I nature?' An exercise in freewriting
With self to hand to pen to paper, and 90 minutes before you, what wants to come out?
I’ve been toying with whether to share this piece of writing or not.
The last month or so, I’ve been experiencing blockages in my own writing, as my client work has taken the front seat. With digital pen so focused on writing as others, I have been finding it increasingly difficult to find the bodyspace to write as myself.
To try and undam, I spent a shared quiet online writing session a few Fridays ago simply freewriting. Me, a pen, a notepad, and 90 minutes that yawned out before me in a seeming impossibility.
I entered the space not knowing what I was going to write, or what prompt I’d be sitting with.
As the 90 minutes was set, I found myself struggling for vocabulary, with the feeling of heaving myself through a sludge.
But I was soon pulled towards a question that we had sat with in my first raqsadnū:studios hosted circle:
Through wordplay, poetry, conversation and freewriting, the group gathered around questions and themes like: what does the word nature mean for us, words for nature in different languages, what wants to come out, what is our relationship with our writing, and more.
The conversation that unfolded had a deep impact on me, affecting me in ways I hadn’t anticipated as the convener and space holder, particularly around the word ‘nature’.
And so, I found that I was freewriting on the question ‘am I nature?’. And this is what emerged, transferred from ink to screen, lightly edited.
I’m sharing it with you, dearest ones, for a few reasons.
I feel like I want to unlock the taboo of only sharing ‘good’, polished, finished writing, in the same way that an artist may share doodles or works in progress, or a musician may share noodles or clips from rehearsals.
I want to show what a stream of consciousness over 90 minutes could look like, or at least looked like for me this time, in the hope that it encourages you to likewise meet yourself on the page, removed from the need for perfection. What writing simply for the self without any intention of sharing can look like.
And I want to share in case it likewise unlocks something for you around the stated question, or if you have your own responses to the provocation that you feel moved to share or wish to create or write or dance with. How do you find your body and self responding to being asked ‘Am I Nature?’
I’ll see you back here in the writing of 90 minutes.
‘Do I want to write?’ the pen asks itself. Or perhaps it’s the hand that speaks.
‘Am I Nature?’, the voice asks itself. Or perhaps it’s the self that speaks.
‘are we nature?’, the tree, wind, birds have never asked themselves.
And the world stops. Sap, brooks, blood, all freeze in their veins.
A question that shouldn’t exist. A question that can’t exist.
We’ve taken a word meaning essence, life itself, birth, and distorted it in ways that have ground down its intention. Created a blasphemy. A heresy.
I pause, and find that I am writing from my head, slowly, lethargically. Not from body.
And yet. Head is body.
The question ‘am I nature?’ brings me to the edges of something that feels like it could be profound. Something existential trying to shift within me. DNA and ancient memory trying to awaken.
‘How do I reconnect with nature?’, meaning not how do I reconnect with nature as trees, and greenery, and landscape, and environment but ‘How do I reconnect with nature?’, meaning how do I reconnect with nature as essence itself.
Essence meaning spirit, lifeblood, core, heart. Soul.
Essence meaning always there, never having left. Essence meaning lying in urgent wait.
This is my nature. This is its nature. This is just how this is. It, just, is.
How can we rediscover these ancient meanings of the English word – symbol – ‘nature’ not just as an exercise in language but as a re-embodiment?
If we can allow our own silence to be still in the wake of these questions, our bodies reveal to us not the answers – which so often come with full stops that halt the conversation, the enquiry, the exploration. But our bodies reveal to us the knowings. Deep, subterranean, knowings.
‘am I nature?’
Answer not with words. With definitions, with intellectual or spiritual nothings, or etymology.
But know that in so many languages ‘nature’ is essence, is life, is birth.
‘am I nature?’
Answer with my breath, with my knowing.
What is my nature?
‘This is her nature.’ ‘This is the nature of things.’
Am I Nature am I Nature am I nature am i nature am i nature am I nature nature nature nature nature nature nature repeat the word until it loses all meaning imbibe it with different tongues drink it in thirstily in other languages feed the tears that form in my eyes as my body struggles to remember
No.
My body doesn’t need to remember.
It just is. It already knows. I already know. You, we, already know.
Why then is it so hard for us to know, to feel the knowing in these questions?
Is it because we feel the vacuum left in the aftermath of the question mark and are desperate to fill that awkward void with words? Fill it with anything and everything, rather than have to sit in the silence that it invites?
I can’t feel the beings that are with me, and I with them, until I stop talking. Until I sink into myself alongside them. And breathe.
The answer to ‘am I nature?’ isn’t a yes, or a deconstruction of the word ‘nature’.
The answer to ‘am I nature?’ is to put the pen down, put the voice down, our thinking down.
And to breathe into the quiet space the question creates.
And so, let’s breathe.
Focus on breath. Feel breath.
There is the breathing to survive the day-to-day, moment-to-moment, to keep going. But there is another breath that is the one that feeds us profoundly when we pause to feel the sun warm our skin, eyes closed, body open to the sky.
Once you’ve tasted this medicine, you’re no longer yours. You want more. You find yourself chasing it, to taste it again, even just one small sip luxuriating on your tongue, dripping thickly coating your throat.
But my writing write feels flaccid, not enough to capture the meanings I feel, words evade me and resist being strung together. I find my hand, my body rebelling as I try to force it to write in response to the question. Instead, it just wishes to breathe.
How do we remember? How do I remember? How do I feel? Is it even possible within the lingual and societal constraints that humans have built for themselves? For each other? For the other?
The temptation to be nihilistic, to just give in, is euphoric in its call.
Who am I writing for right now? For myself? For you? To be clever, profound? To simply unblock?
I need to release. Release. Releeeeaaaaaase. To write to meet myself on the page.
What wants to come out?
Pain. And darkness. The beserker, the one who wants to rage, and give up and just sob into the arms of she. The one who wishes to stay in bed, cocoon, waiting for the earth to reclaim me. The one who just wants to sit. And breathe. And hear stories at bedtime while being tucked in.
The one who wishes to lie on a beach at the edge of the world, to be in awe at all the this that exists, continues to exist, without me here to witness it. That has existed for millennia.
The one who is just a single cell of this superorganism we call Earth.
The one who just wants to breathe. And to sit with this breath. And the next.
To fully feel the songs of this earth.
To feel that descending that is the turning on which my breathing shifts. My experience of my breathing shifting.
How to describe the feeling of this breath that is nature?
The feeling that I have swallowed the world, and that in that swallowing a great spaciousness opens up within me. And that the world has swallowed me in turn, and that a great spaciousness opens up beyond the me. And that we dance together, this inner and outer, and whirl, as the self leaves self and rises from out of body to play with our kinspirits and fly and the sounds of the bird singing aren’t just over there but also within me too and does the bird experience my self in the same way as we are both here and there and i can feel the trees as they pulsate with life the same life that pulsates through me and the i and the they disintegrate into not even a we but an is and just on the cusp of being pulled through into this intoxicating drowning that can swallow me up fully to claim me as its own a sharp tug of fear that hits when you’re about to fall from a cliff thuds me dully back into the here.
Maybe the question ‘am I nature?’ invites others alongside it:
‘am I self?’ ‘what is self?’
And what is self if not nature, and essence? To experience selfhood is to experience naturehood.
herself himself themself ourself myself all is the same self, the same essence, the same nature.
hernature himnature themnature ournature mynature
Nature and self as something distinctly my own and distinctly also ours. Distinctly ‘me’ and ‘I’ and ‘we and ‘us’. I both can only ever experience my own nature, my own self, my own essence. But in doing so, also experience the nature, self, essence of all.
nature nature nature nature nature nature say it enough times that it loses all its meaning and just becomes a random collection of melded sounds in my mouth and markings on my paper.
Breathe.
What it is that I feel.
With my eyes closed, devoid of words to describe or make sense of or name.
Breathe, slowly, deeply. Sink into body.
What is it that I – you – we – feel.
We speak of a singular nature. Not natures. And perhaps this is where we’ve gone astray.
‘Am I nature?’
‘Am I natures?’
‘Am I nature’s?’ but then where is my freedom what does it even mean this word, I don’t want freedom from naturehood I want to be subsumed by it, to be carried in its cycles. What I want is freedom from these restraints that prevent me from feeling my naturehood.
And what does ‘hood’ mean, even? Selfhood, adulthood, childhood, naturehood. To be hooded is to be covered, sheltered, hidden, encloaked. And so is naturehood to be encloaked, hooded within one’s own nature, one’s self, the essence of all?
What are these membranes, these boundaries, of nature and nature? What is nature’s nature?
“How does it feel like to be breathed by the ecosystem?”
My body, my lungs are a filter that purify for other beings, just as they purify for me. My body feeds the earth. The earth feeds me.
But why can’t I know this? Why can I only know this in moments of relaxation and meditation?
“I am thirsty because I remember that I am the ocean.”
I am hungry because I remember that I am the earth.
I am breathless because I remember that I am the air.
And I am cold because I remember that I am the sun.
My body is nature essence. Any feeling, thoughts, griefs, joys, laughter, tears – all – natureessence.
Why can’t I feel it, know it? What even is ‘I’? My body just is. It knows all this that the I grapples with.
The I that can detach from my body, that exists only in these words, that can’t experience that same body knowing.
We have found ways to symbolise these sounds and the meanings that they represent, thinking it makes us superior, while others on and in and above this earth also communicate. And these sounds and their markings have become our anchors, but also chains.
What of silence. What of breath. What of our air as communication? Heartbeat? Bodies?
How do you make space for quiet in writing so that people – the writer too – can breathe into the knowings rather than have their, our, own knowings crowded out by these words?
Maybe.
Only.
Like.
This.
In the spaces between words and lines. In the spaces within o’s and a’s and all those letters with their round bellies swallowing space, all of space up and beyond the night sky with its blinking eyes.
In the invitation of the full stop to pause, take a breath.
Is our writing too limited a tool for this enquiry of ‘am I nature?’
Is the piece that needs and wants to be written simply the question?
Is the shape and curl of the question mark enough?
am i nature?
