The world informs writing informs the world
After a holiday recently out in a cabin in the woods, I got a bit more into identifying and foraging local plants. Part of the description of myself on this blog is ‘plant mother’; my home is filled with various houseplants. My garden is a mostly wild place because I’m reluctant to remove the habitats of local birds, bugs and other fauna. During my lunch today I filled up a watering can for my greenhouse and I saw a bumblebee happily visiting the flowers of one of my mature mint plants. When so much life inhabits what’s overgrown, I find it difficult to remove it.
I’ve been trying to lose weight for a little while, without much success. I don’t have much willpower for such things, so I thought combining learning about local plants with walking would help. Where some plants and common and abundant I’ve already picked a few to press for reference cards.
On Sunday I took a walk around a local country park. It’s an historic orchard with a small lake, some woods, and wildflower meadows. As I walked round taking pictures of some of the flora, I realised that I don’t give that much thought in my writing as to the natural environment. Yes of course I’ll give descriptions to landscape etc, but I’d not thought before the depth that a more detailed view could give. I’m looking forward to trying it in my writing to see how I feel about it. Descriptions are always a balance, although it seemed to work for some writers (looks in the vague direction of Tolkien) I doubt it would work for me to write endless amounts. Still, changing up the depth of description could bring something to it.
Writing in a way is a window into our own view of the world; what we focus on can show perhaps what’s more important to us. Some writers include lots of musical description, or food, or scent. All of these are useful, but some writers definitely are more inclined towards different areas of description. I wonder then, if writing and our focuses on writing then leak back through into the world. If we’re always writing about music because we like music, do we then listen out more to music in the world?
Perhaps, perhaps not, but I like the idea of it nevertheless.