Writing About Wild Things Makes Me Sad
Travels through a disappearing world.
Sometimes I get sad when I sit down to write about nature. Because my words may be describing something that vanishes.
Will my words be the only thing that remains?
I realize that I have to choose my words carefully.
Writing down what I have seen is my exercise in reverence. It is a chance for me to record a witnessing to get close to the world again, and to hold onto it just a little longer before it is gone.
How do I tell you about the snow on Kilimanjaro?
That they rise above you like a walled dream. How the blue and green ice is like a song without words. How the sun dances through the layers of frozen time waiting for a partner. How everything inside the ice seems caught and released and instantly becomes part of you as you move through it. How the outline of the dormant volcano under the icy frosting tells the stories of millennia without moving its lips. I can see it, taste it, feel it. Then I turn my head to look once more and it's almost gone.
How do I end a sentence about the arch of a whale's back?
Is it in the exclamation mark which defines the awe? Or the silence of a suspended water spout shooting 20 feet into the air across a glassy ocean? Or is it in the question mark etched into the giant mammal's back by the deep cuts of a freighter’s propeller? Or perhaps the period that ends my brief encounter when a dorsal fin glides up and out of the water and waves goodbye?
It’s almost impossible to describe the eyelashes of a rhinoceros, thick, stiff, and flirting with the sun.
How can I express to you what it feels like to see her blink? Is it a sad sweep of air like a puff of nostalgia? I wonder if the 3000 lb rhino remembers everything or nothing of a simpler time when nothing or no one was a threat. I remember the smooth shaft of her long horn blunted by the years of digging in the hard African parched earth dried by decades of drought. I can still see the dent of soft step, her folded grey skin, and the smile just before she turns and walks away, maybe never to return.
What about the silent flutter of a monarchs wings?
The elegant patterns of orange, black, and white paper thin works of art casting momentary shadows on my busy day. How the sunlight quietly holds space for the tireless pollinators. The delicate dust covered butterflies have a weightless joy, coming and going, and returning to the same spots every year until they don’t and they won’t because they can’t survive within our human spaces.
Words cannot do these moments justice, though justice is what is needed.
It is too late?
Maybe if I tell you enough of my stories, and use the right words, you can help me remember our planetary roommates before they disappear into the great encyclopedia of things that used to be.
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Audrey Stimson is a writer living in a green house with her husband and two dogs. When she is not writing essays and short stories she works as a television news producer. She is currently working on a forthcoming book about a bicycle trip across the United States. More about Audrey on her website . Please join her mailing list and stay up to date on her various projects.
