"To touch water . . . is to return to each origin, meeting the rains and the snowmelts and the cold interior of the planet . . . meeting in fact the comets machine-gunning against our atmosphere"
—-Craig Childs, The Secret Knowledge of Water
“To be struck by lightening, what a way to get enlightened”
—-Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart
“I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of the landscape so influencing mind that mind’s own substance was altered”
—-Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways
fox photo credit: Photo by Sunguk Kim on Unsplash
Hello Lovelies—
Welcome to my bi-weekly Living Wild Prompt, where I offer exercises in writing and creativity. If you are a paid subscriber, you can check out other Living Wild Prompts in the archive by looking for posts with fox pictures.
I’ve got the elemental on my mind. I noticed my last few posts engaging with deep snow and 100mph winds. I also shared a fiction story, based on true events, about the way a 1000-year flood rearranges the fabric of a mountain town.
The fact is these forces—earth, air, fire, water—order our days and, if we pay attention, open doors to deep experience, to a life rich with meaning. While my recent posts think about dramatic events—five foot snow or dangerous winds an floods—each of us has or can have every daily encounters with elemental forces that bring us closer to our wild selves.
There is a hunger in all of us, I think, for this kind of recognition, this kind of knowledge.
This week, I thought we’d try a few prompts related to writing the elemental and articulating the way nature shapes us or how our encounters with its wild forces changes or forces a change.
But first, a PSA: This Living Wild Prompt is sent bi-weekly and access is limited to subscribers. Inspired by writer Stephanie Land who speaks who writes compellingly about getting paid for the words we put out into the world and for the work we do, particularly as women, I am asking you if you can afford it to become a monthly subscriber for as little as $6/mo. Your financial support of the writing I am doing here helps me keep the lights on. I appreciate it.
Touching the Elemental World
To inspire you, I’ve chosen epigraphs by writers who engage with the elemental by which I mean earth, air, fire and water.
In The Secret Knowledge of Water, adventurer and writer, Craig Childs spends two years searching out water in the desert," not the edges," but "the center."
A Match to the Heart follows writer and rancher Gretel Ehrlich as she is struck twice by lightning and then works through a long recovery, entering what she calls “the Bardo,” the Buddhist space between lives reaching for the mythic and the spiritual to describe the event and its aftermath.
Robert Macfarlane clearly embraces the mythic as he undertakes a series of walks in The Old Ways, telling us of folklorist John Emslie who recounts that “paths were imprinted with the dreams of each traveler who walked it.”
I recommend all of these books for those of you thinking about how your engagement with the natural world shapes your life. Each writer encounters the elemental and in doing so is put in touch with the wild parts of themselves.
There is a hunger in all of us, I think, for this kind of recognition, this kind of knowledge.
Here are some ways you might touch the elemental world.
If you are not a subscriber you can get access to this week’s writing prompt, for as little as $6/mo (which gives you access to bi-weekly writing prompts plus access to my full archive of writing and inspiration, which includes nearly two dozen Living Wild Creativity Prompts.)
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