Robert Macfarlane

And then I've been listening to, um, a beautiful album of folk music following an event that I attended on Friday.

So I went along to watch the Spellsongs, uh, um, group, and they're a group of folk musicians who have come together around the work of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.

Uh, and the books that they produce are The Lost Words, um, and s- and, uh, Spellsongs.

And now they've written another book, which is called, I think it's called In Thin Air.

So it's a book all about birds and about the thinning skies.

And the concert was showcasing the music that this folk group had made in response to, um, the, the book that, uh, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris have produced.

And it was just, it was really lovely music, q- really moving, beautifully performed.

So I'm got that on my Spotify, um, playlist at the moment, and it's on repeat, so I'm really enjoying that.

Um, and it was a profound experience that was completely unnameable.

And then I think five or six months later, I found myself in conversation with Robert Macfarlane, the author, about, um, speaking about his, his book, uh, Is a River Alive? And we were having this conversation about rivers and life flowing, and it kind of occurred to me, and I was like, "Oh, I think that's what the, what I was trying to understand from the river," was just this message of, like, just flow.

And so that was last year, and then this year I, I made my word of this year flow, and I just was trying to embody flow in every aspect of my life, just like where am I flowing? Where am I not? Where do I have resistance? So on and so forth.

So that was just a kind of, something that I felt like I, I had to experience, like, wordlessly in my body, just in conversation with nature way before I understood it.

At the end, we need to build this educational state.

I heard this other quote in a book that I'm reading from Robert MacFarlane, It's a River of Life.

They talk a lot about rights of nature, but there's this young lecturer in India that mentions that barrenness is almost always a state of mind.

Rarely, it is a state of land.

Different in some ways, different in, uh, right, as you can say for all historical periods.

And that encounter with the underground, or the underland, to use, uh, Robert MacFarlane's phrase, were not universal, but, uh, something we have to wrestle with as a historical phenomenon.

Yeah, and it seems like too, and I'm thinking about this as you're talking, you know, especially with the time travel element, within that particular legend is that there seems to be an understanding even back in, you know, in the Middle Ages, imagine that, right, that there is a time horizon to a cave that extends beyond other geographical features, for example.

Like, like the seven sleepers, like, they could have gone to sleep somewhere else, right? Like, it didn't have to be a cave.

If we bide our time, things will quiet down again, and we shall attain what we have hoped for.

Reminds me of Rob MacFarlane.

promising to marry one of the daughters of Sir Walter Frey or whatever, you know.

Don't make promises like that.

And when we met recently, I started by ask him- asking him really, "What does that mean?"

So the term landskene is a term coined by a painter in the Western Isles, um, and it was popularized by nature writer Robert Macfarlane.

And the landskene itself is a, the term means the interweaving and the braiding of horizon lines on a, a hazy day across hill country.

So it's that idea of, you know, if, if for anybody who has stood on top of a, the summit of a Munro or, or any sort of form of hills like the Lomond Hills, for example, and you look out over that vast landscape and you see those braided horizon lines stretching out into the distance.

It is.

Yeah.

Anyway, look, The Book of Birds is the latest collaboration between the artist Jackie Morris and the writer Robert Macfarlane.

Now, they were responsible for the Lost Words and Lost Spells books, highlighting things from the na- natural world which are dangerously close to disappearing altogether, and, and disappearing from the language, too.

These are the seven wonders that together conjure the miracle of bird.

Artist Jackie Morris describing the seven wonders of birds, which forms the heart of her latest collaboration with the writer Robert Macfarlane, The Book of Birds.

They've worked together before on the groundbreaking Lost Words and Lost Spells books.

They're poetic evocations of the more than human world, showing the wonder and fragility of living things which are dangerously close to disappearing altogether.

I am heavily on the pragmatist side in terms of your setup.

You should indeed, as Robert MacFarlane says, "Beware the fetish of the desk," and not worry about getting the details right or keeping things straight or whatnot.

If you find clutter is bothering you, fix it.

If you don't like your pencil, get a better pencil, and so on.