Journal With Impact: Nature Language

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“You present your story in terms of things that can be verified by sensory perception. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—these are the common denominators of human experience; these are the evidence that men believe.” Dwight V. Swain

Before we can interpret our feelings, memories, and emotions to different habitats we are drawn towards, in the past or present, we often need to explore the language that nature’s imagery evokes.

Building a sensory vocabulary helps us to understand and share our experiences with depth to both interpret and enhance emotional connections. One of my favorite and engaging applications came from a workshop I took with author Ethel Herr. She pointed out that any observation is incomplete unless we can track the emotional reaction—both in one-to-one contact and with fictional characters.

We need to develop the essential specific word choices: salty-sour-sweet-bitter. If it smells bad is it like a: rotten egg, a sewer, or a low tide? And we also need to recognize that what smells bad to one person may actually be sweet to another. I discovered that one day when driving with an elderly friend. I smelt something noxious and worried it was my car. I asked if she could smell it and her reply was “isn’t it lovely?” Apparently we were smelling sulfur, which to her reminded her of where she grew up near sulfur springs. She happily inhaled while I attempted not to choke.

To develop and expand a wider vocabulary Ethel Herr suggested choosing a different sense per day and paying close attention to just it. So on Monday notice everything you smell. On Tuesday touch, Wednesday taste, Thursday hear, and Friday see.

Then next to each word on each list expand the possibilities. Again, did something smell rotten? Was it rotten like decaying compost, a humid hiking trail, or a dead fish? What distinguishes each ‘rotten’ smell? Repeat the process for any words that you want more depth to.

Action Steps:

1.     Take the habitat and memory you chose last week and apply Ethel Herr’s exercise to your details. Choose one sense per day and daydream that moment.

2.     What detail surprised you? What made you laugh or cry?

3.     What word best represents your language example?

Share: What two favorite sensory images did you remember?

Read deep, marcy

Journal With Impact: Nature

Workshop: Six Conversations for Writing Creative Journals

“The act of recording a life, in healthy solitude and active connection to a loved terrain, is also the act of creating a life.” Hannah Hinchman

Nature Journals—Language

Art, music, and imagery can become a separate language of communication. So too does nature. It is a language that speaks to us, by personally touching our hearts and souls with meaning, and also by allowing us to share across time and culture with others. Nature as reflection builds a bridge of communication that gives us soul-to-soul threads of understanding.

Their images provide illustrations to our past and our present with strangers and friends, as we paint words with pictures and sensory description through writing, or share our images silently in drawings and photographs.

Here are a few examples. 

In her book, This Same Sky, Naomi Shihab Nye shares poems from around the world; this excerpt is by Kwang-kyu Kim in South Korea, translation by Brother Anthony.

The Land of Mists

“In the land of mists

always shrouded in mist

nothing ever happens

And if something happens

nothing can be seen

because of the mist

for if you live in mist

you get accustomed to mist

so you don’t try to see

Therefore in the land of mists

you should not try to see

you have to hear things

for if you don’t hear you can’t live

so ears keep on growing

People like rabbits

with ears of white mist

Iive in the land of mists.”

As a child I spent many summers visiting my aunt at a lake in northern Ontario, Canada. At least once or twice each summer we would get a raging storm over the lake unlike anything I would ever experience in the city. There were no hard copy photographs for me to look at when I grew older, but as I re-saw the storms in my memory I was able to see it again and capture it for myself in a poem.

           

The Storm, by marcy weydemuller

Gloom black sky,

thick hard rain,

the lake invisible.

Until lightning

ripped above.

Then we could see

                 

bending trees,

churning waves

wrestled the storm.

Awestruck, we

returned to dark

again.

           

Action Steps:

1. What images or emotions do you identify with in either of these nature snapshots? What memories do they bring up from your own experience in a particular setting? Write that scene up in your journal.

2. Then write, “today I wish I could go to the woods, meadow, ocean, forest, lake, mountain or… because…….. .”     

Share: Why does that habitat of nature appeal to you the most?

Read deep, marcy

Metaphors

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.” Albert Camus

Peering into one metaphor alone is like looking though a prism of possibilities. A well-chosen and well-placed phrase provides a dazzling vista of interpretation.

For example, a recent conversation on ‘a castle’ included multiple ways to focus a setting through metaphor and theme.

In the movie The Secret of Moonacre there are two distinct castles, each a reflection on choices. The choices were made hundreds of years earlier but continue to enslave the descendants as each generation takes up a personal decision to perpetuate the feud.

One castle is in ruins; empty, cold, a shadow of its former life. It is a place of sorrow and lost opportunity with only three inhabitants left.

The other castle is stark, cold, grey and brimming with people. Busy, bustling, overflowing inhabitants filled to the brim with anger and revenge. And a closer look reveals a castle in decay as well.

Both castles have become mirror images of heart choices. The reality of this concrete metaphor unfolds with greater perception as the story shows all its secrets and mysteries.

Journal Prompt:

Choose the place that is most important to your character, or most central to the story question. Costume it from a variety of styles: old and decaying, ordinary, flashy, sophisticated, copycat or with a brand new coat of paint. Which version becomes a metaphor for your character’s heart?