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Real people share real stories of their dialogue with Nature. Hear how it feels to talk with animals, birds and landscape. Share the magic of cross species communication.
Created by award winning Nature writer and poet Estelle Phillips.
Instagram @estelle_writer44
TikTok @EstellePhillips
In this amazing podcast, we hear from Juliet about a white magpie, the power of water, and a dramatic encounter with a silverback gorilla.
JLM Morton:We're at Woodchester Park in Gloucestershire, sitting on the bank of a lake where I swim all year round, looking at the beautiful trees that shed a lot of their leaves now, and many of them have just turned bright yellow, and the larch are coming through with their kind of peachy glow. And I'm Juliette, I'm JLM Morton, and I'm a poet and a non fiction writer, and I also run a development network for writers called the Dialect Writers Collective.
Estelle Phillips:I was so excited to be interviewing you Oh. For the podcast because I really, really wanted to talk to you about what your connection with nature is.
JLM Morton:Well, I mean, I am nature, I guess. I mean, that's how I see it anyway. I don't really see a particular boundary other than kind of like in the corporeal, the body, between myself and nature. And actually, spend a lot of my time kind of thinking and writing about that and the relationship between the the human and the the more than human. I spend a lot of my time outdoors in what people call nature.
JLM Morton:I do find it quite strange that we sort of objectify it as nature with a capital n, Like, it's definitely nature with a with a with a small with a lowercase n to me, and it's kind of, you know, I'm just as much part of it as as it's part of me, you know. It's my it's it it keeps me and my family and my community alive. It supports us and sustains us, and, yeah, that's how I see sort of nature as a kind of continuation of the self. But then that centers the human and actually that's not how I really think. I think I kind of decenter the human when I think about nature, you know, as a kind of, you know, I think we were talking earlier about being an equal part with nature.
JLM Morton:I think we're, you know, at the most equal.
Estelle Phillips:Oh, yeah. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Estelle Phillips:At the most equal. Yeah. But, I was really interested to know how you arrived at your relationship with nature. Did something happen or did you see something or feel something? Well, I think
JLM Morton:I've always felt very, like, a really strong sense of kinship with nature. My parents kind of instilled that in me since I was a kid. I mean, we just would spend our weekends in nature going on sort of long dog walks. And where I lived, we kind of had parks at either end of the I actually lived in in in Sirencester, which is a town, and we lived in the center. But because it's quite a small town, there was a a municipal kind of park at one end, and then they've kind of Bathurst Estate Park at the other end of the street, essentially.
JLM Morton:So I spent all of my holiday time in either one of those places. Right? And so, that kind of like very much cemented my relationship with nature, you know. I would spend my holidays running around the woods or building dens or paddling around in the rivers. I did that.
JLM Morton:I did a lot of that when I was a younger child. I mean, I also, you know, smoked and went raving when I was when I was older, you know. They I'm kind of like, I don't want to kind of paint a kind of a false picture of innocence and sort of pastoral kind of, you know, bounty or whatever, you know. It's not as simple as that. But that I guess that's where my sort of relationship with nature began, it's just in childhood.
JLM Morton:And then, obviously, I went away and went off to university in Manchester and onwards, really. And then, had a career kind of in international development and spent quite a lot of time living in places like China and Nigeria and Rwanda. But getting out of the cities that I might have been working in was always always been really important to me and spending time outdoors and being in nature. And then I moved back to Gloucestershire about fifteen, fourteen years ago, something like that now. And, yeah, very quickly kind of just embraced being back.
JLM Morton:When I first moved back, we lived kind of in the middle of nowhere in a kind of cottage on a farm and, you know, we just nature was completely all around us all the time. And that's when I started writing a lot more seriously. And so, yeah, it's been like a really integral part of my life and subsequently, like, a really integral part of my practice as well. So, like, my first poetry pamphlet is called Lake 32 and it came out of a residency that I did at a lake that's romantically called Lake 32 in the Cotswold Water Park. There's about a 130 lakes there and they're growing.
JLM Morton:So, they scrape the they scrape the land out for for gravel, their gravel pits. And so it's growing. And I think by something like 2030 or 2040, it's gonna be the largest wetland in Western Europe. It's massive.
Estelle Phillips:I had no idea.
JLM Morton:That's fantastic. It's really fantastic. And the biodiversity there is sort of extraordinary. So I kind of did this pamphlet, which was a sort of about the year in the life of that particular lake. Mhmm.
JLM Morton:That sort of you know, it was really fascinating project essentially to work on to just kind of observe, to just spend time with the lake for an entire year. The lockdown the first lockdown happened during the course of that year and kind of COVID pandemic hit. And so there was limited access to the lake for lots of people, but then it also made it a very special time to go and visit it because there was kind of an a greater abundance of wildlife because there were less people at the lake. So, you know, that kind of resulted in like close close thinking and reading and think about door bent on bats, for example, and looking at, you know, hazel tree pollination and black poplars. That's the the kind of most nationally significant group of female black poplar trees Sorry.
Estelle Phillips:Don't know what black poplars are. Can you
JLM Morton:describe So black poplars are kind of like the poplar tree itself. I find it really fascinating. It's kind of one of those trees that's been really critical in that the the the British like cultural imagination. So it would often appear in constable paintings. And they're they're they're trees of the water, so they're often by lakes or by rivers.
JLM Morton:They're kind of really often really tall and very thick in the trunk. And they're very like real what would you call it? Like sort of milestone trees, like way marker trees because they're so significant in size. But there there's the black poplar and there's the white poplar and they shed a when they shed their seeds, they're a kind of white fluff. Oh.
JLM Morton:And you got oh, you get it everywhere. You know the stuff I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
JLM Morton:And it's highly flammable, that white I suppose it would be. Yeah. So it's kind of it's been used for like fire lighting down through the ages, which I really love about black poppers. But the black poppers in particular are endangered because there's so few female species. But they're now kind of using population there to kind of to reproduce them elsewhere and kind of grow the Yes.
JLM Morton:So grow the stock of of them. So that was kind of really fascinating project to kind of work on and a really nice way to kind of structure a pamphlet as well to kind of think about a year in the life of a lake. And there was this white magpie that always used to come and visit and sit on top of the bin. A white magpie? A white magpie.
JLM Morton:Yeah. Yeah. For for the first time I ever saw it, I thought I was seeing things. I thought I was hallucinating. And then I would go back and swim and it was there again.
JLM Morton:And then and I'd ask around, oh, yeah, it's the white magpie. They lived for quite a long time. It'd been there quite a while.
Estelle Phillips:How did you know it was a magpie if it was white?
JLM Morton:Well, because it's got if the shape of the beak and the head and the kind of the wings. And did it have some small coloring, you know, like a a a kind of a a kind of differentiation on the wing in terms of the whiteness of the color, you know, which indicated that it was a magpie.
Estelle Phillips:So like a a kind of shadow
JLM Morton:Yeah. Of the blackness. Yeah. Yeah. I guess so.
Estelle Phillips:And you were saying he used to come and see you?
JLM Morton:Yeah. Anyway, it ended up being the self help magpie in a poem in the first pamphlet, in that pamphlet in the late thirty two. This idea that it was there to kind of kind of make you feel like special and that your life was worth living and kind of, you know, it was this kind of this magpie would come to people at the lake and coach them. Did it? You know.
JLM Morton:Well, I think it was a kind of totem for a lot of people. It were kind of I think it did make people feel that they were somehow special. And, it is a special thing to witness, to bear witness to something as unusual as that, you know. White Park. I know.
JLM Morton:One of the things I found really interesting as well at that year is that there were there were very large numbers of people who were going to that lake to swim and they were in grief. And they were finding solace in the water. And that was a really kind of significant proportion of the people who were going there. There was something about going to that lake and feeling held by that body of water. Because it was quite a safe space because it's not very deep.
JLM Morton:And I think it's mostly around about two meters in-depth. I think some places it's slightly deeper than that. So you could always see the bottom. So I think lots of people who were starting out outdoor swimming who were a bit nervous about it, they they were happy to go there because they didn't feel that I mean, they literally didn't feel out of depth. I mean, they couldn't stand up necessarily in the water, but they knew it wasn't really deep.
JLM Morton:But there's something about that body of water that made people feel held in their grief and felt very held by that particular any body of water. But I just noticed during the course of that residency that there were a lot of people who were coming there and felt held by the water and felt restored by it and felt somehow that they could process their grief in that water, you know. What what was it
Estelle Phillips:like to witness that? Well,
JLM Morton:I was in a kind of my own kind of state of grief at the time as well. So I just sort of think I felt a kind of let's say camaraderie because that sounds sort of too, like, knees up mother brown like, you know, jolliness about it. But not to say it was completely like, grief isn't solemn, is it? Necessarily. It's kind of many, many, many things.
JLM Morton:And it's not it's not only solemn. But to witness it is wonderful. Mean, I do find like the the the restorative powers of water, particularly cold water, is something quite alchemical to change that can occur in people. Because you can go into a very cold body of water and be frightened and you can face your fear and and literally do it anyway. And I think the feeling that that gives people of kind of power.
JLM Morton:People feel cold water swimming makes people feel very powerful often and it makes them empowered. And, I think that is a really that's a really beautiful thing to witness, you know. I think it's sort of extraordinary and much overlooked. And, I mean, less so the case at Lake 32, but because you do have to pay to get in and swim at that place because it's life guarded and so on, that particular lake. But it's free usually as well.
JLM Morton:I mean, that's the wonderful thing is it's kind of it's a free resource and it should be a free resource to all. And it should be accessible to all blue spaces, it should be accessible to all people and to swim at their own risk and all of that. And I think that's an amazing thing. Back to the point about nature, isn't it? With being part of nature, why should we pay to be part of something we're part of already?
JLM Morton:You know, to access something we're part of already, it seems kind of mad to me.
Estelle Phillips:I was wondering if you have memorable islands of connection with nature, a bit like the white magpie. Yeah. What pops into your mind?
JLM Morton:Well, two things pop into my mind immediately. Oh, go on then. One of them one of them is water related again. Good. But but I lived in the Niger Delta for a little while working and as an education advisor with a women's group down in the Niger Delta working on adult literacy and a preschool program for children who didn't have access to formal schooling.
JLM Morton:Anyway, we lived literally kind of on an island called Bawama, a village. And I lived kind of in this very hot tin roofed house and all my sensible neighbors had raffia paneled houses and they didn't get boiling like I did in my fancy pants tin house. But I would hear the the the the lizards just scuttling over the roof all the time and I would look out onto, like, literally the kind of the delta, the creek that came in past my house and where I was staying. And I would always the the office where we all met was through a walk through the forest. And so I walked back and forth through that forest every day along the track.
JLM Morton:And I just remember quite late on in the time that I was staying there, there was a spring tide that flooded the forest. And I was walking along and all of a sudden I could just see this sparkling, this glittering arc. And at first, I was terrified. I thought, oh my god, what it, you know, what the hell is this? And again, thought I was like hallucinate, what's happening?
JLM Morton:And then I realized it was dubbed bioluminescence that had come in on this spring tide. And that was a kind of really extraordinary moment. I was all on my own in the dark, in the middle of this forest, in the middle of the night, this swamp forest in the middle of the night, just thinking, this doesn't happen every day. That came to mind. That was wonderful.
JLM Morton:And there's a lot of nature in my house there. It's kind of like snakes curled up on the on the carpet and sort of huge unidentifiable insects kind of stuck to my leg after walking home in the dark, you know, things like that. And seeing like hammerhead sharks as well, who they're kind of born with their head a different way around and turns after they're born. And so seeing all these hammerhead sharks coming in on the canoes, the dugout canoes, because it was a fishing community that was a kind of subsistence fishing community. You'd see them coming on the canoes and it was sort of really odd, but sort of amazing to see how this is how that that particular species kind of, you know, develops over time.
JLM Morton:And another one was when I was living in Rwanda. My brother came to visit and we went to see the gorillas. And so we hiked up into the the side of this volcano up through the kind of it was more like a sort of temperate rainforest and light, and there's lots of bamboo as well because that's kind of what the gorillas ate a lot of. And I remember us kind of sitting down and the biggest silverback in the world literally just came and sat down on the other side of where you're sitting now, next to my brother. And I was absolutely terrified.
JLM Morton:My brother was so relaxed. He's always been like, you know, he's absolutely steeped in nature. He works the land for his his work and always has done. And, you know, he's a fisherman and all of this, and he was just he was completely unfazed by it. He thought it was the most thrilling thing.
JLM Morton:And I look back on it now and I think it was the most thrilling thing. And at the time, I just kinda couldn't quite believe it was it was happening. That was a really extraordinary, like, encounter with something magnificent, you know, that was completely wild, completely wild, silverback. They are enormous, so powerful.
Estelle Phillips:But can you remember what it was like being so near to the gorilla? Yes. Can you say what it was like, please?
JLM Morton:I mean, I think I probably held my breath for the entire time that we were sitting next to the gorilla. And I can't now remember whether we left the gorilla or it left us. I think it left us. I think it decided to to move on. But the entire time that it was there, I was just kind of I think my body felt absolutely volcanic in a in in kind of a mixture of fear and disbelief, you know, a kind of rising kind of feeling of kind of this could could go badly wrong, but it also may not go badly wrong as well.
JLM Morton:So it's that sort of trepidation and that feeling of kind of, I guess, being on a bit of a bit of a knife edge. You know, nature is is incredibly powerful. I know I've already said that once already, but it is it really is. And I think that what's that Ted Hughes, you know, quite red in tooth and claw. Right?
JLM Morton:Mhmm. You know, nature isn't always kind, isn't always kind of, you know, is literally it savage. Right? So I think that that sort of recognition of that and that sort of feeling of vigilance was something that I remember really well. I'm sitting with that gorilla.
JLM Morton:So, yeah. So when you think about I don't know why those two particular things popped into my head. But then I find that equally as kind of, you know, that I find those kind of more perhaps more unusual because we don't see them every day in The UK, those kinds of encounters just as magical as an encounter with I don't know, we've got a population of Roman snails that live up on the common in Rodborough. And, you know, whenever I see one of those, I think that's a brilliant thing. Or you see the glowworms in the verge along by the canal in the summer.
JLM Morton:You know, all of those things are great. Just sitting here on a normal day, it's a Monday. It's the art it's a Monday afternoon on a rainy day in November, and this is a beautiful thing to sit here with all of this gorgeous nature around us now as well. So
Estelle Phillips:yeah. Juliet, that is a fantastic podcast. Thank you so much
JLM Morton:for talking. You're totally welcome. Yeah. You're very welcome. Thanks for coming.
JLM Morton:It's wonderful here.
Estelle Phillips:Subscribe to Nature Talks With Humans for more true stories of people communicating with animals, birds, and landscape. Follow me on Instagram at Estelle underscore writer forty four, and TikTok at Estelle Phillips. Bye.