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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
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Welcome to Amanda Woolworths q and a at the Blandford Literary Festival. We start with a discussion about the Climate Coaching Alliance and move on to other deeply moving contributions from an artist, an ecologist, gardeners, and a postman who had an epiphany.
Amanda Wallwork:Please, if there's any questions or anything we want to explore further in any of that
Speaker 3:Do you do it now in your
Speaker 4:art in order to send that message forward?
Amanda Wallwork:It's a good question because I'm constantly questioning myself about this. And I'm although my own work at the moment is sort of going through different things, different routes for trying to I'm always experimenting and trying different things. Painting is a constant, but I always try and a lot of the stuff I'm doing at the moment is with using the rocks I collect on my journeys and how I can use those in different ways to tell stories. So that's where I am with my own work. Finding where that goes is a difficult thing.
Amanda Wallwork:How do I how does that get out there to people is the challenge for it? Well, if
Speaker 4:I tell my little bit, it's comes from working as an executive coach for the last sort of thirty years or so. I've worked with senior executives in all countries around the world. And I got together with the Climate Coaching Alliance, and several people around the world decided to collaborate on a publication which we've produced called Shaping Tomorrow. And it's a way of talking to politicians, leaders, people who don't normally talk about nature, but also to get them to think about how we can change the system. Because unless we change the system, nothing's going to happen.
Speaker 4:And it's about coaching, it's about collaboration with those people, not telling them what to do with the notice like you said. But also, it's about helping them to come on side with you. But also learning to to challenge people and not to be afraid to challenge because I think that's what we do when we're with leaders or politicians. We don't challenge them enough around. So what impact will that have on the environment?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So what would your children say about that? You know, I had a guy in in America who wanted promotion and he came to me for coaching and I I said to him after I'd got to know him a bit, you know, what would your son think of your decision? And there was an absolute silence. And the and he then said to me, well, he wouldn't he wouldn't want me to do this.
Speaker 4:And I said, so you're going against what he would want, but because so I challenged him on his why. And after the few conversations, he decided he would not go the route that he was going to go because it would be polluting the atmosphere, and his son wouldn't approve, and his son's children wouldn't approve either. So looking down seven years of generations, what would they say about what you're doing? So it's about not only listening to people and collaborating with them, but it's also challenging them on a level that they perhaps haven't been challenged before. And so that's why this publication has become free for anyone to download, and it's to help people to talk to leaders about how we can change the system.
Speaker 4:If you go to the climatecoachingalliance.org stroke shaping tomorrow playbook. Those are great. Yeah. Yeah. It's gone around several countries.
Speaker 4:So we we collaborated with Germany, Italy Italy, Poland, India, Singapore, and Australia. So the people were from those countries that did the playbook together, we wrote it together. And we all did an aspect of it. So it's it's also not only the leaders in our country, but the leaders around the world and how to approach them as well.
Amanda Wallwork:That sounds really useful because it is those conversations and that challenging is really quite
Speaker 4:What I see is with what you do and what we did. Because I think also it needs to be shown to people in other ways, so visually as well. I mean, that's a book. We haven't illustrated it very much. We have, but not and and when you were talking, my mind was going, oh, that's nice collaboration possibly for the next issue.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. It was one of
Amanda Wallwork:the things that I it was the visual impact of something has obviously, for me, has quite a thing. When it was when I saw a map of Portland with all the permissions for mineral extraction, I. E, where the quarries could be. Because it was all after the war. Basically, the whole of Portland was mapped out for quarry.
Amanda Wallwork:All of it was red, apart from one tiny little bit. And I thought that's really shocking. But it it was the visual impact of seeing that map that make brought it home to me rather than reading it and being just being told it. And it it was very powerful.
Speaker 3:And and that's what we
Speaker 4:do with the executives. We take them out. When I go to London, for example, don't know why I'm retired now, but when I was in London, we took them to Hyde Park. We took them to Green Park. We took them out by the River Thames, and we were walking together along into in the countryside side by side.
Speaker 4:And, of course, they freed up to to talk to you. Whereas, sitting over a desk in an office, they weren't free to talk to you. So they would actually be much more expansive when you said and you use metaphors when you're outside. You know, I had this lady who went through a a fountain in the concrete notes there. I told her there's a there's a fountain over there.
Speaker 4:And she used the fountain that which had various spouts as her team. And she started to talk about some of the spouts were coming up from the ground very high, some were lower. And she started to relate those to her team. And because it was less threatening, she was able to talk about it in a way she'd never had before. So it's actually like you did.
Speaker 4:You noticed things in the in the landscape that you hadn't before. That's what they did when they were talking about other things. And it's very freeing.
Amanda Wallwork:Getting out there really makes a big difference.
Speaker 4:Makes you make such a difference. Yeah. Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:It's really important. I think it's really important that children in schools that they go out there and do it. And they just list learn about it in the classroom. They're actually out there physically doing stuff and getting their hands dirty, touching the soil, and realizing what soil is. It's not just mud.
Amanda Wallwork:It's not just dirt. It's actually a living thing. And what it's made of is really quite important, but we don't we don't have enough of that.
Speaker 3:It's very nice what you've talked about. Very interesting. I'm particularly interested in rock faces and colors. So it's really a story to that. I basically get excited about the shapes and the color, and you've it gives you lots of energy just to be there and look, look, look, and look.
Speaker 3:As a response, I tried to translate that from sketches into whatever. It could be painting, it could be textile art. That keeps me going. And I moved from Merseyside to Dorset because I come from a very flat country, Poland. And the hills are constantly a few, and I get excited every time.
Speaker 3:You know, you say you get excited every time you see a hill Yeah. Of you. Can you ex expand on that feeling, please? Not really, but I was on hospital the other day by myself. There was almost nobody about, and it was just you're very connected to everything around you and still, and you don't need anything else.
Speaker 3:Just being there.
Speaker 4:That's a
Speaker 3:And, obviously, I get excited about shapes and colors, but it's like a rhythm of an inner world. I don't know. But you say you don't know, but that answer was very beautiful. Well, you see all the lines that are connected. Probably goes deeper than that, but you need to feel it.
Speaker 3:I'm talking to a geologist once.
Amanda Wallwork:Because you can get different when you go to different places, you can get different you get different feelings about that place.
Speaker 3:And you can respond. You can go somewhere you've never been
Amanda Wallwork:before and think, I feel at home here. I relate to this in some way. And I'd also wondered about that. Then and he was talking about a sense of place, and he particularly used an example of the quite often, what this actually relates to is the stone. Is that what you're actually picking up on?
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah. And that and if you were born somewhere that was a limestone area
Speaker 3:The energy
Amanda Wallwork:of the stone. Yes. Yes. Exactly. And then you go somewhere else like that.
Amanda Wallwork:And you can easily feel, I can relate to this. And this is what I was getting when I went to certain places. It was the stone that was making me think
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, I knew an artist lady many, many years ago, she would always talk about a stone and the energy each stone had. Some are good for you, some are bad for you. It radiates. So
Amanda Wallwork:And you look at that in different ways. You can look at it purely on a physics level or a chemistry level or you can do it on spiritual level. But, basically, what it is based on is that feeling Yeah. What or how that impacts on you. And if you grew up, he this is Georgie, if he said that it there's there's two villages in Dorset.
Amanda Wallwork:One, Abbotspringa and Porteshom, which are about a mile apart. One's limestone, and one's Keralian stone. So one's a sort of reddish orange color, one's 's gray. Yeah. Very different.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah. But you it's only a bar between them. He said he was he didn't why does he feel he really connected with Portashea? And his wife did as well. Then he sort of like, oh, it's because because I grew up in Southern Points.
Amanda Wallwork:It's the same light, the same stone. You know? So he was like, it so this can take it's a really of I don't know. It's a sort of very it's a feeling based thing, but it's also an an actual fact based thing. Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah. There's a reason a reason for all this, particularly. But the our affinity with this can be quite profound in some cases. It is microbiology
Speaker 3:of it all. Yeah. I looked into plankton and did quite a bit of design on it, how beautiful and fantastic shapes they are. So enlarged and they are filmed by photographers on the sea, and they show it up as very colored beautiful shapes. But all the doors at White Rocks are formed from
Speaker 5:that Yeah.
Speaker 3:From the chalk of the so, yeah, it's a history to each part of the countryside.
Amanda Wallwork:Yeah. It's I mean, in England, it it is particularly significant because, I mean, a lot of places, they are just the same geology throughout, and you don't have to say that amount of variety. Dorset England and Dorset is huge geological variety because it's all come to surface. Okay. It might be deposited in in, you know, layers over time.
Amanda Wallwork:But because of land movements, get that sort of shifting. So you get different aged rocks that are at the surface. And these all then impact on the soil above, etcetera. But that's where you get these different shapes. Why some areas are really hilly and some are flat and some are mountainous and that.
Amanda Wallwork:Because these all have an impact on that. And it and it really forms that sense of place in that respect.
Speaker 3:You've got yeah. I think looking into that from the plankton, which is threatened by everything Yeah. It gives us 45% oxygen more than plants, and it's unbelievable.
Amanda Wallwork:If you wanna yeah. When you start going
Speaker 3:into the science of it Yeah.
Amanda Wallwork:You can really yeah.
Speaker 3:45% on the whole club.
Amanda Wallwork:And things that I didn't realize that because so open grassland is as valuable in this country as rainforest in terms of its biodiversity and its and its carbon, you know, the other well, that related to the our environment. So looking after that land in terms of grassland, I mean, I'm talking about I'm not talking about the kind of planted grazing lands, the old grassland which has evolved if you like. So those areas of common land which have been cultivated or anything used on them, are really important. And just having open areas of grassland can be just as important as forests in
Speaker 3:in climax. Seahorse as well.
Amanda Wallwork:And the seahorse. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Really. Seagrass. And that's another very minute world. The smallest seahorse was only discovered, I think, twenty, thirty years ago. Can't even see it.
Speaker 3:Oh. Yeah. It's really no. When you go into the details, all the microbiology is fantastic.
Speaker 4:And the seahorses are protected now
Speaker 3:inside Yeah. They are. Aren't they? Because the birds in they've got
Speaker 4:the bones coming in,
Speaker 3:but they destroyed the seagulls. Yes. You know, the the areas protected now.
Estelle Phillips:You've written a whole collection about trees. Well, I
Speaker 5:didn't I didn't, like, set out to write, but I went in I actually went into a period of solitude in not in Guatemala. And I yeah. I was on a certain path and being more introspective and going inward. And I as I say, I had this period of solitude, and for three months, I didn't say a soul or speak to anybody. And I wasn't expecting this at all, but I was able to connect deeply with everything around me.
Speaker 5:Not that there were words spoken, but it was like I got an intuitive sense from the bamboo trees in front of my cabin, the mountain, the volcano actually that was across the lake, everything had a message, you know, not not like, oh, you know, not through words, but just this intuitive sense of, things that were coming up in me, that I was when you're silent, you start to recognise certain behaviours, emotions, thoughts, things are very clear. And what was happening was that rather than a teacher, nature itself became my teacher and was able to intuitively guide me, I guess. Like like one example, I remember not not long into this period of solitude, I remember watching this bamboo leaf just hanging with by a cobweb, and it was very much teaching me about the precarious situation of the ego and, you know, how I was how that was dissolving, and a greater sense of peace was emerging. So everything just started speaking to me in this in this three month period. And only really towards the end of that three month period, suddenly, all this poetry started spewing through me.
Speaker 5:And I just mean, not automatic writing, but it felt a bit like that. I was like, oh my goodness. Like and I just and I nearly filled a whole notebook of of poetry and like, had no intention to write. That wasn't what I was doing that for. You know?
Speaker 5:So this all just came through. And then since then, that was in 2018. And then since then, well, periods back in Ireland, looking after family. And, yeah, just again, just those intuitive messages that I would that I would get from the ash trees, you know, in in the garden. And then I went to live on an island in the West Coast Of Scotland for four years and sort of lived a little bit like a hermit, I guess.
Speaker 5:And when you were talking there about the whole point of moving up there was to live off grid and to not disturb the land in any way. And when I left to like, I didn't put any concrete down. I put a small dwelling on the land that could be moved. Was a tiny home. And and learned how to build it as well.
Speaker 5:And everything was built of natural and local materials. And I the whole point of it was to, yeah, leave everything exactly as I found it and not to disturb the land and to to work with the land and to listen to the land and not just impose what I wanted, you know, but to, you know, really listen and work together. And and so during that time, I also because geology's, you know, we've got, I think, the oldest the oldest rocks in the world, you know, up on the island Mullen, Iona. And, again, over those four years, just not as much poetry came through because I was also concentrating on building and working and some poems came through and I just self published this little booklet called The Trees Are My Teachers. But it's about what trees intuitively teach me, but it's also rocks, the ocean, just everything the Great Mother has to offer, really.
Speaker 5:What's your name
Speaker 3:so people can find it?
Speaker 5:Kellyanne? Yes. I don't have a website or anything. I'm not and I'm not very I'm trying to get my head around a lot do of these. Compete?
Speaker 5:Technology. Well, people could email me
Speaker 6:if they Yeah. Want
Speaker 5:Yeah. And my email is solaceinselfOkay.@outlook.com. But yeah. Yep. Okay.
Speaker 5:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Saw you nodding.
Speaker 7:Yeah. So, Leona and I are both staying on a nature recovery project in Sharpen in near Tottenass in Devon. So, I went there on a on a traineeship after going on a retreat at Sharpen, just a week long nature retreat and sort of having that connection, that sort of epiphany thing. I was a postman before that and I just thought, well, it's time for me to do something different. And, yeah, it's just a beautiful place to be, and there's an ecologist that lives on-site who I think you guys should chat to.
Speaker 7:It'd be cool. Can you Everything
Speaker 4:say a little bit about the epiphany, please.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Just being silent in nature, I think. And the landscape there looking down on the River Dart was just this you know, they used to use that landscape for films in in the sort of fifties and sixties and pretend it was the Amazon. It's so lush down there. And just being embraced by the land sort of yeah.
Speaker 7:It just had a massive impact on me and I thought, oh, maybe I can do something worthwhile. And yeah. So, I met the owner there as well.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Same. So I I moved to this special place and feel very lucky to spend time there. I work in the garden there, so I grow food. And I think connecting with the land.
Speaker 6:I also think connecting with food is really important and where food comes from and how that shapes the land. I've developed some sessions around trying to connect people with food in this garden, which is amazing because it overlooks the valley that Chris was just talking about, that river, really special landscape. And it's got rewilding happening within it, so you can kind of look out and see nature recovery happening. Yeah. It's very special.
Speaker 3:I'm sure we all want to know what food you grow. It's such a basic question.
Speaker 6:Yeah. It's a one acre market garden, organic vegetables. So it's not commercial or anything. We have residential nature recovery trainees come to live with us for three or four months at a time. And so it's mostly like an educational and therapeutic garden.
Speaker 6:So the trainees will come up and we work with lots of different people as well. We've got a charity who works with adults with additional needs and they have garden groups who come up. And so it's a space where we all grow together, and it's a very, like, mindful space as well. We do there's lots of meditation that's happening up there, and and then we grow the food that we then eat on-site because we live communally. What's it called?
Speaker 6:Ambios on the Sharpen Estate. How do you spell that? A M B I 0 S.
Speaker 4:And which estate is it on?
Speaker 6:The Sharpen Estate. Yeah. It's so fascinating. I loved hearing about this the geology and how that kind of shapes the land. It's fascinating.
Speaker 6:And I've never really thought about it or made that connection. I'm just interested in, cause in a lot of our sciences, we kind of and a lot of our modern world, we kind of separate things. So, you know, you've geology and botany and all this. And it sounds like more holistic, your projects. What's your experience been trying to kind of piece together some of those different things that are often very separate departments.
Amanda Wallwork:That's exactly what yeah. That's what exactly what experience is. It's real you know, knowing these all these things are separate and they're separate sciences or they're separate disciplines. But when you actually put it together from the experience of yourself experiencing it, it's just really important. Then it all comes out.
Amanda Wallwork:And it all makes sense. This is the thing I love is the way that all kind of interconnects and makes sense. And once you realize that, then you then if you can if you can apply that to everything else, you can understand why you do certain things in a garden or or with growing stuff and that and, you know, all these things. And I think that's really important, the growing thing. One of the things, if you like, one of the things I'm most proud of at the moment is that all this work that I'm doing in different ways I used to think the best thing I'd ever done was the children's book back in 1994 or whatever, you know.
Amanda Wallwork:I I never do anything else at least I've had a book published. But actually, what it is now is is motivating and we're actually on Portland. We're trying to buy a small bit of Bandon Quarry, which has got some allotments on it to save those allotments from development because in soil is very thin on Portland. Growing stuff is quite difficult. So any bit of land that you can grow stuff on is really important.
Amanda Wallwork:So we're actually launching a campaign to try and buy this bit of land at the moment. And so where my energies are going is my own work is one thing, but where my energies are going on is motivating and trying to make this happen, to actually do something, to even buy a small bit of land so you can do that with, to save it from because everything's now under pressure from various developments. So that's where I feel I'm most of most of my energies are really going into the let's try and make this happen. Let's really make this we don't have to accept all this stuff just happening, but you it's a hard work because you've really got to you've got all the challenges. It's not just the people you have to convince.
Amanda Wallwork:It's all the layers of bureaucracy you have to get through. Raising money at the moment is really challenging anyway. You know, no one's got anything spare. Well, there are plenty of people who spare, but choosing not to spend it on it. But how do you do that?
Amanda Wallwork:How do you get people to actually change the way they've been doing things and actually realize that this is so important? That growing and those that access to nature, without it, we're completely lost and it's just so important. You can't just recreate it just like that. It's something that is fundamental and it takes thousands of years to form.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much. I'm giving you guys
Estelle Phillips:a clap. 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.