Podcast Episode #20 Lorna Crozier’s books of poetry and non-fiction have been on my bedside table throughout my life. In unusually beautiful and fun ways, world renown Lorna Crozier give us words for what we see or feel. As her fellow author Anne Micheals says,
“ Lorna Crozier takes great pleasure in the world and her pleasure becomes ours.”
When I asked Lorna Crozier to be on this podcast, I could not believe that she said yes. Before you meet Lorna, let me read you her official bio.
An Officer of the Order of Canada, Lorna Crozier has been acknowledged for her contributions to Canadian literature, her teaching and her mentoring with five honorary doctorates, most recently from McGill and Simon Fraser Universities. Her books have received numerous national awards, including the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry. The Globe and Mail declared The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things one of its Top 100 Books of the Year, and Amazon chose her memoir as one of the 100 books you should read in your lifetime. A Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria, she has performed for Queen Elizabeth II and has read her poetry, which has been translated into several languages, on every continent except Antarctica. Her book, What the Soul Doesn’t Want, was nominated for the 2017 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In 2018, Lorna Crozier received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. Steven Price called Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), her latest nonfiction book, “one of the great love stories of our time.” Lorna Crozier lives on Vancouver Island. Welcome Lorna Crozier.
1) Please tell us your story and reasons why nature runs through all your work.
Yes, I think one of the mistakes we make is as a human species, is that we talk about going for a walk “in” nature or we are going outside “to” nature. We separate ourselves from it. We are part of nature like every other species like robins, earthworms, fish, and hawks. It is interesting that we have put this glass bell around ourselves and pretend that we are separate, and I think at our own peril. And maybe that is why we are going through what people are calling a nature deprivation right now where so many kids are not connected to what goes on around them – the technical things are all inside, and outside is a place they venture into, rather than part of their ecology as a living, breathing species.
So ever since I was a kid, I have been outdoors. And it may be because I was part of that lucky generation whose mothers said, “get out and play and don’t come back until suppertime.” And we’d run outside.
I lived in small city, not in a forest or in a meadow, but we lived in the alleys. We’d build trenches for the water to come down the alley. And we collected sticks to come down in them. We caught frogs and bumble bees in mason jars and let them go. We examined ants as they made their way across our sidewalks. We were 100% involved and I think that instilled in me that idea my skin should not separate me from other creatures.
When I feel happiest and when I feel most spiritual, is when I can shuck off the boundaries of what it means to be human and enter into the world of wind and sunlight and an animal with its eyes on me, as I want to put my eyes on it.
In your first memoir Small Beneath the Sky this comes through. You were born in Swft Current, Saskatchewan. The names of the chapters in this book are: light, dust, wind, rain, and snow as you weave in the story of your tough but fun childhood. What a great book.
Thank you Verla. I was in a way tricked into writing it. I always considered myself a poet, except I had written a number of essays as well which were published in various anthologies and magazines. I gathered these together and sent them to GreyStone publishers Rob Sanders because he had been bugging me for a book of prose. They accepted the collection of essays and then when I met with editor, the wonderful Barbara Pulling in Vancouver, she and Rob said “We don’t think this is the book you should be doing… we think you should write a book about growing up in Saskatchewan.” And I said no, because I don’t think my life is interesting enough to turn into a book. They pressured me and being dutiful with a small advance, I thought I better see what I can do.
And the way I tricked myself into this story is that I said, “I am not going to write about me., I find that very self-centred. You know a memoir has two me in it: me and moi. I am going to write about what effect landscape has on the development of character. I have always been fascinated by that. I think if I had grown up in the rain forest where I live now, I would be a different human being, than having spent the developmental years of my life in the short grassland of the very dry region of south west Saskatchewan.
I had heard of Aristotle’s idea that behind everything there is a first cause – something that starts it all. I thought what if I made that plural and turned it into first causes, and tried to figure out what were those causes that shape prairie people? And of course, I had to come up with Sky. Nowhere else in the world is the sky more lively, than in Saskatchewan. There are no mountains or trees to get in the way, the sky unfolds in front of you, and you can see several weather patterns going on at the same time. And then I thought, dust, wind, light – which of course is connected to sky. I thought that even if the book itself and stories about my family don’t work out, at least I am going to have these small condensed prose poems because they are written in paragraphs rather than lines. They use all the elements that a poem would use like music and metaphor and image. Even if the book doesn’t work out, I have these first causes and they can seed something else that I might like to do.
So the book is really what does it mean to be born in Saskatchewan in that landscape? How does it shape how you see the world, who you are, and who you will always be even if you move around.
My mother was from the farmland in the Red River Valley in Manitoba and when we stayed there we used the words that you used “coulees, sloughs, and caragana” and when you write about Swift Current that could be any small town.
I taught at the universities for many years and one of the first lessons is that if you write about a very specific place, if you tell your own small story, and if you can find a way to do it well enough, it will reach the world. It will be everybody’s story. Even a person who lives in New York can read it and find something in it, that will connect with them.
And you just mentioned some of my favourite words. When I was a young writer, just out of Saskatchewan, I would ask the room “how many of you know what caragana is?” And the people who raised their hands were from the prairies. For your listeners who don’t know, caragana is really a shrub that comes from the pea family. It actually originated in Siberia which is why it did so well on the prairies. So when it hit 20 or 30 below zero or it went through drought it could survive. It was probably the most common tree/shrub in shelter belts and then in small cities in lines of shrubs that separated one yard from another. I don’t know if it is as popular now, but in my day and in my parent’s day, it was thought of as a valuable little tree that spreads well.
Would you please read the piece “Snow’” in “Small Beneath The Sky” for people who are not familiar with your work?
Snow is one of the first causes, and especially when I was a kid, we had lots and lots of snow in winter. And I can still feel quite nostalgic and homesick when I think of snow – especially that first snow fall.
First Cause: Snow
Snow falls softly in memory. It is tentativeness given form and temperature, seeming again and again to hesitate, not knowing what lies below, whether the surface will be slippery or smooth, level or steep, a hillside, a field of purple clover, an open mouth. The snowflakes fall and lift , then fall again, the first ones melting as they touch the ground. Those that retain their shapes, remain as they were when they feathered the sky. One by one, they accumulate, form a density of stars, a thousand nameless constellations, none of them bruising or breaking, not a word, not a sigh. There whole purpose is to fall, to settle down. A parking lot, a birch grove, a woman’s hair. No thought can stop the snow, no panegyric or lament. Even if you are sleeping, you know the sky is white with down. To the world outside your window, it brings a riddled hush, a new religion, everything has been touched but touched softly, without hands.
Would you please tell us about your recent loss, your book “Through The Garden?” I love the part when Patrick Lane looks up at you from the garden as you cross the lawn in your bathrobe, barefoot, with his coffee. Would you read that part to us and tell us about your garden, your yard, your life together outside? By the way, I listened to your audiobook, where you are do the narration, and I felt like you were just sitting down telling me the whole story of your life with Patrick. I just loved it.
Thank you, it is my first audiobook and people have been telling me for years that I have an audiobook because they appreciate the way I read my work, which is lovely. It was very difficult to read every single word out loud in that book. Most writers know that there are certain things that you write that you don’t think you will have the strength to read publicly with an audience in the room, so I had to read every word. Sometimes it was trying, but it felt like a privilege to the work in that way.
The passage you are referring to comes from Patrick’s wonderful memoir, “There is a Season”, which was set in our garden and he started writing it during his first month of sobriety. He had been sober for 20 years before he died, and I think it is a remarkable testament to be born again in your new skin, after you have been able to set aside an addiction – in his case alcohol. So this is the passage from “There is a Season” written by Patrick Lane
This morning I am full of prayer although I do not utter it. I pray all goes well this fine morning. Lorna is back from her retreat. I have just seen her at the kitchen door in her red robe. She is letting the cats out, and once they are on the deck she calls my name as if it were a question, and I answer and say I am here, here in the garden. She comes to me then with two cups of coffee and as she walks across the moss, I see what beauty is, and am undone by it. I say to her “you are beautiful” and she smiles as she comes to me barefoot, her feet wet with dew. “Pray God there will be many more days” I whisper.
Wow I have chills after hearing that.
I chose that to be the epigraph for my book because in trying to articulate the forty years Patrick and I had together, I had to set it in a garden. We have had four or five gardens together. He was the master gardener, he knew all about it, and I was his dedicated and loyal assistant. I was what every gardener wants, and that’s an avid weeder. I found it very meditative. I was not good at knowing when a plant should be deadheaded or pruned.. or any of those things.. that was Patrick’s expertise. But I was also his biggest gardening fan. We spent many hours talking about where to move or plant something. He beautified every small patch of earth we lived on. I appreciated it greatly in our lives together.
It sounds like you live in beautiful natural environment.
We are across the road from a regional park. I just have to walk down my driveway, through the parking lot and in five minutes I am at the ocean. And walking through, not a first or second growth forest, but probably a third growth forest, with trees that are hundreds of years old and hundreds of feet tall…so we felt very privileged to live here. We have a pond in our back yard with goldfish, two turtles that came with the pond when we moved in, moss gardens, fruit trees and flowers. Both of our offices where we had been doing our writing for the last 15 years, have big glass windows or doors that look out onto the backyard. I can leap up and chase the heron away when it lands in the pond and devours my fish. I can see birds bathing in the waterfall. There is no sort of separation between indoor and outdoor in our house.
I heard that you took away some of the ivy growing around the trees..
Yes this is part of my new book “Through the Garden.” I think it is one of the best things that Patrick and I ever did in our whole lives – no matter what books we published and awards we’ve won. He started it. He would go across the road to this forest I was telling you about, and it’s mainly old cedars and old firs… some are arbutus and oak. He started taking his secateurs and clipping the ivy at the base of the trees and yanking it off the trunk. You couldn’t always get it off the trunk, but if you cut the ivy at the base it would die high up…even 40 feet up… and quit choking the tree. We couldn’t get rid of it on the ground, at the base because it is just too wide-spread, unless we used some kind of terrible herbicide which of course we wouldn’t use. But we could at least get it off the trees. And it is several acres. We worked our butts off for about five years until we had the ivy down from every tall cedar, and every magnificent fir. We knew it would come back, so last March, a year after Patrick died, I had his two sons who live here, and they each have three kids… so I had the six grandkids and the two sons and their wives come out with their secateurs and we started clearing again. We are going to do the same thing every March. We are going to get out there as long as I am physically capable of doing it, to get rid of the new ivy growth and give the trees a chance to thrive.
And we know that this natural world is probably helping you in your grieving process.
Yes in Patrick’s first stay in the hospital…I should let your listeners know that what he had was never properly diagnosed. It was an autoimmune disorder, which just kept making him more and more fatigued. Anyway, when he first was in the hospital, and I didn’t know if he was going to come home, I could see those trees across the road – the boarder of them – out my sliding bedroom door…I don’t bother closing the curtains at night because I want to see the world in the morning. I looked at those trees across the road and said “he made you better, he helped you live…you’ve got to help him.”
So I think in a way the trees summarize what I pray to. I think I am a pagan, an animist.. and if there is God in the world, I think God is in nature…at least for me. That’s where my prayers go.
Thank for that Lorna. I love that you say it out loud: you pray to the trees. I loved the book. It is sad but also uplifting.
Yes I wrote it I think, not to deal with grief because I was writing it while Patrick was alive, and when we both hoped that one of the seven specialists he was working with – hematologist, rheumatologist, internist and on and on – that one of them was going to diagnose – to find out what it was. And that there would be a drug or a treatment that would make him well. So the book ends with Patrick being alive…although very weakened…and me having hope that we would continue to have many years together.
It didn’t work out that way. I wrote a postscript that dealt with the morning he died – just a page and a half. But the book ended on hope. I think the book is embedded with hope and embedded with love. Because I wanted to explain what love means – what a long term loving relationship means – and especially when two people had so much in common. We were both poets. Patrick also wrote two novels and his memoir, and I have written two memoirs now. We supported and believed in each other. And of course, being a poet is such an eccentric, odd thing to do that we had to have faith in each other. We would buoy each other up when we would feel down about the lack of an audience for poetry for instance…the inability to make a living with one’s poetry — we shared that love, we shared a love of gardening, we shared a love of animals– in our case we had cats. By the way, I don’t think that people have to chose to be a cat person or a dog person. We were both animal lovers and I wanted all of that to enrich this book.
There are those several themes that I think bring joy…so life can be joyous and it is not just about worry and illness. It’s about what keeps you going during worry and illness. Also it tries to find value in a life, and in our lives together.
And we know that this natural world is probably helping you in your grieving process.
Yes in Patrick’s first stay in the hospital…I should let your listeners know that what he had was never properly diagnosed. It was an autoimmune disorder, which just kept making him more and more fatigued. Anyway, when he first was in the hospital, and I didn’t know if he was going to come home, I could see those trees across the road – the boarder of them – out my sliding bedroom door…I don’t bother closing the curtains at night because I want to see the world in the morning. I looked at those trees across the road and said “he made you better, he helped you live…you’ve got to help him.”
So I think in a way the trees summarize what I pray to. I think I am a pagan, an animist.. and if there is God in the world, I think God is in nature…at least for me. That’s where my prayers go.
Thank for that Lorna. I love that you say it out loud: you pray to the trees. I loved the book. It is sad but also uplifting.
Yes I wrote it I think, not to deal with grief because I was writing it while Patrick was alive, and when we both hoped that one of the seven specialists he was working with – hematologist, rheumatologist, internist and on and on – that one of them was going to diagnose – to find out what it was. And that there would be a drug or a treatment that would make him well. So the book ends with Patrick being alive…although very weakened…and me having hope that we would continue to have many years together.
It didn’t work out that way. I wrote a postscript that dealt with the morning he died – just a page and a half. But the book ended on hope. I think the book is embedded with hope and embedded with love. Because I wanted to explain what love means – what a long term loving relationship means – and especially when two people had so much in common. We were both poets. Patrick also wrote two novels and his memoir, and I have written two memoirs now. We supported and believed in each other. And of course, being a poet is such an eccentric, odd thing to do that we had to have faith in each other. We would buoy each other up when we would feel down about the lack of an audience for poetry for instance…the inability to make a living with one’s poetry — we shared that love, we shared a love of gardening, we shared a love of animals– in our case we had cats. By the way, I don’t think that people have to chose to be a cat person or a dog person. We were both animal lovers and I wanted all of that to enrich this book.
There are those several themes that I think bring joy…so life can be joyous and it is not just about worry and illness. It’s about what keeps you going during worry and illness. Also it tries to find value in a life, and in our lives together.
What would you like to tell us about your book “The House The Spirit Builds.” This is the dedication: “Dedicated to the quiet grace and beauty of the land we walk, to those indigenous people who nurtured this place before us and to those who continue to do so after we are gone.”
For many years, maybe fifteen, I have been going to an ecological retreat in the country outside of Kingston, Ontario. A colleague who has become a very good friend of mine named Rena Upitis bought this piece of land with a lake on it and a narrow little rough road, fifteen or so years ago. She decided she wanted to share it. She did not want it to be just a place for she and her family to go to. So she built a big lodge out of straw bales, and built a road, and a few little cabins, including one by the lake. And she opened it up to host groups who wanted to get closer to the natural world and maybe didn’t have an opportunity where they lived – who wanted to take classes in botany, bird watching, drum making, cooking, and in my case people who wanted to take classes from me, writing poetry.
So after “The Wild In You” came out, the book I did in collaboration with the wildlife photographer Ian Mcallister and a book about the Great Bear Rain Forest, Rena said “could you do something similar based in Wintergreen? With a couple of photographers? “So I always think I won’t be capable of this kind of stuff, but I always say yes instead of no, and then I can back out if it doesn’t work. If I say no I feel I am closing down and I feel I am not being brave, and I am not learning what I need to learn. So I said ok, get the photographers to send me some photographs and they did. Many of the photographs were of objects, rather than “The Wild in You” of the Great Bear Rainforest is mainly natural images. In this case, there was an old shovel, tea cups on a window sill…that kind of thing, which was very much a part of Wintergreen. These were objects that were stained by human use and will outlast us – and very few pictures of animals. So it was a different kind of book in that way that I think honored and valued place – where you stand, where you sit right now – and what beauty you can find in it, no matter where that may be.
I think if I have a message in my writing, that would be one of the main ones. It is that there is luminosity in the ordinary. The miraculous you can find in the common place. And maybe if you do that you can find it in yourself. And if you find it in yourself, maybe you will value that in others, in a way that is meaningful and not destructive. And let’s us be better caretakers of the world.
There is a poem in “The House The Spirit Builds” called “Small Ambition” would you tell us about that?
When I was receiving these photographs from Peter Coffman and Diane Laundy
who are a husband and wife photography team, it was at the same time that Patrick was not doing well. I was full of fear, sadness, and worry. And these photographs came across my computer and I thought “oh what a relief – I can get outside of myself an my worries, and I can write about things that have nothing to do with my worries and what I am going through.” Then of course when we finished the book and matched the photographs and the poems, pulled it all together, and I read the proofs – I thought, how could I have forgotten that you never leave yourself and your present circumstances out of what you are doing. I could see the sadness in the book, the mortality in the book, but I wasn’t consciously aware of these themes when I was writing in conversation with the photographs. But it is definitely there. So this is a poem that goes with a beautiful photograph of a kind of fog/mist rising in among a stand of white barked trees.
A Small Ambition
To be no more than mist
Rising above the rushes
Entering the white limbs of trees.
For just one hour
To be a calmness lifting up
Minus bones and muscles
Minus memory
and cognition
And your own insistent longing to last.
4) Please tell us about “The Wild in You.” Would you please read “Being Seen?”. I say pieces of these out loud to myself on my walks in the bush here in Pine Falls Manitoba. I have never been moved so deeply by a poem than ‘being seen’ – probably because there are black bears and wolves around here in the bush. And you have put into words what I feel sometimes when I am alone way out there. Before reading your poem, I had no words for this. Thank you for your work.
Yes this collaboration came to me as a true gift. I don’t know if you and your listeners are aware of an online travel magazine called Toque and Canoe it is a very high quality e-magazine started by a journalist named Kim Gray. She, several years ago, had this overwhelming desire to make Canada known to Canadians. There will be pieces about Manitoba in there Verla. So she commissioned various writers to write travel pieces – fairly short with high quality photographs. She contacted me out of the blue, because she had a read a piece of mine in the Globe and Mail about the change of seasons, and she said I think you would be good at travel writing. And again, not saying no…I said ok, sure, I wouldn’t mind trying. And she said, well where would you like to go? And I said, where would you like to send me? She said, how about The Great Bear Rainforest? So, no one is going to turn down a trip to The Great Bear Rainforest. It starts at the northern tip of Vancouver Island, and includes the water, the coast, the forest from there up to the Alaskan panhandle. It is one of the few primeval wildernesses that we have left. It really changed my life going there. I had to take two planes, stay overnight on the mainland, and then be taken by boat to this estuary and The Spirit Bear Lodge run by the Salish indigenous people who took us in boats to places where we could see grizzlies feeding. I was there in October, so they were just trying to fatten up before they went into hibernation. And on the way to these estuaries to see grizzlies, we just happened to see whales. It wasn’t the purpose of the journey but there they were. And thee indigenous captains would just stop the boat and we would watch humpbacks fish – by “bubble netting” – where the whales create bubbles in the ocean to create a trap for fish. So we were within 50 yards of these huge humpback whales. We could look down their throats, as their heads would sweep up, as they were scraping in the fish. And Kim, my editor who had sent me there (God Bless her) said “while you are there, I’d like you to meet my good friend Ian Mcallister. I had known of Ian as a world famous wildlife photographer. He has won the national geographic photo of the year a couple of times, but what is even more appealing about this lovely man, is that when he and his wife Karen were in their twenties, they canoed through this wilderness area, and it was called something like Wilderness 506 or whatever. They thought we are going to spend our lives saving this – and if we are going to save it, we have to call it something better. Let’s call it The Great Bear Rainforest. They moved there to a little town called Bella Bella, had children there, and spent all of their energy getting this place known to the world through Ian’s writing and photographs and both of their advocacy work. Now they run an organization called Pacific Wild with the whole purpose to keep this place pristine, which is pretty hard when you look at all the clear cutting and the Department of Fisheries allowing overfishing in the area – but they believe it is possible.
So anyway Kim said, I want you to meet Ian. I thought well Ian is a very busy man, I am probably not going to have a chance to …Patrick came with me on the trip and Ian spent a day with us and it was love at first sight for the three of us. Kim said, when you meet Ian, why don’t you guys do a book? And she said it in this sweet, enthusiastic way. We were both a little bit cynical. Ian said “what do you think/ and I said what do you think.” And then again, I said “send me some photos, let’s see what happens.” The challenge for me as a writer was that Ian’s photograph’s don’t need words. They don’t need captions, you just want to enjoy the image that he has captured. So I had to find a way that would say something that was equally as valid, that was not illustrative, but could just sit beside the photograph as a companion that would add something – and not take away – and that the photograph would do the same thing for the words. So it was a challenge and a delight to work with him. And we had a lot of fun promoting the book as you can imagine. Ian said that I was a more radical environmentalist than he was when we spoke to the house. He’s learned not to be quite as proselytizing as I was allowed to be. I was very preachy, not about our book, but our task to save this gorgeous planet that we live on.
I will read you the one you asked for. I sort of had this poem in my mind for a long time before I saw the photograph. Here is the wonderful photograph of a black bear eating herring eggs. I find it such a splendid image. But before Ian sent me that photo, I had been thinking, how do I express what it is like when you are walking in the woods on the prairies, by the ocean, and you suddenly sense that something is looking at you. And it is not another human being. It is not a feeling of fear, like oh my God, a cougar is going to land on me, although it might be – but it is this odd shivery type of sensation that you are being looked at. When Ian’s photograph came, I thought wow, because the bear is looking at you as he was looking at Ian when he took that photo. But I was trying to capture that sense of before you see what is looking at you, you are being seen.
Being Seen
On the forest trail, a rabbit’s
chewed-off foot, a torn wing
slick with spit a Noh
choreography of bones.
Whatever watches you from the shadows
Can smell you now. Startled
from your body,
what you are inside
flinches in the naked light,
not wanting to be looked at.
Even now, you try to name
that prickly patch of flesh on the back of your neck
under your hair. Being seen
has a skin: the air glistens with it.
5) What tips would you like to give our listeners about how to notice in new ways, when we are outside close to trees?
I guess you know…to walk with attention. The two photographers that I worked with in “The House The Spirit Builds” describe it as “slow looking” (like we have slow cooking). It is like when we cook from scratch and use our own garden produce. And also “breathing in” and using all of our senses. I am so pleased that I still have a sense of smell. We know that the pandemic has taken that away from some. I think we have to go back to the animals that we are…. And sniff out our territory, as well as look at what is there. And try to look beyond what we take for granted…..why don’t we thrill when we see a sparrow? Why does it have be a more gorgeous bird like a meadow lark or a cardinal or a kingfisher. What is wrong with the humble sparrow? Why can’t we let it lift our hearts? Because our hearts certainly need to be lifted.
My heart is heavy these days as I am sure some of your listeners are — so let’s act as Rocca the German poet said “We have to act as if we are placing our hands on the earth for the first time.” And maybe we have to act as if we are placing our hands on the earth for the last time too. That is my addendum to his wonderful statement because although we might live until we are ninety, and who knows…we are here for such a short time. Someone once said (and I don’t know who to attribute it to) “Every poem is saying we loved the earth, but we couldn’t stay.” And I find this a way to be grateful for my short time on earth.
Thank you Lorna for this interview and for your life’s work.
Listeners please pick up Lorna Crozier’s Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats), her latest nonfiction book. Let me take a minute to give you some of the 16 the titles Lorna Crozier’s books that I have and love to read and reread. The Garden Going on Without Us, Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence, Inventing the Hawk (winner of the 1992 Governor General’s Award), Everything Arrives at the Light, What the Living Won’t Let Go, Whetstone, The Blue Hour of the Day, The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things, The Wrong Cat and What the Soul Doesn’t Want. 3 children’s book, Lots of Kisses, So Many Babies, and More Than Balloons.
Lorna Crozier’s great website is http://lornacrozier.ca/contact/index.html where Lorna reads some of her poems like “Compendium of Crows” and “All The Room You Need” and there are films of her poems like “fear of snakes.”
Listeners Please check out my book and workbook Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Prevent Dementia, and Control Your Chronic Illness and look for this episodes show notes on my website Treesmendus.com. Thank you for listening to the end. Please rate this episode if you have a minute to show your support for this show.
Next time you are outside near trees, let Lorna Crozier’s poems and stories lend you a hand – to help to find words you when you are moved by rain, snow, trees, living beings in nature. It is difficult for most of us to share the deep insights that we have about nature. Very often they are at the non-verbal level, reading Lorna’s work will help you find the words.
When you are outside and you feel something or see something.. you can draw on Lorna Crozier’s words to say yes!! this is how it is… And this is a good thing because we all need a little more of Your Outside Mindset.
