W for Woman Writer in Wood Wide Web

W is for women especially those who have campaigned for human rights for centuries. W is for the Will to align human rights with nature. W is for a Writer who has wobbled into the Wood Wide Web.

W is for wobble as I stand in the tree position for yoga. I write because I must but 2022 and 2023 brought despair and with it my fiction writing slipped into silence. Words need readers to match writers’ wishes. Wishes cannot be expressed in words only. My sense of self tunes into wordless nature which whispers radical changes in my everyday life. More local networking and co-operation across borders. The woodland planted in 2021 in the midst of a pandemic talks to me about my time. Time to consume less. Time to protect palm forests before they emerge on the supermarket aisles as biscuits and cakes. Time to listen the miners in Africa who feed the chips in our phones.  Time to cut down and cut out the plastic which turns up on the banks of Indonesian rivers. Time to connect again to Think Global, Act Local in a wood-wide-web.

Facing my wobble about writing brings back Sister Catherine, in the Convent of Mercy in Strabane who takes the eleven-year-old me aside and tells me that one day I will write my autobiography. Today I can balance better on my right leg as she pushes me forward in front of the class to talk about rain forests. After the 11plus exam which gave me a ticket to Grammar School, she took the class to plant a few square metres of shrubbery in the Convent Grounds. Shrubberies were no longer in Jane Austen novels so when I moved to Donegal decades later, I planted another shrubbery which grows now taller than the house. Enid Blyton gave me a copse which towers above the stream at the road.

Trees connect me to a couple of decades in Donegal. Trees remind me of the greater and greater concentration of wealth and power bringing hunger, hardship, and war. Trees remind me of a history greater than my lifetime. Myths and metaphors remind me of how interconnected we are with each other and with nature. I visit the healing well which predates Christianity near the 12^th Century Cistercian monastery in Ballyshannon. A green-veined common white butterfly flitting by reminds me of the popular myth recounted to us by a nun in school that a butterfly’s wing touching a flower can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.  Proof that God sees everything. Nonsense of course but a more romantic metaphor than fossil fuels melting the North Pole.. I balance on the stone at the well. As I wobble towards the end of the gender alphabet, can I challenge the binary splits into US and THEM which distract us from the urgency of dealing with climate change at personal, political, and economic levels. Am I in danger of slipping into the sea and drowning in the silent depths of wishy-washy compromise?

Home again, I look at the lichen on the branch of an oak planted fifteen years ago which now towers above the terrace. Trees planted around the house nod at my white hair which has replaced the rebel redhead. Stories of the hidden life of trees told by Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohleben inspire hope that the hidden web of human nature can stop the plunder of our common Wealth. I put my faith in a tidal wave of justice with connections between the nature of plants, trees, earth and sea and our human nature.  

I throw a log in the wood burning stove and think of how trees hold back the floods of the future as I fill the kettle. Trees rustle moments of joy with paper for writing and for wrapping. Trees murmur rituals from the tree of Jesse, father of King David to the Christmas tree in St. Brigid’s Church in Ballintra.. The trees in the native woodland grow taller than me in less than two years. There will be a wood wide web of resistance. I will share my writing to find others who want to join the wood-wide-web. I decide to write a story for children.