This project is the first in a series of creative experiments designed as invitations to appreciate more-than-human life and enter into deeper reciprocity with the ever-present gifts of nature.
We designed these cards to give out as gifts during the 2019 Christmas Faire of Bolinas, a small quirky town in northern California close to our home. All photographs are taken within this bioregion – emphasising poetry of place – and the texts written are our own. The writings are told through the voice of each element, intended to remind us of the reciprocal gifts they bring into our lives.
This site is a resource for you to immerse yourself in each element, to open your senses, read its poetry, hear its voice. You can print them out as gifts for your loved ones, and also submit your own words of what nature has shared with you, your personal secret conversations with other beings.
In the words of Andreas Weber: “Poetic creativity is the ability to know something through participation. We need to understand life as a deeply sense-creating phenomenon. Organisms live in existential, felt realities and perception always means to be touched on a bodily level.”
To be touched means to be entangled. In perceiving we participate in the world.
Our hope is that this project encourages you to enter into deeper participation, curiosity, reverence and harmony with the countless gifts of Nature that are bestowed upon us every day.
You can go to the site, print them for yourself and your loved ones, and if you feel moved to share your own voice and poetry, please do write to us. We’ll be honoured to hear Nature speak through you.
We imagine this being the first prototype of many possible projects – Voices of Nature hailing from around the world, parts of a Rights for Nature animistic engagement, workshops for children in schools, and so on and so forth… Let the ideas and love flow.
From Bolinas, CA – 2019
‘Tis the season to be gifting, and today, we have quite the gift for you!
It’s a special kind of gift. One that cannot be bought nor sold, a gift that follows you everywhere you go. This gift has always been with you. It’s with you right now as you read these words.
Here’s the twist. The card you hold in your hands is a gift coming from Nature, a message spoken through us from other beings, translated into human tongue.
“What are these gifts?” you ask…
Take an audible, overly deep yoga breath. There it is! The gift of Air, the fresh invigoration you’ve partaken in every day of your life. Below your feet, there’s the gift of Gravity, holding you in its sweet embrace. Above, the clouds are gifting clean waters and winter storms. The givers of these gifts love to play, reflecting themselves joyfully as sunsets in the eyes of your dearest ones.
These are the gifts of the many-voiced landscape. The irreducible elements, the evolutionary process, the organisms of Nature. Together, they enable all life to thrive through the biggest gift of all — The Gift of Reciprocity — the exchange that weaves us all together in an interconnected web. The gift of what some would call, quite simply, Love.
In accepting this card, you are sublimely engaging in the most ancient of traditions. We ask that you simply connect with the voice that you find in your hands, that you reflect upon its place in your life and on the qualities it brings to you every day. Maybe you might pause, from time to time, to honor and thank this giver of gifts in whichever way feels right to you.
That is all. And onwards goes the flow.
Happy Holidays.