Landscape and Nature

Writing from Prompts

We include writing prompts in every Sahab Collective seminar. The prompts align with the seminar’s focus, and are written with the intention of encouraging new material and a different way of seeing literature. The writing below was written in response to the following prompts:

1. Sketch a scene of nature that evokes special memories.

2. Show us you moving through your picture. Share the sensorial moments that this movement ignites.

3. Focus perspective now on particular elements, whether that is weather, plants, animals, dirt. Look at it closely, and allow your attention to shift associatively.

4. Share a realisation that has formed as a result of writing yourself through nature.

Why not give it a go, and share your own writing.

My gears creek as I push up the hill. Brambles cling and leave their thin red traces on my thighs and calves, until the path widens and we are in the sandpit.

My bike hisses through the ferns where I drop it, and after my breath has steadied I can feel the silence of the woods radiating from me.

Then my senses adjust, and the chirrups and fuzzing of tiny wings prick my ears.

My shoes are slathered in the moistness of woods, sad clings to the wet. My lungs feel clean, and I swallow the pine air. Only there on that hill can I feel how clingy our home is. How boiled strings and pearls of starch, how fried yokes and animal fats, have stained the closeness, the dust of the walls.

And there is nothing at home that captures my attention like fern. I like bark, I like woodlouse. The way these cue tip shells skuttle in the dampened shade of fallen logs. Are they scuttling before I lift the wood? Or do they only begin to teem and dance once they know I am watching?

I used to grab them, watch them race across the back of my hands. I have not seen woodlouse in many years. I have not felt a butterfly alight on my earlobe in just as long. I would hold my breath when I caught their colours fanning. Flowers their pedestals, but sometimes my finger. I would watch them beat their lazy wings, and imagine them breathing. In and out.

So fragile, delicate. I think that it is their vulnerability that captures my attention.

The woodlouse and butterfly of my youth will have passed. The wood I used to cycle through is a victim to fracking. The pine air is less dense, diluted by the encroaching callousness of New Town planning.

All things pass, but nature should not pass before us, like butterflies dying on the wind.