Meander

It recently struck me that it had been a while since I’d gone for a walk without aim or limit, so decided to take some time and let myself be led by the world instead of my own agenda. Early summer is a fine time for this kind of wandering, ideally amidst damp meadows that teem with life.

As so often happens when I walk in this way, I soon picked up a deer trail that followed the course of a river - an animal inclination to walk alongside living waters that wind intelligent routes through the landscape. A new hierarchy emerges in being a human following an animal who, in turn, follows water that is both shaping and being shaped by the ground. There is leadership - but of a fluid and transient kind.

Rivers are agile, living things that live out braiding, meandering patterns. Without human interference they choose their own way, creating routes that can seem unnecessary to minds that run on straight lines and work to consistent targets. Far from just being a ‘feature of the landscape’, rivers are vital veins that bring life to the earth. The work of straightening rivers, one of the many endeavours of the sometimes insanely rigorous Victorians, has done much harm to the wise waterways of the UK. In our quest for fertile ground and dominant order we turned many meandering rivers into straight runs, stripping trees from banks and pouring concrete over the floodplains, stopping the absorbing conversation between river and bank.

This quest for dominance and order missed something important. Floods are part of a river’s life, and as long as there are floodplains, this need not be a problem. An essential part of river systems – ‘floodplains are the wide, flat banks that are covered with water during long periods of heavy rainfall. They are like speed bumps – holding onto water and slowing it down.’ (Czech et al 2016). They are also places of fertile growth, peopled with water-loving trees, fragrant flowers and myriad insect life. Far from unproductive, they hum with business.

To stop seeing a river as alive and to treat it as a resource is to degrade it. This is true of all bodies, be they made of earth, water or flesh and bone. The current emptying of our raw sewage into our waterways is sad testament to this loss of vision. We empty waste into bodies we don’t consider worthy of respect, missing the link that the health of our water directly links to the health of all who walk and live alongside them.  

Happily, there is now a movement to undo these historic straightenings, in the hope that with the return of floodplains and tree-lined watercourses (with their nourishing leaf-fall and tangles of absorbent roots that hold the earth together) we can halt flooding and encourage the return of spawning salmon, trout and freshwater mussels. This process has some wonderful names such as putting the kinks back in the river, rewiggling, and the more technical but still lovely, re-meandering. It is a heartening thought that they way a river rewilds itself is by returning to its wiggly, non-sensical ways.

Allowing myself to follow the winding deer tracks along the river’s inefficient course, calmed me. These animal-river lines give a taste of what it must be like to walk in synch with a world that has a different understanding of time. To walk without purpose or aim is antithetical to how the western human is taught to move, think and do. How often do we allow ourselves to simply wander?

Words like ‘drift’ and ‘aimless’, speak of hazy and intangible life ways often associated with a sense of being lost. But they are how foraging animals, and the world, make their way. A river or an animal is not meant to move in ways that are consistently neat and straight. The straight line is a facet of hunting, either chasing or being chased, and these sprints are always short-lived. Otherwise, at peace, there’s just gentle movement that speaks of browsing - the meaningful relationship between foraging and meandering.

What happens when we ask the world, and ourselves, to sprint at optimum speed for long stretches of time?  Without kinks to slow things down, long loops that turn back on themselves, and absorbent stretches that aren’t meant to do anything, we also, like our rivers, get overwhelmed. We can go so fast these days - voice messages at double speed, 5G super-quick downloads, and projects like HS2 that destroy precious eco-systems, and waste billions, in order to shave seconds.

 But the body, the world, also needs spaces in which to slowly unwind. The only way our Plant Listening walks work is by consciously slowing down so that we allow ourselves to re-attune to the rhythm of a beckoning, meandering world.

You can read a conversation between myself and fellow tracking collaborator Hermione Spriggs on the subject of Meander here.