Wild Words Can Change Your Life

I have been absorbed with reading Annie Dillard lately, which has me thinking about the life-changing effect that nature writing and good books can have on our lives and perspectives.

Dillard’s book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) is a beautiful (and occassionally exhausting) account of her nature wanderings near Tinker Creek in Virginia, where she ponders the secrets of the natural world and God’s role in its creation. I read her words with a highlighter in hand armed for highlighting action because she often speak to my naturalist heart.

“Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will do. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Chapter One

I was recently introduced to another Dillard piece, Living Like Weasels. “A weasel is wild,” it begins, going on to describe how a weasel will “bite his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go.” Ultimately, Living Like Weasels is a detailed and thoughtful essay about Dillard’s run-in with a weasel and her contemplation of the simplicity of life in nature.

Blame it on my mentor-across-the-centuries Charlotte Mason - who promoted reading “living books” to children and not “twaddle” – but I decided to read Living Like Weasels to my 7 and 9-year-old daughters a few weeks ago. I have been talking with them about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as I have worked through it, so their curiosity about the intriguing Annie Dillard – their mom’s new nature heroine – had been piqued.

We were a few sentences in to the story when my 7-year-old began clinging to me, asking in a nervous voice: “Do weasels live in Tennessee? Do they live near our house, Mom?” I had not expected this reaction and wondered what to do with it. “Maybe,” I said. Then the tears started, and we had to stop reading and go to the laptop to look up weasels.

“Emma, you cannot be afraid of weasels – that is embarrassing,” I giggled. Our online research stalled our exciting weasel story for a bit, but it finally calmed Emma, who was reassured knowing that weasels are not very big.

Today, if I mention weasels, Emma still gets a wary look on her face. We have both been under the spell of Annie Dillard’s words.

That is the thing about nature writing and good books – they can open your eyes to the world and change your perspectives. Books about nature – children’s books and adult “living books” - can be used strategically (or not, as in my case with weasels) to build on a child’s understanding and compassion for the natural world.

So tell me: What nature books have changed your life?