The Landscape Within

Writing Exercise: What worlds live inside you?

When I read Sharon Blackie’s The Enchanted Life, I was already intimately familiar with many of the practices she recommends. Spending time in nature, slowing down to see and appreciate small details of your surroundings, following passions and hobbies that make your heart sing—all key elements to living an “enchanted life,” and all things I try to do in my everyday life.

Midway through, I came to a chapter where she writes about how our landscapes form and shape us, not only as individuals, but as communities and as cultures, which also made sense to me. But then she went further to suggest that while we inhabit our landscapes, those landscapes also inhabit us. And when she began thinking of what kind of world existed inside her, she envisioned an old, gnarled island where brash and conquering ships would meet their doom on her shores, but small, peaceful boats might land safely. She went on to write:

My island’s edges might be fraught with danger, but its interior would be lush and green. You’d have to scale the mountains to get there—mountains forged from age-old gneiss, carved and curved like the secret folds of an animal’s pale-grey brain. These are dark mountains, not easy to cross, but behind them you’d find the treasure you sought: hidden green valleys loud with tumbling water, and the thick oak forest where the old gods still dwell. Follow the river to the heart of the wood: a woman lives there, in a cottage whose walls are studded with shells. A fox sleeps by her hearth, a raven roosts in a dark corner, and a sealskin hangs on the back of her door. This is the island I would be.

And it lit a fire in me. I put down her book and spent the next hour furiously scribbling in my notebook about archipelagos studded with islands that sink and resurface at will, and trailing vines that have learned to hunt after sundown, and trees thick with russet bark that tower higher than the clouds. And whether they’re part of me, or the stories I still need to tell, or the worlds that live and breath inside my dreams, I don’t know. I can’t separate them.

The landscapes inside of me have changed as I’ve moved through my life, and even change from day to day. It’s become a favourite writing exercise to sit down and close my eyes for a few minutes and see which world is breathing deep inside me, what creatures are snuffling at the edges of my stories, whether the wind is soft and sweet or cutting and determined.

When you try this exercise (and I hope you do), give yourself ten or twenty minutes and close your eyes. Open that secret door in your heart and listen, see, feel. Can you hear the distant crash of waves over rock, or the buzz of insects in tall, dry grass? Is your world bright and clear, or twilit and hidden? How does the air travel over your skin? Then put your pen to paper and let it all come pouring out.