Robert Macfarlane

A Weekend with Robert Macfarlane, in Touch with Nature, Words, and Moral Imagination

Step away from the noise.

Let the hush of trees and wind-tossed leaves tune your senses.

Let words—read, written, or spoken—open new inner doors.

Let moral imagination guide you beyond what is, toward what ought to be.

Walk barefoot on the earth.

Write what you see, and what you feel.

Speak not just to be heard, but to connect.

And listen—not just to others, but to the world itself.

"I came to see that we are never dry-footed on the bank. We’re never standing there watching the current move past us… We’re always moving. And what that understanding does is both induce a contentment with change, but also a pristination of the given moment, because it will be upstream of you within seconds.

I want readers to imagine rivers as having lives, having deaths and even having rights – and to see what flows from that re-imagining in terms of law, culture and politics. And I would like them to take the full downriver journey of the book, from mountain to sea.

In English, we have no verb to river, but what could be more of a verb than a river? At the level of form and pattern, I sought to give the whole book the shape of the water cycle. So we begin at the springs who rise near my home, and we end back at the springs. In between, the book travels up to the mountains and from there descends eventually to reach the sea at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. By the final pages, language has entered a sort of liquid state. Language has been rivered, as well as me. I strongly felt at times that I was writing with the river, or even being written by it.

Words make worlds. In English, we ‘it’ rivers, trees, mountains, oceans, birds and animals: a mode of address that reduces them to the status of stuff, and distinguishes them from human persons. In English, pronouns for natural features are ‘which’ or ‘that’, not ‘who’: the river that flows; the forest that grows. I prefer to speak of rivers who flow and forests who grow. In English, we speak of a river in the singular. But ‘river’ is one of the great group nouns, containing multitudes. In English, there is no verb ‘to river’. But what could be more of a verb than a river?"

— Robert Macfarlane