Ep. 38 – Margaret Renkl on finding wonder, grief, and inspiration in backyard nature

“When things get overwhelming in the larger world, what I tend to do is look at smaller things, pay attention to what’s living in my pollinator garden,” Margaret Renkl says. “This year we had a bird grasshopper. I’ve never seen one in this yard in 25 years in this house. One of those very large, finger-long grasshoppers. It was hilarious because it just set up camp there and watched me while I was doing what I needed to do. And that was just very encouraging, to see life going on.” (Photo by Heidi Ross)

In the long months we’ve all been confined to our homes, many people have become reacquainted with the vibrant life just outside their doors. Through the exploding interest in birdwatching, gardening, and other backyard adventures, even in the face of this year’s grief and pain, many people have found unexpected joy, companionship, and hope through partaking in the cycles of love and loss that happen in the skies and yards around us. The author E.B. White wrote, “Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” It is this wonder, from the nesting chipmunk family under her house, to watching a monarch butterfly emerge from a chrysalis in her yard, that our guest in this episode captures so evocatively. Through her writing, Margaret Renkl offers a vast window to that wonder, conveying the profundity to be found in the wild–and not so wild–world and how we live in concert with other living beings. 

But these days, loving nature and mourning it go hand in hand. At the foundation of our environmental crises lies humanity’s extreme disconnect from nature. From disappearing forests and rising seas to shorter winters and toxin-laced waters, humans have tried to dominate the natural world, attempting to see ourselves as distinct and untethered from the other living things around us. Renkl is a voice for celebrating our communion with the natural world once again and changing how we live. As she wrote in one of her recent New York Times columns on the mass killing of millions of minks in Denmark that contracted coronavirus, “Our mistake was only partly in believing that the natural world was ours for the taking. Our mistake was also in failing to understand that we ourselves are part of the natural world. If this pandemic has taught us anything it’s that we cannot escape the world we have shaped. We must begin right now to make preserving biodiversity a priority, to make protecting wildlife habitats a priority, to make living in closer harmony with our wild neighbors a priority.”

Renkl’s columns are often love letters to the Tennessee’s flora and fauna. “How lucky I am to live in a home with windows,” she writes in “Hawk. Lizard. Mole. Human.” “Against all odds — the encroachments of construction companies and lawn services and exterminators — these windows still open onto a world that stubbornly insists on remaining wild.” (Photo by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
“In terms of mortality, we are all on equal standing,” Margaret Renkl says. “Every living thing is going to die and every dead thing is going to decay or be eaten by something else. It’s something that doesn’t feel like a kind of judgement or punishment – it’s just the way things are. And even though it doesn’t make losing someone you love any less tragic, it does make me feel less singled out for suffering.” (Photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

It’s this connection to nature and the grief and hope that go with it that Renkl explores with vividness and haunting beauty in her masterful, genre-transcending book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. Through vignettes, she creates a tapestry of her childhood  in Alabama, her experiences of grief and renewal, and the mirrors and lessons she finds in the trees, bird-feeders, and rosemary bushes of suburban Tennessee. In stories about the heartbreak of losing her parents, finding the perfect squirrel-proof finch feeder, and seeing the chattering of birds in her yard as they warn of a lurking snake, she grounds the extraordinary and uplifts the everyday, finding reflections and teachings on life’s greatest joys and sorrows in the world around her.

Margaret Renkl is a New York Times opinion columnist based in Nashville, whose incisive commentary and exquisite portraits of our relationship with the natural world have awakened people to the preciousness of what we have; how profoundly we will feel its loss if we do not become better cohabitants of this planet; and how, even in the darkest times, there is much to celebrate.

“The shadow side of love is always loss,” Margaret Renkl reminds us in Late Migrations, her beautiful collection of essays on love and loss in her life and in the natural world. “Grief is only love’s own twin.”

Recommendations:

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

One Man’s Meat by E.B. White

H is for Hawk and Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald

The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham

World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

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