THREAD
1/5
I want to pick up another part of the ‘nature cure’ problem
When a woman writes about the outdoors, people often reach for the same narrative template. She walked, she felt better, the land healed her. It can read as wholesome encouragement, even harmless, but the effect is anything but neutral.
‘Nature cure’ quietly shifts the focus away from the systemic forces that harmed her in the first place.
#Scotland #Writing #WritingCommunity #Reading #Books #NatureWriting #Nature
@kristiedegaris
Yes.
My experience: Spending time in nature can be wonderful — and joy is not a cure for trauma. Symptomatic relief is often critical for approaching a stable place where deeper work/healing becomes more practical.
Nature, helping someone, playing music together, dancing — many activities can be joyful and help with both feeling more grounded and somewhat more open to deeper change and that’s great — and working on the deeper change is a different kind of work.
@kristiedegaris I love to read nature/science & travel/adventure memoir, and I have definitely noticed that women tend to consciously put more of themselves and their socioeconomic situation in those books.
And this thread makes me wonder how much this harms the message from & for men. Is this the source of the men who think that they can survive in the woods with no preparation and fight a bear? Like they're not understanding that the book is written from the place of someone who did work to be able to be there.
Anyways, thanks for pointing this out, I hadn't thought about this perspective on it.
@kristiedegaris Yeah, totally see your point but 'nature time' has become a saleable commodity like everything else. The other side is that it is not negotiable; it is simple 'ME time'. Where it happens is immaterial and is what works for you. I'm an Osteopath and had patients recover from chronic back issues on rides at Alton Towers, in the crowds on London's Oxford Street, or trekking Annapurna. Set the right environment and healing will happen. Love the book BTW.
@kristiedegaris right on. very well put.
@kristiedegaris she could have walked with me XD
2/5
It turns structural pressures into private moods and political realities into matters of personal wellbeing. And it offers an easy fix where none exists.
3/5
My book ‘Drystone - A Life Rebuilt’ is about things that cannot be remedied by a hike. Reading it otherwise trivialises both that weight and the lives marked by it. My physical engagement with drystone appears late in the narrative so it cannot be mistaken for a cure, and I never propose one. Racism does not vanish because I feel the weight of a stone in my hand. Misogyny does not retreat because I observe the textures of the Perthshire hills.
4/5
If walking were sufficient, ramblers would have dismantled the patriarchy by now.
5/5
Nature cure is a quiet form of erasure. And a cop-out.
The land is there, it can hold us, but it cannot remake the world. Only we can do that.
END
@kristiedegaris The answer is not a hut in the woods
@kristiedegaris Thank you, I've moved your book to the top of my TBR.
