They say writing is a solitary activity.

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As I sit facing a blank page, pen in hand, feeling the need to communicate something meaningful to an unknowable reader (you, my friend) I feel the faint touch of panic – a fleeting shadow of what is commonly known as ‘writer’s block’. Unless I am blessed with a surge of inspiration, it happens frequently when I sit down to write. Now I teeter on the edge of the urge to simply override this feeling. It’s easily done: like a four-by-four powering across a gravel slope, with my heart in my fingertips, I can traverse the page with sheer force and grit, penning down the first thing that the loudest voice in my mind dictates. “Just get on with it!” And there I go! Not so bad after all. Except it often is – bad, that is!

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So, this time let me pause in the gap between pen and page, to examine this chink in my writer’s armour, this place of vulnerability: the propensity to be wounded – and, by being wounded, somehow prised open. What if I stay in this place of potential and allow the opening, be curious and learn more about it? Now, instead of a gap I find a huge chasm, just narrow enough at the top for little me to try and bridge with a string of words. But my words are barely able to take the weight of that which wants to cross: Oh my! All this love and madness, unhealed history, creased imagination, trapped anger, submerged vitality, untested wisdom, unbounded depression, earthy tenderness in me that wants to meet your need, dear reader, to be touched, provoked, illuminated, soothed, moved, tickled, inspired, informed, enraged, maddened, healed. It is a bridge woven with word-strings plucked by your readerly attention, which tell a story of one kind or another -fiction, non-fiction, poetry, prose, none of these – you name it, it’s all story.

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I make to start weaving, aware that once I gaze down into the chasm, I will be overtaken by my fear of falling. I imagine my four-by-four tumbling down into the abyss. But if I just slow down enough, a quieter voice pipes up “Who am I to build this bridge? What have I got to say that’s so important, anyway?” and then the killer: “Why should anyone step onto my bridge when so many great bridge builders have already crafted such strong, beautiful, durable bridges conveying readers to such compelling worlds into which so many people have already crossed?”

The rejoinder soon comes from a bolder voice: “But none of them had my particular talent, my way with words or told the unique tales that want to be told by me.” And so the battle of ego, little and big, rages on.

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Still, the pen hovers above the page, caught in the crossfire between these voices while the abyss awaits the vanquished. If you are a writer, perhaps you can relate to this? All writers must have a way of bridging that gap.

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In recent years, the experience of writing in, and with place, however, has transformed my experience of the gap between pen and page and with it, my understanding of what writing is and who is doing it.

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My earliest experience of writing in and with place did not involve a pen – not, that is, at first. It started about 8 years ago. I found while jogging in the Railway Land Nature Reserve in Lewes that all manner of things would pass through my mind and find their natural resolution or evolution. No materials in hand, feet beating time through the trees and fields, along the river under the grin of the chalk cliff, the ravens wheeling and the hawthorn, bramble, beech, pine, reeds and meadow flowers cycling through the seasons, the pollinators busy at their work, I found my mind would simply unstick and unwind. Free-ranging wisdom would start to drip and then pour delivering a poem or the riff of a new song, the solution to some knotty issue I was grappling with or a whole short story echoing in the dome of my skull — as I threaded my way through the increasingly familiar land. It was pure magic – rub the lamp and the ‘genie’ appeared, walk the land and the writer appeared. Every time.

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Like any magician with an ego, I was tempted to congratulate myself for this stroke of ‘genius’. But I am far enough from the arrogance of my youth to acknowledge that thousands of writers before me have experienced it (some of them rather famous and many of the rest, far more talented than me). My point is not to extoll the virtues of leaning into more than human nature – and the vast beauty of land, sea and sky – for writerly inspiration – although that can of course be liberating and rewarding. Instead, I want to share a subtler, deeper and slower learning that unfolded from writing in and with place: that writing is not, and never can be, solitary. Nothing is. And, that recognising this is a portal to a different experience of life, of self and of the art of writing. The ‘genius’ does not belong to, but invents, us as writers, and it is available always and everywhere. To everyone. Let me explain.

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Everything in creation tells a story. But only humans do it in words. Sure, we also use dance, form, picture, music, signs, song – to name a few other languages. But words are unique to humans. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells us that plants speak not through the sounds they make (every living thing of course has signature sounds), but through being and providing food. As I reflect on this, it seems to me that all beings, plant or animal, tell stories: they dance, sing, prowl, fly, call, growl, slither, swim, give off scent, feed other species; provide shelter, habitat, touch-warmth-protection or menace, poison or remedy. These are their languages. It’s how they communicate. The earth itself – in its variety of landscapes, speaks and sings to us, spinning through space as our earthscapes move, shelter, feed or imperil us. The ground beneath us, the living world around us, the atmosphere and the skies above us speak to us and each other incessantly – touching, caressing, sounding, perfuming, freezing, frying, colouring, moving and spreading fields of light and shade before us. Oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide and nitrogen enter and leave our lungs, which share them with all our sentient kin. Sun- moon- and star-light map the visual world, touching and enlivening our skins, illuminating our paths and minds.

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You can never write alone because you are never alone. All of creation is telling its story to you all the time. But only you can put those stories into words – and only if you are prepared to slow down and stop in that gap and listen.

It’s one thing to read this off the page. It’s another to sense it in the gap, here and now, and to know it in the body, heart and spirit. There, beyond my window, across the sunlit air, great trees stand waving at me. Here, beneath my wrists, the remains of a tree support the act of writing. This table is the next generation of a tree: a being who has transmitted the trace of their life into the wood. Human hands and mechanical or electric saws have wrought the wood so that I can sit here and write for you – not just what ‘I’ want to say, but what the dependable solidity of this table will allow – or prompt — me to say. Even what ‘I’ want to say emerges from the mysterious chasm within me, from voices belonging to who knows which ancestor, genie, long-forgotten love or injury? Can you hear them speak?

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We never write alone because we are translating into words something that was first spoken without them. And sometimes we are writing what is being dictated to us by unseen voices from the depths of the chasm or beyond some invisible veil. My pen moving on the paper makes it creak and the tree whose body was pulped and bleached and crossed with grey lines has something to say: it pushes up through my skin as I sweep and mark the page. The sound of writing is the song of the relationship between us. This is no longer a blank page, but a singing page. The tree’s song is here, and the black ink tells it with the tree’s consent. For better or worse, we write together. I cannot write alone.

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Writing in this way requires humility. A name may appear on the cover of a book, but the work is always co-created with the help of mostly uncredited helpers.

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Nothing prompts humility like the death of a loved one.

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When my mother died, I had to write. Within days, I was wandering and wondering in Railway Land, no pen in hand, but a voice recorder poised to receive the sounds from my mouth and the mouths of birds, winds and branches. A song emerged from my heart directly into the electrons coursing around the microchip in my phone – a chip whose rare origins lie deep below the ground in faraway places plundered for their human and more than human resources. We write together, the stones, leaves, blackbirds, rare metals and I. We, co-authors, meet at every point – feet and ground, skin and breeze, retina and light, lungs and molecules of gasses, hands and oil that made the plastic casing for the microchips.

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It’s not that the plants, animals and earth are ‘dumb’ so I have to speak for them, you understand. We humans have become so enchanted with words and thinking, and convinced of their power, that we have forgotten how to hear, read, sense, intuit, feel, understand and listen to the million other languages of the communities of the earth. And in so forgetting, we have become the paupers of the planet.

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Reclaiming our birthright to be plurilingual beings, moving amongst our more than human relations whether plant animal elemental or mineral, is the subject of an altogether different story. A story-bridge for another day.

Today, I want to celebrate writing. Writing in and with place – here at my desk or kitchen table. Here on this land filled with species and ancestors of species, blessed with living air and water, sanctified by the sun – our source of life energy — and the untellable abundance of the earth — my body’s primary parent — and animated by a dream whose Dreamer it is my unending purpose to encounter.

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Today I celebrate this fragile bridge, made of strings of words, and the fact that it is only half alive without you. I and my co-authors make our bridge across this chasm, for better or worse, bearing this simple message to you: you will never write alone, so take courage, enter the gap and write.

Razia Aziz, Writing Our Legacy @ Changing Chalk Associate Artist

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Razia Aziz has a number of ‘lives’: as a creative practitioner (word, song, music, performance); holistic coach, facilitator and organisational consultant; mother, partner & community builder. She has lived within easy reach of the South Downs for 30 years. Her most recent work includes Challé Gayé, a soundscape at the Chattri monument for the Witness Stand season at Brighton Festival 2022, and an audio commission for site-specific streaming coming soon (spring 2023). The work is rooted in her south Asian interfaith heritage and the Downs’ landscape. They find voice for the vital relationship between human narratives & ancestry and the living world around us. Razia has made three albums of music (western and Hindustani), composed original music for theatre and (co)/written and performed two plays. She co-hosts spaces for women to wander and wonder in nature.