Live & Learn

Anna wandered down to the sea. She knelt in front of some of the stone nest houses and peered in. Anna’s life here was, I was coming to see, devoted to paying attention to – or, more than that, being completely committed to – the beauty of the world before her. She seemed to have done it by cultivating an extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise. She used every ounce of her willfulness to shut out the world and concentrate on these simple things. More and more, she reminded me of my grandfather. He spent many hours walking his farm and learning about the wild things upon it, like it was the most important work a human could do. Growing up, I’d wanted to be like him. And I was, for three or four years, after I left school. I’d go for walks over the fields; on sunny nights I’d sit with my back against a rock or climb into the lower branches of a tree and watch the world happening around me. I’d spend hours just watching deer or foxes or badgers, or swifts tumbling and screaming through the sky. I’d lie on my back in the grass and watch the swallows hawking after flies round my dad’s cows, or the brown hares playing in the meadows. But somewhere in the years since, I’d stopped being that person. Life was too busy to stand and stare. I became responsible for boring, necessary things. At one point I had three jobs and worked most nights and weekends. D. H. Lawrence once wrote that the industrial age had created a new kind of human, a machine-like man with iron in his soul. I had become one of them. The past few years had been swallowed up by striving. I remembered a friend back home trying to tell me, gently, that I had become almost manic. But the longer I spent with Anna, the more that way of being felt like a sickness I needed to recover from. A new calmness began to settle over me. It was a feeling I had not known since I was a child following my grandfather round his fields.

Anna reminded me that the first rule of living is to live. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste the world. The more I tuned in, the closer Anna and I were growing as friends. I was beginning a journey back to the person I had once been – and needed to be again.

— James Rebanks, from the Prelude of “The Place of Tides” (Mariner Books, June 24, 2025)

Notes:

• Loved the book. Highly recommended.
• Book Review: A warming tale of gathering eiderdown in Norway. Shepherd’s Life author trades the Lake District for a remote island just below the Arctic Circle, where he joins an ‘unbreakable’ septuagenarian keeping an ancient family tradition alive.
• Book Review in The Guardian: “Duck Tales. The Lakeland shepherd heads to a Norwegian island where eiderdown is harvested to learn lessons about nature and humanity”
• Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.