The Confidence of a Raven

My black, sleek wings are ready. Ready to preen. Ready to gleam. Ready for flight.

As I start standing on the cold stone, my talons rest with certainty. The skills my mother taught me, to have confidence, to know that the air will hold me and carry me to where I want to be.

To lift me high, high up into the treetops, which weren’t standing here before. To perch amongst the branches that hold my weight seemingly precarious, my balance certain, that I am here and I will hold myself aloft above the chaos below.

I have the freedom, the freedom to go where I please, to fly in the skies and know that I will not be persecuted in the same way as my friends of old.

People have seen us as a blessing. People have seen us as a curse, but now we go unnoticed by most. My raucous calls and vocalisations tell my others that I am here and I belong.

On fires, I swoop and explore, on carcasses, I feast, part of the ‘cleanup crew’, pulling and tearing the flesh alongside red-winged butterflies. The air will carry us both up. Up into the sky. Up into a belief that with space we can thrive.

Image: K. Morley. Black and white image of a wooden Raven carving.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/32b3d9_90bc7d20db63487280cd8def860e0e33/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Video: R Morley. Video of a family of ravens feeding on a roe deer carcass with vocalisations.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/32b3d9_5b3a5ca694744411bcde1e2dc903e009/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Video: R Morley. Video on Red Admiral butterflies on a roe deer carcass

This piece was written as part of a series of creative writing sessions that are being led by Dr Tanvir Bush and supported by Dr Sarah Bell of the Sensing Climate project. The series is called ‘The Elementals’, with each session guided by an elemental theme; Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Spirit.

PhD in Numbers...

As someone who continues to feel like an interloper in academia, I'm struck by how much needs to be quantified and measured. It feels like when it comes to how academia functions, numbers are still 'king'. This is despite my research using a qualitative ethnographic methodology, which explores beliefs, behaviours, voices, and experiences.

When asked for a 'research update', just saying "I'm still in my analysis phase" may seem a bit 'woolly' and inefficient.

As I come to the final phase of my PhD (as well as a cliff edge of funding), I thought it would be useful to take stock of what I have been up to in the last 18 months (in numbers...):

• 314,678 words in transcripts

• 32 interview transcripts

• 31 HOURS of interview recordings

• (all of the above has been reviewed 3 times)

• 111 Documents and policies that have been reviewed and analysed

• 9 Research-based meetings attended/observed

• 15 Presentations given

• 2,773 miles travelled for research activities.

  
  

Disability Studies is a notoriously difficult field to find funding for or to shoehorn into an unyielding academic structure; add to this the need to accommodate the experience of crip time for myself and my participants, and it feels that 'doing' a Critical Disability Studies PhD within the 'typical' timeframe was always going to be a challenge.

I dream of futures where academia has the flexibility to honour the pace needed for Disability Studies, to avoid fishbowling and extractive research practices... an academia that authentically wants to hear and centre the voices of disabled people, and values the expertise and insights of disabled researchers; a future of crip academia; an academia that is built on anti-ableist and anti-normalcy ideologies and is "connected to community, solidarity, outspokenness, and defiance" (McRuer, 2019).

Despite all this, I feel honoured to have spent the last 18 months talking to some fantastic people who have shared their experiences of nature, their efforts to find space with nature, and the insights that could help us in these times of biodiversity collapse. At times, these discussions have brought tears; at others, roars of laughter. Those conversations have been had on clifftops, in urban woodlands, next to rivers, in front rooms or cars looking out of windows. Witnessing the joys that nature brings, witnessing the harms that are being done as well as deep discussions of the 'context of crap' that so many people are living with in a fragmented society where narratives of hate and division try their best to undermine feelings of belonging and relationships with place and nature; also reflecting how society often determines where different humans and non-humans 'fit'.

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Images: K.Morley

River Stour with sky reflections. Quiet corner in Poole Park with circular seating. Graffiti on a pedestrian crossing linking two park areas.

How the legacy of political, policy, and personnel churn directly impacts the decision-makers who are working to find space for nature. Hearing how the awe and love of nature for decision-makers motivates them to do more with less, 'when money's too tight to mention', and land use is increasingly being driven towards building non-accessible and non-affordable housing.

It's been an immense privilege to experience nature with my participants, and as I begin to pull the strands of their insights together, I hope I can weave a picture that explains what nature means to disabled people.

As one of my participants shared:

"I feel much better when I’m outside. It’s the air that you breathe, it’s the fact that you’re not indoors stressing about jobs, it’s a complete and utter outpouring of my whole self into a park or a garden. It doesn’t matter where it is, as long as there’s birds or bushes or people, I do find it much better. So nature is a big thing for me, yeah, nature means a lot to me. It's been a lifesaver."

I would like to send huge thanks to my participants and my supervisors, who keep me motivated and allow me the space to still be creative.

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Images: K.Morley

The importance of encountering incidental nature. Goats being used for conservation grazing behind beach huts. Community growing space.

Image: K.Morley. Starling being fed by hand.

Links to further reading:

'And that, Damian, is what I call life-changing': findings from an action research project involving autistic adults in an on-line sociology study group. (2012) Milton, D, Moon, L. Good Autism Practice, 13 (2). pp. 32-39.

Enforcing normalcy : disability, deafness, and the body. (1995) Davis, L J.

'Crip'- Composting Feminisms. (2019) McRuer, R.

Doing Disability Research. (1997) Edited by Barnes, C. and Mercer, G.

Revealed Roots

I'm not sure where to start with my beloved space. To sit next to the stream in a cavity of roots, beneath your aged soaring canopy, pondering at how you're still standing when so much of your supporting Earth is gone.

Gone from years of erosion, the wear and tear of the seasons ebb and flow as the waters rise and fall.

To be entombed in your absence but looking with wonder at all that has kept you up for years- supported you. Fed you.

The Earth smells of leaf litter and worm-turned-over soil in the autumn. It barely smells at all in summer as the stream dries to a bone. But in the spring, the carcass of a nearby pigeon rots away, and its perfume of death mingles with the earth, a reminder of the labour of a sparrowhawk who sat and watched from your branches above.

For that time when I sat and removed my glasses and hearing aids, and with no taste or smell, labouring lungs, robbed by a global pandemic, but the absolute joy I felt to be back on the Earth. To be connected with a past touched by the hardships endured by generations gone by. A place where I was most sensorial 'dimmed' but the most held and most connected to the Earth... the most whole.

Aware of my privilege to have an intimacy with a place, unseen, unwatched, except by the eyes of the other non-humans in this space.

The years have again gone past, swiftly drawn down the stream of life, the stones and soil worn by the flow and carried away in minute detail.

Then one day, after storm after storm, your branches were broken and crashed to earth- destabilised by a life of erosion to your roots whilst revealing your intricacies, you could hold no more, and you too return to earth.

Your trunk slips into being deadwood utilised by bugs and grubs. Will your cavities be filled with dormice nests, will the moss that still cloaks your bark be scampered over by returning pine martens, or will you just be 'let be', and crumble and rot as the mycelial network works its magic and converts substance and structure to elements and minerals?

No longer will I sit beneath your cavity and canopy as the world changes and fragments, my understanding of interconnectivity and interdependence to the soil, to the water, to the air that I breathe, your body becoming my body. Your body becoming my mind.

Revealed Roots. Image: Kate Morley

This piece was written during the first of a series of creative writing sessions that are being led by Dr Tanvir Bush and supported by Dr Sarah Bell of the Sensing Climate project. The series is called ‘The Elementals’, with each session guided by an elemental theme; Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Spirit.