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WELCOME Life’s cycles … and recycles T his year I had an important message from Life, and one I would have missed had I not been deeply listening, which is the theme of this beautiful issue. What I heard from the natural world was all about how there is always – and always will be – a place for us to take and share the tangled stories of our own lives and the lives of those we care about. The invitation to rest with the world outside my door followed a major bereavement and the death of someone who had been important to me for over four decades. And whilst I was disenfranchised from the formal grieving process, I was welcomed by the natural world to take the story of that loss and that deep sorrow to all about me: the crow families I hear each morning, the majestic fern in my humble garden, the bees I am writing about for a book* and even (perhaps especially) the wider landscape around my home. And so I did. No talking was required. Which was a relief. Just listening. And the more I listened, the more uplifting the stories I heard told back to me by the unseen. Stories about Nature’s wounds and healings, and resilience despite these, stories about our place in the wider scheme of things, and stories of the sorrows of biodiversity losses around which we must now all grow. After a while I understood that I was also hearing stories of hope and of the patterns and cycles of life from which I could start to take deep comfort and find peace. Life. Death. Rebirth. I watched over the months of a summer of deep grief as a wild four-foot-tall foxglove that had impudently seeded itself in a flowerpot on the doorstep grew, flourished and brashly announced its presence and essence to all who passed by. It would wave its tall spike joyously in the wind – but then slowly, as all things do, it began to fade away, flower by flower, day by day. Another summer gone and another plant neighbour disappeared but very much not forgotten. I found myself wondering what the stories were that the American composer Pauline Oliveros heard when she disappeared down a cave in the 1970s to record the ambient sounds around her and coined the term ‘Deep Listening’ as a practice. I first heard of her in an interview where the violist and composer/conductor Robert Ames spoke about her enduring influence. We should embrace the word ‘enduring’. It gives us hope for the years ahead, and if you don’t know her work, you can learn a little more about Pauline on page 28. These, then, are just some of the themes and ideas we explore in this final issue of 2024. Edward Davey gives us three powerful reasons to stay actively hopeful and grow in our collective grief after such a globally challenging year in his Slow Read entitled ‘Finding hope in troubled times’, an NHS psychologist and a relational coach tell how an initiative called Spaces for Listening that they set up during the Covid-19 pandemic is still running (and free to participate in) and artist Rachael Mellors shares how she listens to both the Embodied Earth and her Soul Ancestors to create art that is firmly rooted in the planet’s cycles and recycles. The articles in this issue offer the same invitation to you, with our much-valued writers sharing their ideas and discoveries of hope and comfort, some through the cultivation of a practice of Deep Listening, and others through simply paying attention to that in the natural world that we may otherwise be too busy talking to hear speaking and calling to us in our and their time of need. Susan Clark Editor of Resurgence & Ecologist * Telling the bees is an old European custom whereby families would announce important events, especially the death of a family member, to the hive so that the bees could mourn alongside them. In memory of Declan Liam O’Mahoney (29 April 1955 – 14 June 2024) Issue 347 Resurgence & Ecologist is published by The Resurgence Trust, an educational charity. See inside back cover and our website www.resurgence.org for more information. Views expressed in these pages may not necessarily reflect those of the Trust. Resurgence & Ecologist 1

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