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On the subject of schools, I ask Morris if she will be supporting the global general strike called by Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement. “I don’t think anyone would notice if I went on strike,” she replies, but she believes the school strikers need to be supported. “I know some schools are beginning to punish their children for taking part in the strikes. I saw something the other day where some girls had been told they couldn’t go to the prom because they’d been on strike. So I say to them, get the other kids out and have a prom somewhere else – have a prom strike as well.” Children are putting adults to shame, “but I do worry for Greta,” she continues. “She says we have stolen her future, but I fear we have also stolen her childhood. I don’t think she should be monetised. I don’t like the management behind her, really, which we don’t really see. I just hope she’s OK.” By helping words like ‘acorn’ and ‘conker’ to re-enter the national vocabulary, The Lost Words plays an important part in the message of the school strikers: by severing our connection with the rest of the ecosystem we are threatening the future of our children. However, the medium of music can take that mes- sage deeper, Morris says. “Music can thread its way into the mind in ways other things don’t,” she explains. “You see how tiny children respond to music, mothers sing lullabies to their children to calm them. At the other end of life, there are people living with dementia who remember nothing, but they can still play the piano. Somehow the rhythms of music thread into our souls, and I think that’s how it can carry the message deeper. I can make people cry with my paintings, but there’s something 54 Resurgence & Ecologist September/October 2019
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about the way music enters our soul and our spirit.” Many of the musicians involved in the project are from the folk tradition. Macfarlane attributes this to folk tradition’s “long double allegiance to landscape and protest [which] aligns precisely with the book’s own purpose”. ‘Heartwood’ gives voice to a tree facing the swinging arm of a woodcutter – “Would you hew me to the heartwood, cutter?” – inspired by the Sheffield tree-felling scandal, and is at once a lament and a protest song. Morris is not keen on putting the style of the album in a box. “In the same way I’d say [The Lost Words] isn’t a children’s book. Marketing does love a label. Is it world music or is it just human music?” The spell songs are being interpreted in other music­al styles. “We’ve got classical, choral, experimental classical – there are so many different types of music that have been drawn to the book and the message. It’s difficult to get your head around sometimes,” she says. The interpretation of music, like birdsong, is very subjective. The soft cooing of a wood pigeon may for some summon the feeling of cool shade under a canopy of trees – and for others the white-hot frustration of having all their lovingly reared brassicas pecked to bits. For the pigeons themselves it means something else altogether. So too it is with Spell Songs. There are some tracks I skip halfway through and others, like ‘Heartwood’, I am inescapably stuck on. Perhaps when my memory struggles to recall what I’ve had for breakfast, it will reach out to the lyrics and rhythms of that beautiful song. I can live with that. www.thelostwords.org/album Marianne Brown is Editor of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. Issue 316 Resurgence & Ecologist 55

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On the subject of schools, I ask Morris if she will be supporting the global general strike called by Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement. “I don’t think anyone would notice if I went on strike,” she replies, but she believes the school strikers need to be supported. “I know some schools are beginning to punish their children for taking part in the strikes. I saw something the other day where some girls had been told they couldn’t go to the prom because they’d been on strike. So I say to them, get the other kids out and have a prom somewhere else – have a prom strike as well.”

Children are putting adults to shame, “but I do worry for Greta,” she continues. “She says we have stolen her future, but I fear we have also stolen her childhood. I don’t think she should be monetised. I don’t like the management behind her, really, which we don’t really see. I just hope she’s OK.”

By helping words like ‘acorn’ and ‘conker’ to re-enter the national vocabulary, The Lost Words plays an important part in the message of the school strikers: by severing our connection with the rest of the ecosystem we are threatening the future of our children. However, the medium of music can take that mes-

sage deeper, Morris says. “Music can thread its way into the mind in ways other things don’t,” she explains.

“You see how tiny children respond to music, mothers sing lullabies to their children to calm them. At the other end of life, there are people living with dementia who remember nothing, but they can still play the piano. Somehow the rhythms of music thread into our souls, and I think that’s how it can carry the message deeper. I can make people cry with my paintings, but there’s something

54 Resurgence & Ecologist

September/October 2019

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