Diving deeper

Happy birthday, Wreckage and Shimmer! It’s exactly one year since I published my first post on here and I want to start by saying a big thank-you to everyone who’s subscribed, read, commented or otherwise engaged with my writing. It really means a lot.

It feels as though this post should be about WHAT’S NEW FOR 2026! However, as 2025 drew to a close, I felt increasingly prompted not to reach after anything shiny and novel but rather to go more deeply into what I already have. To invest more in my longstanding friendships, to reread books sometimes instead of buying the latest new thing, to make better use of the research gathered over several years of postgraduate study - and, crucially, to pay more attention to the multispecies world of my neighbourhood.

In my first post a year ago, I explained that the title of this publication comes from Deborah Bird Rose’s beautiful essay ‘Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed’.¹ Bird Rose draws attention there to ‘the brilliant shimmer of the biosphere and the terrible wreckage of life in this era we are coming to refer to as the Anthropocene’. She writes about the crucial importance of saying Yes to the ‘lush, extravagant beauty of life’, even while bearing witness to the cascades of destruction that surround us.

This is surely the work of a lifetime.

Padley Gorge, Derbyshire

As I reflected on what it might mean to ‘go more deeply into what I already have’, I became aware of how little I really know about the more-than-human world on my doorstep. My ‘nearby wild’, to use Jo Cartmell’s wonderful phrase .

I often yearn to live in a place that seems truly wild. I read beautiful writing from Scottish islands by the likes of Samantha Clark, Vanessa Wright and Rebecca Hooper and fantasise about solitary walks under stormy skies, scanning the ocean for rare seabirds and occasional whales, and revelling in the extraordinary light.

Orkney picture by Vicky Brock

It seems it might be easy to find what Bird Rose calls ‘shimmer’ in such places.² Shimmer involves brilliance:

Brilliance actually grabs you. Brilliance allows you, or brings you, into the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world […] It is a capture that is all over the place: water capturing and reflecting the sun, the sun glinting on the water, the eyes of the beholders captured and enraptured, the ephemeral dance of it all. It is equally a lure: creatures long to be grabbed to experience that beauty, that surprise, that gleaming ephemeral moment of capture.

I live in Sheffield, a former hub of heavy industry, the sixth-largest city in England. On a day like today, when the sky is a flat shade of dirty white and rain is streaming down the windows, it’s difficult to feel lured, let alone grabbed, by anything resembling shimmer.

And yet, and yet – it would be ridiculous to believe that Bird Rose’s ‘lush, extravagant beauty of life’ is only available in the most obviously scenic places. I’ve heard what sounded like dozens of goldfinches on a patch of waste ground next to the local gym, and I’ve found herb robert, mallow and purple toadflax poking through cracks in the pavement beside our street. There’s even something vaguely resembling a country lane behind our flat, probably used in the past for horses heading to the coach house at the bottom of the road.

My nearby wild also includes Sheffield General Cemetery. Established in 1836 as a Victorian ‘garden cemetery’, it saw its last burial in 1978. Now it’s full of quiet, scruffy corners where birds, flowers and small mammals can thrive. Once I saw a flock of waxwings feasting on the rowan trees that line the approach road.

Robert Macfarlane writes that our verb ‘to shimmer’ comes from the Middle English ‘shimeren’, which means ‘to shine with a veiled and tremulous light’. He points out that shimmer is ‘both highly dynamic and specific to the observer, inflected as it is by angle of illumination and angle of perception; utterly bespoke to a subject position in space and time.’ ³

Antony Gormley statue in the Water of Leith, Edinburgh

To catch the shimmer, we need to be looking from the right perspective. Like so much else in life, engaging with shimmer is a choice. If I can’t see it, maybe I need to change the way I look. I’ll always long for beautiful places away from the harsh angles and noisy thrum of the city but I need to learn to say yes to the lush, extravagant beauty of life when I’m out on my local patch too.

Macfarlane cautions against the danger of relegating shimmer to the realm of the aesthetic. He writes:

Like Bird Rose I have come to think of it less as a form of beauty and more as a mode of being: life, re-located to the interface; relation in action; existence as process, not substance, weaving and unweaving itself in a continual becoming. World itself, shining with ‘a veiled and tremulous light’.

What might it mean to think of shimmer as ‘a mode of being’? Macfarlane’s writing here is full of dynamism – it reflects the fact that the world itself is in a constant state of becoming, and conjures a way of life that is focused on relationship.

I can choose to ignore the brambles, sparrows and very occasional badgers that I see on my local patch - or I can celebrate the fact that we are all in relationship within the same spaces and thus connected in countless ways with each other and with the myriad other forms of life that are here, and that I may know nothing about.

As Macfarlane concludes: ‘Shimmer is ravel and unravel, shimmer is friendship, shimmer is teeming not lonely, many not one, also not only.’

Starling murmuration by Donald Macauley

This prioritising of relationship and entanglement connects to another of Bird Rose’s amazing essays. In it, she describes the act of writing in a way that’s become a sort of personal manifesto for me. I have this quote pinned beside my desk:

Writing is an act of witness; it is an effort not only to testify to the lives of others but to do so in ways that bring into our ken the entanglements that hold the lives of all of us within the skein of life.⁴

This kind of writing is my goal for Wreckage and Shimmer. To get better at doing it, I need to ‘go more deeply into what I already have’. To find the shimmer in my nearby wild, while not turning away from the wreckage that is all around at this time of multiple crises.

I hope you’ll keep travelling along with me.

Threads, knots and tangles

Just one thing today - and that is that despite what I’ve written above, I am in fact introducing one new feature to Wreckage and Shimmer this year. It’s completely in tune with the themes of the newsletter, and will, I hope, be something you all enjoy. More in a couple of weeks!

1. ‘Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed’ appears in the book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan and Heather Anne Swanson

2. I do appreciate that life in the far north of the UK is often very challenging, as well as beautiful. Samantha’s latest post on trying to get to the mainland during Storm Goretti is a case in point!

@robgmacfarlane

Robert Macfarlane on Instagram: "Our verb “to shimmer” comes fr…

3.

4. It’s called ‘Multispecies knots of ethical time’ and can be found here.