Creeksong: One Woman Sings the Climate Blues
I’m delighted to welcome you to this conversation that matters so much to everyone. I prepared this space and have been waiting to welcome you to my book to share my ideas, endeavors, and passion for healing the Earth.
This website is the new home for my memoir, Creeksong: One Woman Sings the Climate Blues. It’s a passionate, heartfelt, personal book about climate change, activism, and courage. It’s also about midlife, aging, passion, and terror.
It’s my account of how I’ve grappled with the climate change emergency for nearly four decades. How I journeyed to find answers to questions that nobody wanted (or cared) to answer (in the 1990s). And how I found some of those answers in a tropical Australian forest … by listening to the softest voices.
Creeksong is about listening to all the voices. And about speaking out.
| Purchase Creeksong in Canada: | Purchase Creeksong in Australia: | Purchase Creeksong in the US: |
What is Creeksong about?
This book tells many stories. You can read it in many ways.
These stories are powerful keys to unlock different meanings buried beneath the play of stories.
One “big-picture” story recounts a woman’s journey to a deeper ecological consciousness and a visceral connection with Nature. We access this story through the small apertures of an embodied life: crucial tiny moments (a fire, a counselling session, a chance meeting…), specific presences (Mica, the White Gum, a kookaburra, Tristia), and surrender to particular times and places (Deep Creek, a tiny ephemeral creek, as well as Vancouver’s Norgate Park and Capilano River in childhood and adulthood). This big story parallels other archetypal journeys of discovery, where our protagonist learns to understand her place in the greater Order of Things.
A Midlife Journey
Another story is primarily about a midlife journey. An exhausted, over-scheduled, lonely, and dispirited woman (me), entering her 50th year, asks questions that cannot be answered in her everyday life. So she seeks answers in an unfamiliar realm, a harsh, wild environment, begging that the dramatic difference in context might heal her many estrangements. As she is childless, this midlife story is not about an “empty nest.” This story is about the desperation of a woman at midlife to connect with her soul.
An Intellectual Sojourn
This book also recounts the story of a profound intellectual sojourn. It traces my steps from an initial perception that problems with my profession, urban planning, result from my colleagues’ lack of literacy about environmental issues. My depth experience in Nature reveals that my colleagues do not care, not that they do not know. My intellectual insights produce a PhD dissertation outlining a model of caring for Nature in the education of Australian planning students.
A Spiritual Pilgrimage
Significantly, this book recounts a spiritual pilgrimage. The deep yearning for connectedness I experienced before I decided to live for a year in a tropical forest is a classic symptom of estrangement from my soul. My soul was dying to be recognized, listened to, cared for, and integrated into the rest of my being.
A Lifetime Quest
This book also tells the story of a lifetime quest that was not resolved during my dramatic year of retreat. So deep and painful are the wounds I carry with me into midlife that they cannot be healed then. My forest sojourn soothes and heals many estrangements but has no visible effect on my estrangement from my abusive mother.
One Redemptive Tale
However, my book does recount one further redemptive tale. In my late seventies, I reconcile with my estranged mother seven years after her death at 100. Creeksong concludes with my joyful story of welcoming my mother into my heart and experiencing a powerful sense of homecoming, acceptance, reconciliation, and peace.
A lot is going on in this book. And all of it is happening to me. As I am writing, I am remarking, “I am not writing this book. I am living this book.”
Creeksong is a book about loving Nature, finding, nourishing, and expressing courage, and a vivid spiritual and intellectual journey with sparkling realizations. It’s also about suffering, healing, and, ultimately, coming home to love and coming into the light. Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone needs to love themselves, however difficult that may seem.
Ultimately, Creeksong is about facing fear and learning to love myself. And to love myself as a member of the Earth community.
The Creeksong Audiobook
The much-awaited, multi-dimensional Creeksong audiobook was released in November 2023. It’s a masterpiece of creative work, with 90 pieces of music and over 400 special effects.
I narrated every chapter. All the audio has been mixed with special effects and authentic sounds from tropical northern Australia (and elsewhere). It’s produced and mixed by Christopher Baudat and mastered by Carl Craig of Post Hypnotic Press in Vancouver, Canada.
Christopher will be blogging every two weeks about the audiobook starting on February 9th.
Watch this space!
One Audiobook Chapter
Here’s one chapter, the title chapter, “Creeksong,” as a taste of what will come.
In this story, I’m sitting in my tiny, ephemeral creek. It’s the end of the rainy season, but an unseasonal cyclone brings enough rain to refill my creek. So it’s an unexpected blessing: a miracle.
And I say this:
LISTEN HERE: