Ecologist Ivi Szaboova on trying to find a tender place in the world through writing

Can you call it craft when it’s intuitive? Words incubated in countless cool forests and hot meadows, poured out of feelings; like spring water seeping out of limestone hopping over obstacles in life’s ravine, finding its precise path in the most unpredictable way.

Words arriving on paper though, that is the feeling of chance, however slight, to sense the stealth of lynx eyes on her forest path, the soft pad of wide, furry paws barely audible and yet somehow that tremor arrives deep inside my inner lynx, also observing; soaking up every twig snapped, the rustle of beech leaves underfoot, the faintest change to her woodland clearing. Sometimes the words arrive like she pounces on a doe, fast and furious, leaping, barely able to keep up with the flow of energy and straining muscle, and sometimes, they are soft and purring, languid like the lynx; curled up with her kittens in a rocky lair.

My words hunt me like she hunts; low to the ground, unseen, choosing instinctively, as I go towards what needs to be explored; never knowing which way the story will spill out until I hear the opening line in my mind. My neuro-spicy ADHD brain is a convoy of hyper-focus interspersed with hyperactivity and wonderful sensory overload, and writing helps make sense of this topsy-turvy, non-angular world not always comprehended, trying to fathom inexplicable rules by which neurotypical folk breeze through. A world where the likes of me are simultaneously too much and not enough, a world navigable only by sixth sense and intuition, where I hear words in my dreams, and in waking hours, watch the little details that add up to a life.

Since a spectacular car crash three years ago, words started tumbling out as poems - some rhyme, some do not, some are super-long, some tiny-short. A friend calls them 'synergy of nature and self', which neatly captures what writing does for my head. The prose I write is lyrical: centred on places that touched me and moments I have inhabited in the fullest way, a hilly travelogue of the walking mind; the poetry is deeply personal and intimate: the liminal places, ancestral pull, belonging; processing grief and joy, and pure celebration of nature.

So why does my inner lynx write? I was brought up in the Slovak Karst National Park, in a little village at the end of the bus route, below the high plateau calcareous meadows and steep beech woods calling all but heard by few. Imagine the only bookish kid, with a passion for nature, a feminist aged nine before I could name what I felt (no vocabulary = no voice), in a poor mining and farming community, where words and beauty were meaningless because, after all, you can’t eat the view. ‘But why?’ was not allowed; to be expected in the cruel, watchful silence of a Stalinist police state. It was the poverty of expectation that drove me away because I had to, to survive, and because I could, because in the end, those long words and curiosity gave me options. I left to study environmental science and found my niche, and it pains me that I’m still the only woman in my village who escaped her lot through education.

*Ivi in the High Tatras National Park (Vysoké Tatry in Slovak)*

Fast forward 30 years, to the gentle hills of Gloucestershire. My core frequency is unchanged; a professional wildlife hassler/ ecologist, observer of minute detail, a feminist, and word-lover. How can you not write when feelings are so real, and through them, the words arrive? My lynx is at home in majestic ancient Slovak forests and hills, stretching into the blue; and here, in the tranquil shire, my little inner otter lets me into watery secrets of a deep old lake - gorgeous in all seasons; truest in winter, it inspired this:

“Raindrops on the lake are gentle at first. In that almost-light of a wet day, set at perpetual dusk, pinks and greys are wrapping the bare beech canopies and the glory days of autumnal bronze lie on the ground, sodden. All you can hear in the valley is the velvety rain, like a quiet jazz piano, all high notes, softly pressed, the keys barely caressed - the fluid melody of raindrops easing themselves into the lake.

Sliding into the silken fury of the December waters, my breath catches, and I exhale sharply into the mist, an involuntary yelp of half-pleasure and half-sting of pain. Sinking into the deep, I feel myself smoothly folding into this hidden fiery green gem. Slicing in near silence through the reflection of the woods, they are now quavering behind me and closing ranks again, re-formed, like I have never passed through. Nothing exists, only this next hot breath and the freezing water, washing over me.
It’s heavy now, the rain, bullets all around me, surrounded by a cacophony of whooshing as the wind whips the cool mirror and the droplets no longer meekly subside into the depth but hit the surface; hard, violently bubbling, bouncing back, pairing up, head sky-wards and then, finally too heavy to resist the lake’s pull, submerge...rings....rings.....rings forming.

The world’s troubles are sinking. I’m missing her still but the acute pain of it no longer lingers. My skin is burning, prickling, and fizzing; fingers frozen, I’m breathing hard, but the absolution of the water and the clarity of thought is sublime. I emerge brand new. It’s an epiphany of sorts - the direction of movement is in my control. I don’t choose the weather. The raindrops...I can see what they add up to, but, to briefly hold onto the translucence of their magic, I must look into each of them, singly. All is calm.”

Beauty to be immersed in - solo bivvies in wild places, up with the cuckoo for sunrise, endless water, sitting with trees in beechwoods… This is why my inner lynx and little otter write: rooted in nature; striving to understand it and, through it, our tender place in the world.

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