Field Notes #10: Waylarking

You are reading the weekly poetry newsletter, "Entangled Worlds: A Field Guide to Hope in a World Unraveling." Read more about it here.

Dearest waylarks, come! Come out of the dense and freezing fog. The fire is warming for body, yes, but soul most of all. The snow is melting. In six weeks time, the hills will burst with wildflowers. There is a way out of this cold entombment. There is always a way out, waylarking tells us so.

What is waylarking you ask? Well, it’s high time I told you that. Let me explain with a story, for the best explanations always are.

Last year, near the first day of winter, I went with a dear friend to explore old stone ruins. We wound through tumbledown factories and canals along the starry river. Great bone-white sycamores lined the banks like a path to the underworld.

"Very Tolkien," I told her, and it was. I felt like singing a wandering song. Along the banks of the river, we tread mournfully. The old, old river was drying up. If I so desired, I could walk into nearly the very center on great limestone slabs, worn smooth with millennia of rushing rapids but now drying in the winter sun.

The river had revealed many things. A dead tree trunk stood sentinel, tangled into the riverbank of clay and limestone. Its roots lay far above the water line now, gnarled and caked with mud from many seasons past. But, drawing closer, I found tangled among the roots...well, I found treasure. River glass of green and blue and brown and clear iridescence lay atop the roots. Rusted metal curly-cues tangled deep in the root mass. Shards of old plates and cups with delicate designs grew into the wood. A piece of green uranium glass sat abandoned in the river sand.

The river had receded, but a treasure was revealed, accumulated over centuries of storms and droughts, and each time I searched, I found anew. I find waylarking to be so. The word is mine own creation, a combination of wayfinding and mudlarking,

Wayfinding: Orienting yourself and navigating in known and unknown places.

Mudlarking: Scavenging for items upon river banks, deriving from eighteenth and nineteenth-century scavengers of the Thames.

Waylarking: Navigating in a world without maps using only the bits of hope, wonder, and joy that we scavenge along the way.

For those of us with any marginalizations, for those of us that must navigate systems not designed for us to benefit from (or that actively seek to harm us), there are no guides to follow. We must find our way using our own creativity built through long and painful resilience and the small clues given to us by those who have come this way before. I think that’s what we are all yearning for right now. A way forward. A guide. Someone to tell us it be okay. That we’ll find our way home.

But dearest waylarks, we’re the only ones who can do it. Do not be afeared for we do not go alone. Waylarks always go together.

Waylarking

It is like a new moon
swallowing
a forest full of chittering
but foxfire burns a bright path forward
and you dream mycelial dreams
ever after.

It is like a river
dying
but along the banks a tree collects
a millennia of lives for you to prick
a bead of hope upon.

It is a community
crying out for help
and finding it in the hands
of their neighbors, there all along
only waiting for a word.

Waylarking is a story
we build
careful step by careful step
in the dark of a world
waiting to be born.

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