‘All nature’ – it could have been a slogan during the biodiversity summit that took place in Canada over the past two weeks. A call for healing, a commitment to recovery after all the damage humans have done to the earth – logging, overfishing, pollution. But All nature is also the thick book by Koos van Zomeren that I had lying next to my bed in recent weeks, felled by corona. In the absence of healing air, Van Zomeren’s pill was a godsend. Orchids, slow worms, the Swiss mountains: every day I could go on an excursion from my bed. It felt like it speeded up my healing.
Knowing that Van Zomeren can write is inveterate NRCreaders already. A large part of the pieces from his book appeared in this newspaper before: from 1986 to 1999, from 2001 to 2003, and in 2006 and 2007.
But rereading them is not a punishment. You continue to be amazed, just like the writer himself, about the versatility of nature. About the moths that deceive feeding bats with their hairy, woolly bodies (their fur does not reflect echoes well, so that the bat that hunts by ear feels in the dark). About the lizards that, when attacked, not only release their own tail, but sometimes also eat it later (as a source of protein).
Van Zomeren’s enthusiasm and curiosity are contagious – you want to go with him, across those mountain pastures, into the peat bogs. He can make the small great, make the seemingly dull shine. Occasionally stories or anecdotes feel a bit dated because they have been ripped out of the context in which they once appeared. But most are timeless.
All nature (except birds) is the full title of the book, and a grouch soon sees that that is not entirely correct – there are also passages from his book Craving for Great Gray Shrike. He himself writes in his own defense that the birds in those fragments are never the main subject. If you still need more birds, you can refresh yourself with his earlier book All birds.
A disadvantage of the thickness is that some passages are difficult to find. For example, I remember a sentence about which he himself wrote afterwards that it was ‘a sentence from the top ten of his oeuvre’, a beautiful poetic sentence, but I can no longer find it. There is only one thing to do: read the book, then you will come across it automatically.
#healing #effect #pill #Koos #van #Zomeren