Nature Speaks

On wild weather, the things we try to protect, and the memories carried by familiar sounds

There are nights when the weather seems to enter the house without finding its way through a single opening, when the wind moves through the trees with such force that we become conscious of their height and weight in ways we seldom are during calmer hours, and the rain falls so heavily that its sound ceases to be a collection of individual drops and becomes instead a continuous movement, filling the darkness with the restless presence of a world that has grown suddenly more powerful than the one we knew during the day. Last night, I could hear the River Ceiriog behind my house, its waters swollen by the rain and moving with an urgency that transformed the familiar sound of flowing water into something deeper and more insistent, while above my bedroom stood a great copper beech whose branches were being drawn into the wind, and I found myself listening with an attentiveness that was not entirely peaceful, aware of the beauty of these familiar presences while remembering, too, that beauty has never been a guarantee of safety.

I have often wondered how much of what we hear in the natural world comes from the world itself, and how much arises from the memories and experiences we bring to it, because the same sound can awaken delight in one person and apprehension in another without either having misunderstood what they are hearing. To somebody unfamiliar with this place, the river after heavy rain might seem exhilarating, a magnificent expression of the energy moving through the Welsh hills, while to someone who has lived beside it and watched its changing moods, the sound carries a history of other nights and the knowledge of what water can become when the rain continues to fall. Even the copper beech, whose presence ordinarily brings such pleasure, becomes something different when the wind strengthens and I remember reading about the comparatively shallow rooting systems of beech trees, becoming conscious of the enormous weight of wood above me and the roots concealed beneath the rain-soaked soil, whose strength I cannot judge simply by looking at the branches.

There was a time when the sound of a rising wind filled me with a more immediate dread, during the years when I ran a horticultural nursery and severe weather meant going outside to secure the polytunnels and protect the young plants growing inside them. I remember the polythene lifting and straining beneath the gusts, the desperate attempts to keep it secured, and the occasions when, despite everything I tried, the covering would tear and lift away, leaving the plants exposed to the weather I had been struggling to keep out. Many times I lost cuttings and young plants that represented weeks, sometimes months, of patient propagation and cultivation, and there was a particular sadness in seeing so much careful work disappear within moments, knowing that the time could not be recovered and that a cutting only beginning to establish its roots could not simply resume its interrupted life because I wished it to.

Once, while lying across the top of a polytunnel in an attempt to hold it down, I was lifted several feet into the air by the force of the wind, an experience that remains astonishing to remember now, when I can listen to a storm from the relative shelter of my bedroom. What stays with me is not only the physical force of that moment, but the strange reversal it contained, for I had gone outside believing that I might hold something in place, using the weight of my own body to resist what was happening, only to discover how suddenly my own sense of control could be taken from me. There is little opportunity to admire the wildness of the weather when you are trying to save something you have spent months nurturing, and perhaps this is why a rising gale has never entirely lost the meaning it acquired during those years, even though the nursery itself has long since become part of my past.

What I remember most deeply is the experience of caring for something vulnerable while knowing that care, however wholehearted, might not be enough to protect it. The wind had no knowledge of the cuttings I had tended, the fragile roots they were beginning to establish or the weeks of attention invested in their growth, just as it had no knowledge of the person struggling to hold the covering in place, and there is something profoundly unsettling about confronting a force capable of undoing so much without possessing the slightest awareness of what is being lost. Perhaps one of the more difficult truths of living within the natural world is that affection grants us neither authority over its forces nor protection from their consequences, and that the things we cherish remain vulnerable even when we have done everything we know to keep them safe.

These memories have brought to mind an old fable attributed to Aesop, in which the North Wind and the Sun argue about which is stronger and agree to settle their dispute by seeing which can persuade a traveller to remove his cloak. The wind begins by blowing with all its might, but the harder it blows, the more tightly the traveller draws the cloak around himself, until the Sun takes its turn and, through the warmth of its rays, succeeds where the wind has failed. We are usually invited to understand the story as a lesson about gentleness overcoming force, yet I find myself lingering over the traveller rather than the competing powers, recognising something deeply familiar in his instinct to hold more tightly to what protects him when the world around him becomes threatening, and wondering how differently we might regard another person’s reluctance to loosen their hold if we knew what experience had taught them about the possibility of loss.

For the things we seek to protect are seldom as easily identified as a traveller’s cloak, and sometimes we cling most closely to what has required the greatest effort to create, the relationships we have nurtured, the places that have become familiar through years of inhabiting them, or the fragile beginnings of something we have barely dared to imagine might flourish. It is not always fear of the unfamiliar that makes us cautious, but knowledge of what can be lost, and perhaps what appears to another person as unnecessary apprehension may be the quiet continuation of an experience whose significance has never entirely faded. Someone who has never watched a river rise towards their home may find the sound of rushing water thrilling, while someone who has spent years safeguarding vulnerable plants through winter storms may hear the first strong gusts with an uneasiness that remains long after those responsibilities have ended.

There is a particular kind of compassion in recognising that we rarely know everything another person brings to a moment, that beneath an apparently simple response may lie experiences which have taught them to hear danger where somebody else hears excitement, or to recognise vulnerability where another sees only beauty. We may stand beneath the same sky, listening to the same wind and watching the same rain, yet inhabit experiences so different that neither of us can fully understand what the other is hearing, and perhaps the knowledge that our own interpretation is only one among many might make us a little less certain in our judgements, a little more willing to wonder what lies beneath another person’s caution, resistance or fear.

I think, too, that there is something worth reconsidering in the way we so often describe attention to nature as a source of tranquillity, as though looking more closely must necessarily bring comfort or delight, when in truth the better we come to know a place, the more clearly we may recognise both its beauty and its capacity to affect our lives in ways we cannot choose. There is awe in the immense movement of a river after heavy rain, in the force of wind passing through the crown of a mature tree and in the extraordinary power of weather moving across the landscape, but awe does not always arrive accompanied by peace, and perhaps a more complete relationship with the natural world begins when we no longer require it to reassure us, allowing affection and apprehension to exist together without believing that one must diminish the other.

This morning, the river continues to carry yesterday’s rain through the valley, its surface restless beneath the trees, while the copper beech stands above the house and the ordinary sounds of the day gradually replace those of the storm. I have been looking at the water and thinking about the distance between the person I was when I struggled to hold down those polytunnels and the person I am now, and how little that distance sometimes seems to matter when a familiar sound brings the past so unexpectedly close, until the years between become almost imperceptible and something once experienced returns with a clarity that has little to do with our conscious efforts to remember it.

Perhaps this is one of the quieter mysteries of being human, that the world does not simply pass before us and disappear, but leaves something of itself within the ways we learn to recognise it, so that the sound of rain, the movement of a tree or the sudden strengthening of the wind may carry an entire history invisible to anyone standing beside us. And I wonder whether, the next time we encounter somebody whose response to an ordinary event seems difficult to understand, we might remember that we cannot always hear what they are hearing, even when the sound itself is familiar to us.

For the river is simply flowing, and the wind is simply moving through the trees, but somewhere within those sounds are all the things we have loved, all the things we have feared losing, and sometimes, without warning, the memory of what we once tried so desperately to save.

The River Ceiriog after heavy autumn rain, photographed from my riverside garden, October 2026. © Jane Maye.

Nature Speaks explores Attentive Wondering — how the quality of our attention, and the experiences we bring to it, may change our relationship with the living world.

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