Two ancient oak trees—both split at the base into yawning tent-shaped caverns that my four-year-old can easily stand in—tower next to one another. I wonder how long they have been neighbors and how they survived the logging that visited this hillside not so long ago. I have to crane my neck all the way back to see their leaves, still green at the end of August. The branches spread from the trunks only where they rise above the dense forest canopy, into sunlight. I follow the weathered, crevassed bark back down to my feet where sparse light finds its way to the forest floor.
There, my eye catches something small and round, half-covered by a fallen oak leaf. I pick it up. It’s pocked and green-brown, the size of a bing cherry. A memory rises to the surface of my mind and takes the shape of words: oak gall.
I am transported, just for a moment, to a rewilded landscape in northern Scotland where, eight years ago, I was on a week-long retreat called Fire and Shadow. A group of artists from half a dozen countries, spanning generations and backgrounds, had come together to sit with how to move through this ongoing moment of ecological crisis when it feels as though the world is burning. In the midst of so much loss, so much destruction, how does one create meaning? How does one stay present? During that week, one of the workshop leaders gifted each of us a vial of homemade ink that she had brewed from oak galls. She also brought a bouquet of seagull feathers and taught us how to make nibs. We all wrote and drew with the ink, a bit in awe of where it had come from.
Though it’s been nearly a decade since that gathering, the questions the retreat centered seem ever more relevant. What is the work of creation when the hunger of wildfires and hurricanes is growing, when forests and ice sheets and entire species are disappearing?
Standing beneath the two oaks, I realize I’ve never actually seen an oak gall, and though I’ll do some research later to double-check, I am quite sure that this small orb in my palm is one. Oak galls, I will learn, are made by oak gall wasps. In spring, the adults lay eggs in newly growing buds and leaves of oak trees, secreting a chemical that disrupts normal plant cell growth. The gall, constructed of plant material, grows into a hollow sphere with the eggs and larvae inside. Once the wasps have hatched and departed, the gall dries and eventually drops to the ground. Little to no harm is done to the host tree.
Searching through the soft layer of duff, I fill my pockets (including the makeshift one I create using the bottom of my shirt) with about thirty galls. I bring them home, place them into a glass dish. Over the next couple of weeks, I read in spare moments about how to make oak gall ink.
As I do, questions shimmer in my mind. I’ve stumbled in my writing practice over the last several months. I’ve lost my rhythm. I read about near-extinct North Atlantic right whales as hurricanes roil the South. Here in the Northeast, September and then October are far too hot. A buzz seems to have arrived in my ear; my thoughts take on a fuzzy quality. On top of that, we recently moved to a new house and it’s taking time for our immediate surroundings to feel settled. What, then, does it matter to crush the oak galls into a powder, pour hot water over them and let them sit quietly in a jar for a while, their tannins releasing into what will become a deep brown liquid? What difference will it make for me to be a writer who occasionally writes with ink I’ve made myself?
The whole process feels a bit indulgent. A waste of otherwise valuable time. I likely won’t be able to write an essay in oak gall ink to submit to a publication. And if I’m attempting to write words in defense of the natural world, then what good is it if no one sees them? I rely on my laptop, where mistakes are easy to erase, where email permits me to send off an assignment in the time it takes to sneeze, where my creative process begins every morning, not with a blank piece of paper, but with a blinking cursor. My writing feels nudged into efficiency and increased output, even though my creativity feels increasingly parched.
And so, as I strain the tea-like liquid through a coffee filter, separating bits and grit of oak gall, and then add two crushed tablets of ferrous sulfate and watch as the resulting chemical reaction transforms the amber brew into a midnight purple-black, I think about just how much making this ink has slowed me down, has required my attention, has sparked a level of curiosity and wonder that I haven’t felt in a while.
As I swirl what will soon be ink in the glass jar, peering inside, I sense something real and immediate stirring and swirling within me.
I’ve yet to find a suitable feather with which to make into a nib, so when the ink is ready, I dip a thin paintbrush into it and hold it above a blank piece of paper. For days, I’ve been wondering what to write with the ink when the time comes. Seeing it there, only filling half of a small jar, it is obviously a finite resource. How to make it count? In my head, I’ve drafted the beginnings of poems and a few weighty sentences, or perhaps, I’ve thought, I’ll transcribe a favorite quote. But when ink finally meets the page, it’s for just one word: “Aspen.” My daughter’s name, with a simple leaf drawn beneath.
I’ll write more words with the ink soon. I’m taking it slow. My intention is to begin every morning with the ink and a blank sheet of paper, my computer left in the other room. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that writers should make their own ink or press their own paper or write with quills. I certainly will continue to use my laptop as my primary tool. But I’m growing more interested in ways we can fine-tune our creative practices such that we are woven into a deeper relationship, not only with our craft, but with the living world that we are already in relationship with, in all the ways we forget, and in all the ways we still remember.
It seems like there is a certain alchemy—a magical transformation—at work in a wasp laying an egg on a tree that has been growing for centuries. A chemical reaction that grows a gall, part of which will be used to write the name of a four-year-old girl, a girl who, just yesterday, on a walk to Jewel Falls along the Fore River in Portland, filled her coat hood with acorns (her coat was on backwards to expedite the collection process). Perhaps one of the many acorns that she picked up and then mistakenly dropped again along the path will roll into a fertile patch of sunlit soil and find its way to becoming an oak tree. Perhaps a wasp will alight on a budding leaf in some future spring.
Transferring part of this ecological process onto the page and into words…is there meaning there? I sense something swirling into focus, a new ground to stand upon, questions distilling into direction, the whisper of an oak tree inviting words to appear.
