Wandering Colour

How to notice without naming

A few years ago I was invited to lead a foraging workshop for Teju Cole’s creative writing class at Harvard. I met Teju on the steps of the Widener library and everything was almost ridiculously golden with fall leaves. Teju’s mind jumped from Youtube gossip to East Indian ice cream flavours to white privilege at US customs to beech leaves in the poetry of Seamus Heaney to photography and every imaginable thought in between, and that was just on the walk from the library to his class, during which time he also introduced me to an artist I had just read about in the New Yorker and the world’s best known young Jazz vocalist and a few other people I had to look up afterwards to find out why they are so famous. In his class I got to observe a bunch of supersmart English students who were studying the 3 line dark news-based haiku-like writing of Félix Fénéon a neo-impressionist anarchist that was basically writing tweets in the 1880s. As a longtime fan and hopeful, almost-friend of Teju, I felt incredibly lucky to get to observe his witty, generous, logic-leaping teaching style in action, but I was, by this point, starting to get a little nervous. What could I possibly teach to this next generation of writerly elites? I couldn’t really picture this group making abstract blobs of handmade ink.

But then, 5 minutes later, we were all out in Harvard yard happily picking up pennies and rust scraps and acorns while others were scraping away at copper-coated drain pipes and crumbled bricks in the golden light of the University Quad. The writers and readers and critics mostly separated into lone foragers looking at their feet and so engrossed in noticing that they hardly talked at all. Occasionally you heard a gleeful cheer when someone found something unexpected. After 45 minutes of outdoor investigation, we returned with our haul to the classroom and put all the finds on the lecture table and I talked a bit about traditional and experimental possibilities of the materials. We didn’t have time to make any ink and I don’t think there was a single person there that was going to go on to make their own art supplies, but I could tell that something had shifted. That there was something that changed in these students’ minds while they were getting their hands dirty and seeing their campus with new eyes that just might be useful for whatever they would go on to do. I recognized (though I have always sort of suspected this) that there is something going on in inkmaking that has nothing to do with inkmaking and everything to do with eye opening and just being open in general to the materials and natural realities at hand. Teju Cole, who wrote one the great modern books about flaneuring called Open City, and hundreds of articles as the New York Times photography critic about how we look and notice, probably new this from the beginning that new eyes are as good as a new colour any day. All this is a very long way of saying, it’s going to be nice weather this weekend and maybe you should go out into whatever wilds are near you and just notice anew with a forager’s eye.

Like those Harvard students, you might never make ink, but isn’t everyone a forager? All your primordial ancestors crawled out of the mud looking for sustenance. Your every cell is a forager, right now going about its business looking for oxygen or strings of proteins, and even inside your cells, blobby mitochondria are scrounging around for glucose and ketones. Really foraging is as simple as opening the door and hitting the streets, except that when you open your door, there is sometimes a paper bag with your dinner in it and a package of clothing and another with books and beside that a box with what seems to be a moroccan throw pillow kind of blocking your exit and so you may have to kind of relearn the art.

Most of the questions I get as an inkmaker and a leader of colour foraging workshops concern ingredients. Questions about which root or berry or leaf collected at what time of year and with which additives and boiled or ground or fermented in this or that way and for how long might culminate in what final colour. In my book Make Ink, I put together some of the ground rules of foraging which includes where and how to look for natural colour, what to watch out for, what to do in winter, and what parts of a plant you might get pigment from. But there is an equally important skill that I forgot to give instruction on. It’s a skill that is integral to foraging and it’s really a great way to spend a few hours on a sharp fall afternoon. I would like to call it, Wandering Purposefully, and below I offer 10 guidelines for trying it yourself.

1) Forget Everything! My friend Ani has this amazing method for experiencing the world without words which I won’t give away because I imagine that she will eventually use the method to create a cult or a children’s book on the topic. But at the heart of her idea is to forget the names of things. Forget the name of that tree. Forget that that invasive vine has a berry you have used before. Forget that the shape of that leaf means it belongs to that species. Forget the word red or purple or golden. Forget your role as a sister, employee father, student, patient, teacher or tourist. Forget everything and…

2) Feel it all. Instead of categorizing and figuring out and naming, try concentrating on what your toes and fingers, nose, and eyes are telling you. Instead of following a map or pre-planned route, try feeling your way along.

3) Enter the picture. That spot down by the river framed by marsh grasses with the sparkles on the water makes a nice picture for Instagram but why not go right into the picture. What do those rushes feel like? What is the sound of the mud?

4) Go small. We notice the colourful leaf or butterfly or bug but remember being a kid? Why not become the ant, the bird, the burrowing beetle and follow its logic.

5) Move by attraction. Colour foraging makes you walk into spots you might not ordinary look closely at. If you are open to it, a landscape will pull you in a certain direction like a magnet. Don’t be afraid to wander like a stoner or like someone just falling in love with no other purpose than pleasure.

6) Look for tiny plays. I learned this when working with Lauren Kolyn. Sometimes light trickles down through a forest to perfectly highlight a little stage of spongy moss with the skeleton of a weed poking up through it. Give this little play its due and really observe the scene from all angles. Or better yet, follow a nature photographer around and start to see things as they see them as pools of shifting light patiently waiting for the next act to start.

7) Befriend a plant. Choose a botanical not by name or reputation but by shape, texture, colour, or sound that draws you, and just watch it. If you can watch it through several seasons, so much the better. Eventually it will let you know how and when you might collaborate with it.

8) Find a sidepath. If your wandering still feels a bit forced, look for a sidepath and follow it until you are crawling through the underbrush in a kind of tunnel of greenery like that early scene in Totoro.

9) Pick one thing. When you do the actual foraging part, try only collecting just one thing. If you bring a notebook, try writing down just one word, and if you have your phone with you, just pretend it’s an old-fashioned camera and there is just one frame left.

10) Make you own rule and put it in the comments.

or just spread the word.

Photograph by Eamon Mac Mahon