Chatter Marks EP 52 If you take care of nature, it’ll take care of you with Mossy Kilcher

Mossy Kilcher is a homesteader, a musician and an ornithologist. When she was young, she was afraid of nature. It was just so big and there were so many ways to die. But the more time she spent outdoors, the better she understood it. Making music and recording bird songs helped. She realized that it wasn’t about taming the wilderness or dominating nature — like her father believed — it was about living in unison with it. That if you take care of it, it will be there for you when you inevitably need it. Understanding her place in nature, helped her understand her role in it. For example, she found that if she sat still for long enough, she became invisible and she could see and listen to nature doing its business all around her. It carried on without her help. She says that this was a sobering thought: that everything is important, not just her.

She recently released a book — a memoir — that focuses on her upbringing. Homesteading in Alaska before it was a state, living off the grid and off the land. They hunted and they gathered. It was a self-sufficient lifestyle that her father sought out and he found it in Alaska, a place where he believed he could live simply. They settled on land about 15 miles from the nearest town and accessible only by a trail in the forest or on the beach at low tide. They used horses and a wagon to transport goods back and forth. Mossy says that she wanted to share all of this because it’s what led her to another way of looking at life, another way of looking at the world. That everything matters and we need to be good, thoughtful stewards of the planet. It’s a connection with nature that she has applied to every aspect of her life.