Seasonal Rhythms in the City

London National Park City Ranger & Art Ecologist Becky Lyon, chatted to Ananya about using nature as a teacher, looking down, not up and finding nature later in life.

When Becky found herself “captured by” nature, it wasn’t the bucolic countryside origin story that most of us expect to hear. Instead, Becky started her relationship with nature around six years ago. A born and bred Londoner, Becky knows just as well as any other city dweller that feeling the “molecular nature of our being” isn’t about “going to the Lake District and doing a wonderful walk” but “it’s realising that we are ecology. We are at stake in everything that is happening, and we have the power to reshape things differently”.

Since 2016, Becky has spent time working out, how can she, as an artist, help bring us back to ecology, and back to our bodies?

Becky’s practice focuses on “thinking about how we can live differently and where we might get those answers.” One way she does this is by organising walks in Stanmore Country Park, exploring dead and decaying wood to understand it as part of the ecosystem and appreciating dead wood as a sacred relic: “everything is on the way to becoming soil and everything new that emerges is actually quite incredible”. She also runs a group called Squishy Sessions, working on how “we can activate our embodied mind to live differently”, but underneath all of these forms of learning Becky is keen to champion “ways for people to engage (with nature) without judgement”.

For now, Becky is driven to find out how her practice can help to “attend to the sticky complexity of the climate crisis” in some way and is continuing to work on events that draw attention to seasonal rhythms.

Check out her upcoming events here:

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