Unplated: An interview with Heather Wall
Cultivating a sense of wonder while exploring the natural world
This conversation is part of the Unplated series, a collection of interviews with folks whose work intersects with food, but who work outside culinary spheres. My hope is that these conversations not only spark your curiosity, but help you think about how what you eat is connected to the world well beyond your plate.
Heather Wall is one of those folks who you meet online and feel like you've known for years. We've never met in person, but I feel a kinship with Heather because there's so much overlap between the way we both view the world.
Heather writes Natural Wonders, which has quickly become one of my favorite newsletters. I love the question and answer format, the way she breaks down complex phenomena into really readable, accessible writing, and of course I love her sense of wonder about it all.
Heather recently retired from 32 years in education, working with students from age 5 to adult. As she says, "I currently have a much better work-life balance as I split my time between writing, reading, being outdoors, and working part-time coaching teachers." Her work has stretched beyond the classroom too: She's been everything from a raft guide to a short-order cook, a ropes course director, and a waitress.
Here, we talk about nature, cultivating a sense of wonder, and what we learn by looking at food and eating in the natural world.
JS: First of all, can you tell me a bit about yourself and your work?
HW: I love being outdoors – between mountain biking, hiking, and paddleboarding, I spend a good portion of each week in the woods. I find it’s a great way to recenter myself and find energy when I’m low. It can be tempting, during a stroll, to contemplate all the distracting messiness of life (politics, work, relationships) but I find if I consciously use all my senses, I often notice amazing details I’d otherwise pass by – a tree trunk twisted in a loop, a pileated woodpecker drumming in the distance, an enormous poplar stump – and these turn into questions: why are some trees so twisty while others are straight? Why don’t woodpeckers get headaches? Are there any old growth forests left near me that haven’t been logged?
In the past, I would have let these questions flit through my mind and then let them go, but I (partially) retired from teaching about a year ago and realized now I actually have time to pursue the answers. And once I started researching, I realized other people might be interested in how quietly fascinating the natural world turns out to be. I’ve stumbled across a horde of ants enslaving a neighboring colony, I’ve learned to identify a carnivore’s pooh, and why some creeks actually rust. I’ve started reading more books about the natural world by authors like Peter Wohlleben and Diana Beresford-Kroeger and find myself wanting to share their amazing perspectives.
I don’t pretend to be an expert by any means – I’m more of a perpetually curious person who finally has the time to explore the answers to my questions and share with others who appreciate a little nature in their inbox.
JS: You grew up in the mountains in North Carolina, in a part of the Appalachians that's near and dear to my heart. I wonder if you could tell me a bit about that experience: How has growing up immersed in nature shaped your life and perspectives as an adult?
HW: I grew up at a rafting company deep in the bottom of the Nantahala Gorge, which meant a) we weren’t distracted by television because there was no reception, and b) I was surrounded by other raft guides, paddlers, bikers, and hikers who chose to share the outdoors with others as their life’s work. My parents had been “city folk” who took a chance when they moved us to the mountains when I was in kindergarten, and they modeled for me a sense of wonder at the diversity of life in the Smokies. My mom specialized in learning wildflowers while my dad practiced tree identification. Locals took us on walks in the woods to learn native plants and their uses, and also to play sly jokes on us newcomers, like mentioning that this or that plant was “poisonous if you’re more than a mile away from water,” which is not possible in the Smokies, or yelling, “Rattlesnake!” loudly while whispering “plantain” under their breath when pointing to a local plant.
Like many other folks my age, I grew up climbing trees and catching fireflies until dusk, but I had the added benefit of gathering water cress and morels with my mom and hearing my dad describe the natural history of the gorge as we paddled the river. From an early age I learned to respect nature (the river wasn’t always safe and there could be bears) and to appreciate all it could provide (from entertainment to food to medicine). It was a wonderful way to grow up, and I wish more folks could experience that connection to the world. Which is, in a way, why I write Natural Wonders.
JS: You focus on wonder in your work: What is the power of wondering? How does a sense of wonder enrich our lives?
HW: What a great question. It often feels like in today’s world we are drowning – we have so much competing for our attention: news at our fingertips, fascinating podcasts, addictive clickbait, our Netflix menu, the whack-a-mole of email – we have too many stimuli and not enough white space in our lives. The effect, I believe, is an overriding sense of anxiety. We become numb to the world as we try to check off our to-do lists and “get through” our weeks.
It’s not a good way to live.
To cultivate a sense of wonder is to intentionally slow down and appreciate a small, amazing element of your surroundings that could be easy to miss. It means shoving to the side your mental to-do list and simply being where you are, and really appreciating what makes an object unique. You might have passed that spider 15 times in the past week, but what if you stood still for a moment and really studied it, watched it walk across its web, and realized – wait! It’s not building a web – it’s taking it down! Is it eating it? Is it sucking it into its abdomen somehow? Does it do this every day to build a new web? Why?
To be wonder-full is to be like a child, learning about our world as if for the first time. I once saw a first-grader squatting next to a daisy, stroking its petals like a cat. That, to me, is wonder.
Of course, it’s not easy – when I am stressed or behind on tasks or physically not feeling great, I find I’m not at all motivated to write about a natural wonder. In those instances, I make myself get outside and engage all my senses. I try to insert some white space. And once I can breathe again, and think in a non-list-y format, I find that I can open my eyes and my mind to a sense of wonder.
Being wonder-full is a much more rewarding way to live, though I periodically have to remind myself how to do it.
JS: I want to ask about how food and the act of eating show up in your writing and your perspective on the world: Whether it's observing eating habits of animals and bugs, or the nutritive mycelial networks between trees, or the rich culinary heritage of human communities. How does thinking about food and eating help build our sense of wonder around the natural world?
HW: I tend to write about food indirectly most of the time, and usually it’s in reference to what animals eat or when they eat us. My very first post was about the bumper crop of acorns we had last year, and how this “mast crop” is nature’s way of trying to ensure at least some of its acorns will survive the hungry deer and become young oak saplings. (Now I’m wondering – are last year’s prolific acorns why our deer population has seemingly exploded this summer? Will that result in a large die-off of deer this winter, since mast years are never back-to-back? I need to do some research…)
Nature is one big food-cycle, each organism struggling to find enough water, sunlight, or food to grow big enough to leave its own offspring. Trees shed their lower branches to maximize the food-production of their uppermost leaves. Hummingbirds migrate hundreds of miles to drink nectar in the exact same fertile area they spent the previous summer. Sensitive briar closes its leaves when touched to protect against being eaten by hungry deer. Every decision in nature is about survival, and that often comes back to food.
I used to think the only truly selfless act of nature was the fact that trees turn the forest into a bouquet of flashy reds, oranges and yellows each autumn as they lose their chlorophyll. It seems like one last burst of beauty that serves no observable survival purpose other than suggesting to humans there really is a God. And while I still do consider autumn my favorite season for that exact reason, I have recently learned from Peter Wohlleben that trees may explode in color as a way to signal to insects looking for a winter home that they’re too healthy to be a good source of food. So perhaps everything in nature really does come back to food.
JS: Are there other unexpected ways that food has shown up in your work and life, perhaps in your role as an elementary teacher or elsewhere?
HW: For many humans, food is no longer about survival but about community and comfort. While the trees and raccoons and insects around us still spend most of their day searching for enough nutrients to get by, most people have the luxury of gathering their unbruised apples and perfectly carved baby carrots from the store without much thought as to where they came from.
As a teacher, I used food as a way to communicate safety and to build community with my children. We’d make chicken soup with rice to bring Maurice Sendak’s poem to life, we baked cookies and pizzas and churned ice cream for ourselves, and we always decorated a holiday tree for the animals, a childhood tradition I wanted to bring to life for my students. We took turns feeding our classroom pets (a rabbit, a cockatiel, and various fish and lizards) and we learned about the cycle of life when we had to bury our hamster under the maple tree one morning.
Many of the children I taught were not food-secure, however. I learned early on not to use food in non-edible ways with children of poverty. A hungry child should not have to glue down Cheerios for an art project while their stomach grumbles. Our basic needs of food, water, and rest have to be met before we have the bandwidth to enrich our minds. Unfortunately, the daily struggle for food is still a concern for some humans, as it is for much of nature.
JS: Anything else you'd like to tell me?
HW: It’s incredibly easy for us humans to remain encapsulated inside our climate-controlled cars, dwellings, office spaces and miss the tiny miracles that are happening in the natural world just outside. Even at a microscopic level, trees are communicating through an underground fungal network (one teaspoon of soil contains miles of these filaments), moss is breaking down rocks into minerals for the soil, and conifers are releasing chemicals that both clean the air and lower human blood pressure. The plants, animals, insects and minerals are working together in an intricate network that we humans are still trying to understand.
There is much to wonder about.
Tuning in to this network and how we humans impact it is fascinating work. My hope is that we can learn to appreciate and understand it, and from there advocate for the protection of this amazing place we call home.
P.S. Hidden Cosmos planners are up on the website!
There are a very limited number of printed planners, but if/when they sell out (or if you’re international) there are also digital-only planners, which you can put on your tablet or have printed at your local shop.
Thank you as always for your support!
If you enjoy the Unplated series, or the newsletter writ large, please consider supporting my work with a paid subscription. If you're already a paid subscriber, thank you so much! Your support means the world.