I’d forced myself out into Sheffield’s Porter Valley. The temperature was around freezing, the sky flat and monochrome. Wishing I’d stayed in the warm, I followed an icy path to nearby Shepherd Wheel, a 17^th century knife-grinding workshop close to our allotment. And then, stopping to take a breath beside the millpond, I caught a sudden flash of orange and iridescent turquoise as a kingfisher plunged into the water, right in front of me. To think I nearly didn’t go out because it all looked so miserable.

My encounter with the kingfisher was an experience of what the anthropologist and activist Deborah Bird Rose called ‘shimmer’. For this month’s essay, I want to look at shimmer in more detail because it has so much to say to those of us who are trying to deepen our relationship with the more-than-human world1 at this time of environmental crisis.

Rose learned about shimmer from her work with Aboriginal communities. American by birth, she lived, worked and thought with the Yarralin and Lingarra communities in Australia’s Northern Territory for almost forty years. In her writing, she returns repeatedly to the stories she learned from her Indigenous teachers. She loved to bring them into conversation with a whole range of other stories, thinkers and beings, both human and other-than-human. As her colleague Thom van Dooren wrote after her death:

Her great art and skill was to bring disparate stories, ideas, and concepts into generative conversation. Not to create harmony or synergy, but rather to stretch them beyond their comfort zones, rubbing them together to see what sparks might be produced—an approach that she names ‘firestick wisdom’.2

Rose believed that the Aboriginal concept of shimmer was one that Western thinkers needed. Always aware of the dangers of cultural appropriation (she worked with many Aboriginal communities on their claims to have land stolen through colonisation returned), she nevertheless felt that a meeting between shimmer and Western thought would be ‘a process of encounter and transformation, not absorption, in which different ways of being and doing find interesting things to do together’.3

Rose begins her exploration of shimmer with the Yolngu term bir’yun, which translates as ‘brilliant’ or ‘shimmering’ and is found in the process of Yolngu painting. Yolngu paintings begin with a rough outline, which the artists describe as ‘dull’. Then the outline is covered in cross-hatched lines that bring out the fine detail and shift the painting to ‘brilliant’.

Brilliance captures the eye, just as the glinting of sun on water does, just as the flash of kingfisher did for me on that cold, grey day in Sheffield. In Yolngu thought, brilliance is also a way of experiencing ancestral power, a source of energy and wisdom. Rose elaborates:

Brilliance actually grabs you. Brilliance allows you, or brings you, into the experience of being part of a vibrant and vibrating world [..] It is a capture that is all over the place: water capturing and reflecting the sun, the sun glinting on the water, the eyes of the beholders captured and enraptured, the ephemeral dance of it all. It is equally a lure: creatures long to be grabbed to experience that beauty, that surprise, that gleaming ephemeral moment of capture.

Rose writes that she ‘learned about bir’yun through dancing all night’. After she died, far too early, one of her obituaries read, ‘In remembering Debbie, this image of a shimmering dancer stands out.’4 I wish I could have met her.

The idea of dancing is helpful for understanding shimmer, because shimmer pulsates. It moves from dull to brilliant and back again, just as a dance begins from music and movements that generate energy, or shimmer, and then back to the sounds and motions that close it down. At the end of some Yolngu rituals, the brilliance of the painting is erased so that it becomes dull again.

Rose sees this pulsating movement throughout the more-than-human world. In the rhythm of the wet and dry seasons in Australia, for example, as they shift from lush brilliance to desiccation and back again. ‘Shimmer comes with the new growth, the everything-coming-new process of shininess and health and the new generations.’

Viewed through the lens of shimmer, absence isn’t lack: it’s potential. However, the movement from dull to brilliant, from absence to fullness, depends on encounter. In a lyrical, sensual description of how flying foxes pollinate eucalyptus trees, Rose writes, ‘The tongue meets the flower and the flower meets the tongue in a kiss of symbiotic mutualism. Trees call out to flying foxes in languages of color and scent, and flying foxes respond with gusto.’

This is why Rose described the current environmental crises as ‘dragging shimmer from the world’. Disrupted seasons and functional extinctions5 drastically reduce the possibilities for such encounters. ‘Relationships unravel, mutualities falter, dependence becomes a peril rather than a blessing and whole worlds of knowledge and practice diminish,’ she wrote.

Western thought has tended to separate humans from the rest of nature, positioning them as superior to all other forms of life. This way of thinking denies shimmer. It cuts off encounter. It dulls the senses. It has also led to the great thinning of life that has been accelerating at breakneck speed since the Second World War.

How much richer to understand that we live in mutual dependence in multispecies communities, and that fullness is found in a dazzling, iridescent world of connectivity. ‘The bling of life,’ as Rose called it. A love story. A lure that leads to attentiveness and the desire to care.

My own understanding of shimmer is profoundly affected, like everything else, by my experience of being a bereaved child and not being allowed to talk about my brother’s death (see my introductory post for more about this). One of the consequences of this was a lifelong tendency to depression, a state of affectless dullness that smothers any capacity for encountering shimmer.

It’s difficult to overstate how much life has changed since I was given the time and opportunity to write about Simon, and to create my own ways of remembering him. Even as I continue to process deeply buried grief, I’m amazed at how much more intensely I experience joy, how even in the most everyday moments, the world can suddenly gleam and dazzle.

Surely there are lessons here for how we respond to life at a time of terrible losses in the more-than-human world. I will close with a final quote from Rose.

In this time of extinctions, we are going to be asked again and again to take a stand for life, and this means taking a stand for faith in life’s meaningfulness. […] We are called into recognition: of the shimmer of life’s pulses and the great patterns within which the power of life expresses itself. We are therefore called into gratitude for the fact that in the midst of terrible destruction, life finds ways to flourish, and that the shimmer of life does indeed include us.

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Threads, knots and tangles

~ ‘A howling lamentation’ is a beautiful essay about Deborah Bird Rose and her work, written by Thom van Dooren and Isabelle Stengers as a preface to the French edition of Rose’s book Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. You can read it (in English) here.

~ Rose’s understanding of bir’yun began with a famous essay by the anthropologist Howard Morphy. There’s an extract on the brownbaby website here.

~ While I was writing this, and thinking about how shimmer might meet with Western culture, images of iridescence from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins kept coming to mind, especially As Kingfishers Catch Fire and God’s Grandeur. I’d love to hear of any examples you have of shimmer and Western thought ‘finding interesting things to do together’.