During Lent, contributors have reflected on the books that got them through a desert period in their lives. For our Easter issue, a writer leaves her library behind and finds solace instead in the inexhaustible miracle of the natural world

Words are my work, my pleasure and my life, but when life gets difficult I need to put them aside. Almost consciously, I empty them out of my head and read, instead, the book of Nature. That may sound a pretentious thing to say, as if I need no advice from anyone wiser. I do need that, and my head is full of comforting aphorisms and lovely lines I have laid down over the years to keep and sip slowly, like an elixir; as well as sharper advice, such as “Worse things happen at sea.” But for a particularly tough patch, whatever it may be, I have to take myself outside. Turmoil ends there, and I can start again from the inexhaustible miracle of existence in the world.

Shakespeare, naturally, has been there before me. In As You Like It the Duke rejoices that the Forest of Arden offers “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything”; and Orlando dreams that his love for Rosalind may be “charactered” on the bark of trees. As a child, discovering the power of letters long before I met the Bard, I took that rather literally: imagining that the lines of dots on the beech trees that lined the playground were a language something like Braille, and the markings on oak leaves a code that I would crack, when I was old enough. In Umbria I’ve often walked in a wood that seems primed to take dictation, full of pen-thin sapling oaks hung with galls and watered by inky little streams. But the older I get the more I treasure the way that Nature works in silence, simply being. Natura naturans, as Spinoza said: Nature doing what Nature does.