Leslie Patten

Shadow Landscape Leslie Patten

Our human world has burgeoned so rapidly that it has completely consumed our earth. Wildness has receded into the shadows. Finding wildlife is akin to finding Waldo in a sea of human activity. And with less wildlife on the landscape, whole ecosystems collapsing, and extinctions becoming more common, our serendipitous encounters are vanishing too.




Shadow Landscape recounts stories of my own animal meetings, some intentional, others unexpected, in the vanishing world of wildness. The majority of the stories included were written during the COVID winter, some in Arizona and others in Wyoming. But the events occurred over several years. Working for many years with plants and animals, I now consider the animal world like a troupe of jazz dancers. Wildlife sway and move to each other. They anticipate their partner's next maneuver; they are creative in their calculations and read with expertise every gesture, smell, and sign on the land. Meanwhile, we humans sit on the dance-floor bench with only the two-step under our belt. We are bumbling and awkward in our participation. Loud, fast, self-absorbed. Possibly the connection between all these tales is my own clumsy attempt to touch nature's heart, to understand the ineffable, to reach beyond my grasp and feel like I too am learning to jazz dance.