Rebecca Hooper of Between Two Seas on Nature, Writing, and the Wisdom of Compassion

Rebecca Hooper’s writing is alive with the sounds and scents of the sea. It’s richly rooted in the land, and paints a picture of her life on Scotland’s Orkney Islands — while also offering up medicinal and breathtaking reflections on mortality, ephemerality, and more.

For the second episode of the Ink Roads podcast, I spoke with Hooper about transitioning from academia to writing, nature’s wild wisdom, science and spirituality, the reality of suffering and the balm of compassion, and so much more. I’m super excited to share it with you today.

Read the full transcript of the interview below, or listen above.

P.S. For at least the first few episodes of the podcast, I’m creating a custom musical intro inspired by the person I’m interviewing, so check it out after the intro! Listen to the podcast above, or on Spotify.

Photo via Rebecca Hooper

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INK ROADS: I'm super excited to get to chat with you for a little bit. I really, really love your writing. It's just so precise and detailed and kind of delicate, and I just always love slipping into your pieces, ever since I read the first one of yours on Substack that you posted. So I'm excited to get to chat with you today. I would just love to hear a little bit about your journey to Substack and how the blog came about, or the newsletter, whatever you like to call it, if you could just tell me a little bit about that process.

REBECCA HOOPER: Yeah, of course. Well, thank you, first of all, so much for inviting me onto the podcast. And yeah, it's really nice to just have a chat with you. I also love your writing and your music. I have to say, your new album is just amazing.

IR: Thank you.

RH: Yeah, it's really nice just to be able to hang out for a while. And yeah, in terms of my Substack journey, I sort of happened upon Substack. My dad had been reading some of his favorite authors and followed some of his favorite artists on Substack, and he kept mentioning it to me. And I just thought that I would check it out one day, and it just looked like a really lovely community. Such amazing talent, so many writers writing about so many incredible things, and I think really supportive readers as well.

When I was reading people's work and then reading the comments, I thought, this is just such a nice community and such a nice space. So I thought, okay, why not give it a go and see what happens? At that point, I'd been writing for about a year, although I would say I probably have always identified as a writer in terms of how much I love writing and how much time I spend writing. As a kid, poetry was what I started writing. As soon as I learned to write, I was writing poetry. So that has always been, in some ways, the language that I've communicated in.

But around my teens, I stopped writing things down. I was always writing things in my head, but I just stopped writing things down. I think as academic life in school started taking over time, I just lost the time to be writing things down in notebooks, which is what I had always been doing.

I didn't get back into writing things down — I was always just writing in my head — until the pandemic and lockdown. And I feel like that's when so many people kind of refound their true loves, the things that they loved doing when they were kids, and the things that really light them up and set their heart on fire. I feel like a lot of people who had stepped away from those things found them again in lockdown. Maybe something to do with the space and the time, just the availability of time again. So I started writing poetry properly again in lockdown.

And then again when the pandemic was over and lockdown was over, I stopped, because life got really busy with other things. Sorry, this has turned into a bit of a narrative about how I ended up even getting into writing, but it is how I ended up getting into Substack. So yeah, it's sort of a long and winding story.

IR: That's the question, you know, that's your story.

RH: Yeah, so I stopped writing again. Stopped writing things down — I was still writing things in my head. And this was just coming out of the pandemic, and I started a new academic job. I finished my PhD at this point, which was in evolutionary biology, and I started a new academic job. And it was really intense and really busy, and I just had no time for writing or really being creative.

I ended up leaving academia two years ago for many different reasons. The reason was — well, there were quite a few different reasons, but one of them was that I had sort of fallen out of love with the academic institution and the modern scientific process. Or, not the process itself, but all the bureaucracy around the process and the driving forces within the processes. I suppose I could kind of see how the scientific system as it is was not really aligned with my own values anymore.

And yeah, that made me question whether I wanted to continue. At the same time, I've had a chronic pain condition since I was quite young, but it was getting worse and worse in academia for many different reasons. I'm still kind of untangling all those reasons now, but I just felt like I had to leave, and I did. And it was then that I decided, okay, well, I want to write. I've always really wanted to write, and now is, you know, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it now.

The problem was, I didn't really know what I wanted to write, and I didn't really know what my voice was. I didn't really know what I wanted to say. I didn't know if I wanted to write poetry or fiction or nonfiction. I just knew there was this driving force within me that wanted to create, and I wanted to create through writing.

So yeah, I took on a job because I needed some money, and it was an awful job. It was kind of an admin job in a tech company. It just was not very fun. It wasn't in my line of how I think and how I do things. But it gave me a paycheck, which was what I needed at that time, and it also gave me a lot of time on the side of doing that job. So that was when I set to work figuring out what my writing was going to be.

I really wanted to find my voice. The way that I thought I would do that best was to stop reading, because I think I'm quite easily influenced by what I'm reading. Back then, whatever I was reading, I would find the rhythm of that book would end up in my words. So my words would be like a tapestry of all these different influences from all these different things I was reading. And I really wanted to just figure out, like, what actually do I sound like without all of that lovely, beautiful, wonderful, inspiring noise?

So yeah, I didn't read anything for a year, and I just wrote in my spare time like an obsessed little gremlin. I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I wrote a novel in that year, and the first draft was just appalling. It was really, really bad. And then I redrafted and redrafted, and during all of those redrafts, I think I did develop a voice. I did develop how I wanted to write, really. And then it was when I finished, as much as a novel is ever finished, that final draft, and I set that book aside, I thought, okay, I think I'm ready to share writing now. I think I'm ready to be a writer. I suppose before that I hadn't given myself a label. But at that point, I thought, I'm going to dive in the deep end and just begin this life and see where it leads me.

So I quit my job, and I went fully freelance and started doing lots of different types of writing — lots of science writing based on my academic background, about the latest wildlife and conservation news. But then also, this was the time that I thought, oh, I'll check out Substack, because my dad's been talking about it for ages. And yeah, I was really taken with it. I just thought this looks like a lovely place to experiment and start out with sharing whatever it is I'm writing, and also engaging with other writers and being inspired by what they're doing. So then I just sort of dove into Substack.

I think I signed up on, like, a Tuesday, and then I remember writing my first post. I live on a little, remote Scottish island, and it does have some shops, but they don't have much. Well, they do have quite a lot, but if you need specific things, you need to catch a ferry into town — to the bright lights of Kirkwall, which is really like kind of a big village slash very small town on the main Orkney island.

So I was on the boat over to there, and I was like, I'll write my first Substack post. And I didn't really know what I was going to write until I started, which is often the way when I write anything. It turned into this sort of narrative nonfiction short essay about all of the dead things on the island and how close to death life on the island makes me feel, but in a sort of very whole way. Like, in a way that I think my life has been missing up until this point, to kind of be confronted with death in this way. With all these carcasses that wash onto the shore and all of these amazing bones that you find whenever you go for a walk. Like, literally every day, you find another carcass or another skeleton.

On this island, I am surrounded by the dead

And I just find it fascinating, and I think what I also find fascinating is that so many people here are equally in love with these bones. So you go around someone's house, and there are skulls on their bookshelves, and outside their house, there are whale bones. And everyone just seems so connected to all of these corpses.

So, I wrote about this, and I thought there's no way that anyone is going to be very interested in this because it's so niche and so strange. But that is the beauty of Substack, because I guess I found my fellow niche, strange people. And, yeah, I was really surprised by the response to that post, and people seemed to really connect with it in a way I hadn't anticipated, but I loved. And from then on, I just started posting weekly pretty much about island life, or biology, or philosophy. And I'm loving it. I love Substack. I think it's a great place to be.

IR: Amazing. Yeah, there's so much there. I think that first post just felt like it kind of tapped into something very primal, almost. There was a closeness, a sense of closeness to the landscape that I do think a lot of people are quite hungry for, whether we know it or not — sort of an intimacy with the wilds and with death and things like that.

I know you've written also in your recent post, I think, about the body-mind being separate, and I think that's also connected to our separateness from nature. So I think that post, even though it might seem niche, tapped into this general knowledge that we're kind of detached from the lessons of the land. A lot of us. And I definitely saw those lessons appearing in your writing.

I think, for me, it also sort of tapped into something from my childhood, because I actually wanted to be an evolutionary biologist. I was, like, three or five or something, I don't know what age, but I saw the skeletons in the Natural History Museum. This is a very vivid early childhood memory. And that was what made me want to do that. And then I wanted to be a writer, and that's kind of never changed. But I just felt like there were some stories that the bones knew, maybe, and I felt like seeing that in your work, I was like, there it is.

RH: Love that. I love that you had this, like, both very personal and also this kind of universal connection. Because I think you're right. What that essay did tap into was this kind of longing that people have to just be more connected to the natural world. And that is what I tend to write about.

Whether or not I know when I start out that actually I'm going to be writing about that, it almost always comes back to this disconnect between our modern lives and the natural world. In this modern world, I feel like many of us feel rootless. And I just feel like so many people, like you say, are hungry for that connection.

In this modern world, I feel like so many of us kind of feel rootless, like we don't know where we belong or how it is that we ended up here, and we're all just kind of looking for that connection — something to tether us. And, I think especially people who are curious, and who are questioners who are thinking about human nature and the human condition — we all end up asking, in the end, why. Why are we here? What are we doing here? What is the point?

I think being connected to the land and the whole of the natural world can kind of show you the way a bit. It grounds you. It roots you. It makes you feel less alone. As a human I think humans feel very, very lonely when they think that humans are the center of the universe. That's such a lonely place to be.

And I feel like once we feel that connection with all of the rest of life, we feel less alone. We feel more like a part of something — like this huge community.

So, yeah, I think you're completely right. There is a hunger for that. And I think there are a lot of writers exploring that at the moment. And I think it's such an important thing to explore in the modern world because, yeah, I think we're getting a bit lost.

IR: Oh, yeah, for sure. And I've always thought we can just learn so much from the Earth, and obviously, there are plenty of people who have never stopped doing that. But I think a lot of us just kind of are rootless and are not totally grounded in place.

And I think that's what I love so much about your writing. It really feels like you're just letting the spirit of this place speak through your words.

I'd love to hear a little more about what you've learned from the island where you are and also how your research maybe informs that, or if you feel like it falls short compared to the innate wisdom of the island. I just think it's so beautiful, that meshing of science and the power of noticing, which seems like it could be even more powerful than your scientific background, maybe.

RH: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, and I do agree. I think science is a wonderful thing and a very necessary way for us to understand the world that we live in. And I think maybe I had spent a lot of time seeing things through a strictly scientific lens.

And there is so much beauty, I think, in just opening your mind and your body beyond necessarily thinking about measuring and empirically recording and, you know, "How would I test this? How would I test that?" and letting it be more about feeling. I think there's a sense of belonging you can find in opening yourself up that is hard to find if you just see the world through a very scientific lens.

But yeah, to go back to your question about how the island has influenced me. I find this so interesting to think about because I've always been quite disconnected from wherever I've lived. I spent my twenties kind of just moving around every six months to a year to two years, moving locations within the UK, also moving countries. And I thought that I loved that — that sort of peripheral life where you're never quite a part of the place that you're in, but you are always within novelty, and you're always within the excitement of that novelty. And I think maybe for that time in my life, that was really nice. And I did really enjoy that.

But there just came a time, and actually, it's interesting because I think I can pinpoint it to lockdown again, which was the first time in over a decade that I felt like I'd been given permission, for a terrible reason, to be still. And in the midst of all this awful stuff going on in the world, I just felt within me a kind of calm that I hadn't felt in, well, I think my whole life, to be honest. Because I had to be still.

And we were allowed out, I think it was for an hour a day at some point in lockdown, to go walk — to go outside for exercise was the idea. And so my partner and I would do the same walk every day in the woods near our house.

It was just so lovely to see the spring unfold, because I think it was early spring when that happened. And every day we noticed more of the flowers blooming, and we would hear different songs of the birds. And we both, I think, just noticed things that normally we'd be too busy and too rushed off our feet to notice. I think it was that experience that made us both think that we really wanted to just be somewhere where we felt connected to the land.

At that point, we were in the south of England, we were living in Cornwall, in this really lovely location. But we were living these very fast-paced, quite stressful lives. And yeah, I think it just really made us both realize how much we were yearning for a slower pace of life and a connection to the land that we lived on.

And so we did. It was a few years later that we eventually sat ourselves down and were like, "Okay, are we actually going to live that life that we've both realized we want, or are we going to carry on in this kind of rat race?" We both kind of fell into these academic career tracks because we both love the natural world. But I don't think we stopped at any point between undergrad and PhDs or postdocs — the job you get after a PhD — to actually question if we wanted to live our lives like this, without space to stop and think and be creative and connect.

When we did stop, I think that's when we realized that we needed to be somewhere where we could have a slower pace of life and we could feel connected to the land. I really was yearning for it. My body was telling me, "I need this, and I can't continue in this extremely stressful life anymore."

So that was when we moved up to the Orkney Islands, where we'd been before a couple of times on holiday. And we loved it because, well, for so many reasons — but I feel like one of the main reasons was the space, the big open skies and the water, all that blue. So much blue just takes your breath away.

We moved to one of the North Isles, one of the smaller islands off mainland Orkney, without knowing a huge amount about it. We had been here before, but it was a bit of a dive into the unknown. We bought a house, our first house here. We adopted a dog on the way up to the island, because that was another part of the dream we'd been dreaming of: to live somewhere connected to the land and finally be able to have a dog.

So yeah, we arrived here with our new dog in our new house, and it was all, I suppose it was just, it was all very novel at first. But slowly, we just settled into it, and we settled into knowing the land and the pace of island life, and building this life that we both really wanted. And yeah, it happened slowly.

It was an unfolding of experiences every day, just sort of everyday small things. Small things you notice, like if the wind's blowing in from this direction, what the sea is like in a certain cove, whether you can swim, whether you can paddleboard, whether you just need to walk because it's too rough and the currents will take you out, what birds you're likely to see where, what flowers you'll see.

And I think a part of being connected to the land in this way, or connected to the island, that I hadn't anticipated was also the connection to the community. Because we sort of moved for a connection to the seasons and a slowness of life and the ability to walk every day in the wild. But we hadn't thought a huge amount about the island community itself.

And it's kind of blown me away how wonderful it's been. It's quite a small island. I think it has a population of just under 600. And we see our neighbors every day, and many of them have lived here all their lives. They tell us things about the land and the weather and the wildlife that we would not know if it weren't for that connection to them.

The longer we live here, the more we learn about them, the community, and the land. And it all feels like a really slow and beautiful way of learning about the place that you live and becoming a bit more in tune with the natural cycles of the world.

IR: That gets to, I guess, kind of the main idea of this podcast, which was the intersection of ecology and spirituality, and then creativity also. I've always thought that a lot of us look to religion and to science for explanations of why we're here and those huge questions and what it all means. And I love that you mentioned being a node in a larger web, because I see that idea in spirituality all the time as well. Like, we're one soul and part of a greater web of divine love or something — that idea appears a lot in religions. And then you see that reflected in nature and science. So that feels like a hint of some kind as to what might actually be real.

Do you feel like any of your explorations in these fields led you towards any kind of answer to these big questions? If that's not too big of a question.

RH: That’s a huge question, yeah.

IR: Not to ask you the meaning of life on a Thursday afternoon, but just curious if you felt like you got any closer.

RH: I think the more I explore these questions and read other people's explorations of them, the more magic I find in just the process of trying to answer them.

Although I personally am not sure that there are any answers. I think we're all kind of scrambling around, looking for patterns and reasons. And I think, personally, that we will not find any reasons. And that probably does come from my evolutionary background — this kind of understanding of life as just a bit of a random phenomenon that has occurred, and consciousness as the same, as something that has arisen because it's helped us to survive.

I think that has heavily influenced my understanding of the world, which I think is entirely incomplete, and I'm still learning every single day. But I don't know if that will change — maybe it will.

But I think I'm really happy to just explore the questions. I'm not necessarily sure that I even want to find any answers. I think I just really like exploring the human condition. I really like exploring what it means to be a human in this world.

I think probably what I'm most concerned with is suffering and compassion. I'm really interested in understanding how we can decrease suffering in the world — of the things that are alive in the world right now.

And I think to understand how collective human behavior can try to decrease suffering is really related to questions of human behavior. And questions of human behavior always come back to human nature. So yeah, these are all questions that I just end up circling around and around and writing around and around.

And I think there's just so much beauty in exploring human nature, but there is also a lot of darkness, and I think that can't be glossed over.

I think there are lots of different perspectives that people have on the natural world, and I think any connection with the natural world that a human has is a beautiful and important thing. But I do sometimes worry that there is a habit people have of overlooking the indifference of nature and the brutality of nature — because it is brutal in its indifference. It's not trying to be brutal, but it just has no compass and no intentionality and, therefore, sometimes really is the most awful thing.

I suppose I worry that that can occasionally be overlooked and ignored, and nature is looked at through rose-tinted glasses. And when that happens, I think the suffering that happens in the wild and in the world can also be glossed over. I don't really believe that the universe is looking out for any human or any animal in particular because there's just too much suffering for that to be happening.

So I think I would say I do have a spiritual connection to nature. But I think what I mean by that is probably very different from what a lot of other people mean by it. And I think for me, it's more to do with looking closely at nature and feeling very connected to it, in terms of almost being related to it — like, this is what I've come from, this is where we've all come from, and we are all connected, and we are all here in this world together.

I think that's when my spirituality really comes in — just that feeling of connection and empathy for all things, which I think so many people have, and it's such a beautiful thing. But maybe it's got a fringe of darkness to it, which is probably heavily influenced by spending a lot of time seeing firsthand how brutal nature can be. It’s maybe a bit of a darker edge to my connection to nature than some people have.

IR: I think it's a very clear-eyed way of seeing nature in its wholeness. I think separation from nature can definitely lead to idealization of it, and that just creates more separation. I think a lot about how we're not separate from nature, which means that nature has as much shadow as we do, as much beauty and wildness and everything. So I think that's a super valuable perspective and very true.

And I also wonder a lot about the nature of suffering. That's been a big question for me — why there's so much of it. I think I keep coming back to just accepting that I can't fully understand. I think you're right that saying we think we know just closes off so much possibility. So I love that idea of beauty in the searching. And I also really love how you just went back to the question of how we can make things a little bit better through compassion.

Sometimes I do think a lot of religions are just metaphors to try to get us to be kinder and better to each other. I don't know if it's true, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in just going back to that idea — even if we can't understand, how can we make the world just a little bit better for what's in our immediate vicinity? So yeah, thank you for sharing that.

RH: I think this idea of just decreasing suffering as much as we can in our lives…maybe that is the answer. Like, maybe that is the answer to "Why are we here?" Surely that's a good reason to be alive — to help decrease suffering in our own small corner of the world. Anything and everything that you can help with. Maybe that's a good reason to exist.

IR: I think that sounds pretty wise to me. Just making the world a little bit better in our immediate vicinity feels like one of the only controllable things in some ways. So yeah, I love that so much.

I like to end the podcast by asking people about their visions for the future. Do you have any thoughts about how we can work to make the world just a little bit better in our own vicinities?

RH: Yeah, that's such a lovely question to end on. And yeah, I think it is just compassion. Compassion and connection. And I think attention — attention is one of the most important gifts that we can give anything and everything in our lives. I think when we pay attention, that's when we see solutions, that's when we see patterns, and that's when we see answers.

I do see the downside of paying attention in this world where we are bombarded with information from across the globe. If you pay attention to all of it, you are overwhelmed, and I think a lot of us right now are probably in a state of overwhelm about what is going on on the planet, for many different reasons. The climate crisis, corrupt politicians, Elon Musk, Ye — there are so many reasons to be overwhelmed with what's going on.

But I feel like if we just pay the attention that we can to those things without being overwhelmed and say, "Okay, that's enough," when it's not helping us anymore…I think we have to be healthy, happy human beings in order to be present in the world. And our presence is a gift to the world. So I think we have to protect ourselves from too much negativity and then just focus our energy on what we can do.

Just as you said, being compassionate in our own little corners of the world and spreading that as far as we can, and just having empathy for each other and also for non-human life, I think, is so important. Just doing what we can to try and spread warmth and connection.

I think that's how we'll end up with community and connection to the land, and I think those two things, in the long term, would hopefully lead to a better place to exist in.

I think hope is really important. I went through a phase of being completely overwhelmed by the state of the world, and I kind of lost hope that anything could be changed. And that was a really, really dark and unproductive and lonely place to be. So yeah, I think clinging onto hope and light, and sharing that alongside the difficult things, is really important.

IR: Absolutely. I think a lot of people can relate to, you know, the feeling of overwhelm and hopelessness. So I love that you brought in attention as a key part of this, just by being present and, I think, staying with the trouble, as I think Donna Haraway says. Just being present for it and kind of accepting what is, is something I think about a lot. But, yeah, it's difficult, and this is the journey., and I love that you brought in attention.

Attention is what I see in your work so much — attention to the light, attention to the bones on the shore, the salt, the wind. To things that kind of can slip through the cracks a lot, but really giving those a voice and giving what's sort of in the spaces between a voice. And I think there's so much we can learn from that. So, yeah. Thank you for giving voice to some of those things.

RH: Thank you. I'm so glad you enjoy reading. It's lovely to hear.

IR: Well, I think that's a pretty good place to end, it feels like. Unless you have anything else you'd like to share?

RH: Yeah, no, I feel like that's everything. I feel like we covered some pretty big topics there.

IR: Oh, yeah, yeah. I know I didn't quite put those in my list of questions, but I just felt — hopefully — I think you did a beautiful job with answering those. And, yeah, thank you so much for chatting.

RH: Well, thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

IR: Of course. I'm excited to put this out there. And, yeah, if you hear an animal, this is Blue. She's been rolling around during this podcast.

RH: Oh my gosh, she looks so happy.

IR: So, yeah. But anyway, just if you heard, like, heavy breathing, we'll see if that makes it onto the final episode. But if it does — yeah, it feels appropriate. And it's raining in Brooklyn, which also somehow feels appropriate, you know, incorporating the natural sounds.

RH: So atmospheric.

IR: Well, thank you so much. It was super lovely to chat with you and hear your perspectives and wisdom. And, yeah, just a real pleasure.

RH: You too. And so nice to meet you.

IR: You too. Yeah, I'm looking forward to staying in touch on Substack and whatever else. Substack is interesting. I feel like I look forward to being on it for a long time, which, like, I don't always feel with projects and things. But I'm excited to see how it progresses through the years and whatnot.

RH: Yeah, same. I really wasn't expecting to feel that kind of bond to it, but yeah, it's just such a lovely place, isn't it? And it's so nice to — yeah — just have that kind of community. So hopefully we'll both be on there for years to come and keep reading each other's stuff.

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