When you don’t speak a language, you hear how things are said, the energy in a conversation, and notice when people choose to say nothing. This weekend, I climbed Spain’s highest mountain: Mount Teide. I did it with a group of native Spanish speakers from the Canary Islands, Latin America and mainland Spain. As we hiked up the mountain - the patterns, and regularity of certain words changed. When we began: “vamos”; when we walked into the shadow of the mountain it was “frío”; each time we stopped and turned around “bonita”; as we walked out in total darkness at 5am: silence, no one spoke; as we ascended “silueta”, as we reached the crater at dawn and saw the world’s longest shadow stretching over the Atlantic: “la sombra”.
 
A few years ago, I went to FLUPP festival in a favela in Rio and remember noticing how people's conversations felt like they had a temperature: they seemed to bubble and ping and were so full of gusto and vim, compared with the flatness of my own language (where people speak to each other as if they’re not fully awake yet). I love this about languages like Spanish, Portuguese and Italian: how they take off. Everything sounds caffeinated. I feel so tethered, compared to exclamations of ‘a’s and ‘o’s and the rolling engine of ‘r’s.
 
Earlier this year, a poem had risen up in me, dream-like, about Teide Violets - a flower that pretty much only grows on this volcano, on the island of Tenerife, at a specific altitude. It is a small and massive poem to me: about how maternally protective I feel, and heartbroken by the loss and vulnerability of certain species. The poem will be published in the forthcoming Climate Change issue of Magma magazine. In the poem, I walk up the volcano through the night, guided by a man I don’t know.

In the Mountain refuge on Saturday evening, a wonderful Venezuelan woman, Aliee, that my friend and I’d met, said: “This is not chance. I have been looking for you.” The whole experience had this feel to me. I found myself living the poem that had come to me three months earlier. I had not planned to climb the mountain, definitely not with a male guide, and had no idea that when you climb Teide, this is how you do it: in the night, in blackness - such blackness that you can’t even see the silhouette of the mountain, where it stops and where the night sky begins. You walk up into galaxies and shooting stars and the smear of the milky way. We were a group of about 20. When I looked up or down and saw the trail and clusters of headlamps along the path I thought we looked like our own constellations. My mother used to say to me as a child that I was made from stardust and this journey felt like us returning ourselves to the heavens.
 
When I re-read Johanna Spyri’s children’s book Heidi this summer, the mountain felt like one of the main characters. So much of the narrative centres on them climbing up and down it like a ladder. Mount Teide felt like our plot. We walked into it. We crossed into its shadow with such relief to finally be out of sun and heat, then turned from it when we reached the Altavista Refuge only to see its sombra across the earth's atmosphere, with Gran Canaria next to it seeming to grow out of clouds. On a clear day you can see every one of the canary islands from Mount Teide and you can see Mount Teide from every one of the islands. Its shadow is so vast, that it is like watching an eclipse. It has a halo around its crater, and drapes like cloth over the surrounding mountain range, ocean and islands.
 
The higher you get up the mountain, the harder it is to make out what is sea and what is sky, unless there are boats; and as you ascend, it becomes impossible to look at anything but where your feet are. There are vents and cracks which your sticks get jammed in, plus a fallen empire of rubble, loose rocks and scree to slip and turn your ankle on.
 
Last year, I went to Iceland. As the plane flew in, I thought the landscape looked traumatised. Teide National Park is the same: an outburst, made by fire and heat, wounded. The earth is black and red and brown - broken and cut and coughed up and turned and spilled. It looks like chaos. There has been no water here to sooth it, as there was in the landscapes I grew up in, that were softened and made slowly by water, carrying and holding the memory of it in their undulations and cupped hands. The making of this place feels abrupt, violent. I can’t say if I felt happy in it.
 
An English poet called Helen Mort has written a brilliant collection about female mountaineers and mountaineering, No Map Could Show Them. As part of the research she hiked in crinoline skirts and petticoats to recreate what some women would have worn. In my group, on the first day, a phenomenal woman, Rossi, climbed the mountain in hotpants, a Glee-style crop top and sideways basketball cap. She was the sun of our group - even in the darkness and tiredness of the second day. She lead at the front for much of the hike, would Facetime her brother, Ivan, at various altitudes (and we’d all wave back at him in his warm house), she sang to us to keep our energy up, had us laughing and taking selfies at every stage, and got a collection together to tip the bus driver on the way back.
 
Another man played R&B very loudly for two hours from his phone, dancing and skipping around each curve of the track, at the rest stops some people would light up and many people chatted on their mobiles as they hiked up until the signal was lost. I loved the lack of reverence and conformity. I had not pictured myself mountaineering with Despacito as my backing track. It felt freeing and unBritish. It reminded me of when I’d go skiing, listening to Bollywood and hip-hop all the way down the slopes.
 
Two of my favourite international poets are mountain women: Bejan Matur and Kutti Revathi. Bejan is a Kurdish poet who was born and brought up on a farm in the mountains of north Turkey. Mountains are so present in her work that even though she left many years ago, they still live in her.

Kutti is a Tamil poet who lives and has the courage of someone who has grown up overcoming the difficulties of height and distance. She lives in mountainous Tamil Nadu in India, runs a feminist literary magazine and explores the landscape and reclaiming of the female body. The first poem I read of hers is called Mulaigal, Breasts and was translated by the late Lakshmi Holmström in the anthology Wild Girls Wicked Words.

One of the most beautiful books written about how mountains inhabit you, is Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. When I go to watch the deer rutting each autumn in Richmond Park and hear their bellows and horns interlocking (which sound just like the crunch of American football players), I think of her descriptions of the stags jousting to the death in the Cairngorms. There is something that brings us to mountains. Sometimes as healing places, as in Susan Trott's Holy Man trilogy, sometimes as safe spaces, as our ancestors did in the previous ice ages and on migratory routes, and sometimes to prove to ourselves that we can be where we weren’t made to be: where we can walk at the bottom of the ocean floor and step in and out of clouds.

I never thought language could be a flute. Or that we could be birds. This week I heard a language that I’ve read about, but never seen, never heard or watched ‘spoken’. It was a concert. It wheeled through the air all around me. I had to spin and turn each time someone new ‘spoke’. Their questions were swifts - moving over me and by me and beside me: from down by the waves, up on a path, out on one of the fishing boats. A young woman next to me put her knuckle to her lips, whistled an answer, and that seemed to silence the questioners. It may have been the most mundane conversation about where to have lunch, but to me it was one of the most beautiful and startling things I will ever hear.
 
Off to the west, there is an island called La Gomera. Some days it is visible, some not. The whole island is pretty much one mountain. The language I was listening to originated here. El Silbo, or Silbo Gomero is not an intimate, whispered language; it is a public one, loud and boisterous and made for the open air. It is a Sheppard’s tongue: created in response to how the land settled in deep ruts and runnels. It is ancient and comes from North Africa, (inspired by imitating birds I imagine), and created because the human voice would not carry itself far enough.
 
A friend once witnessed it save a boys life. He’d fallen in a ravine up in the hills and was communicating with someone over a mile away down in the harbour. The man in the harbour managed to find out what had happened, check how badly the boy was hurt and get an ambulance to him through whistling. I wanted immediately for there to be poetry in el silbo. But perhaps there doesn’t need to be. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be shaped into something it already is.
 
A few years ago I spent the summer with some friends in a small town near the Jhelum river, in the north of Pakistan. The tiers of social life in Pakistan are wonderful: there is the ground floor with the welcome of living and dining rooms, shared sleeping rooms above and then the flat rooftops - where you can chat to aunties and cousins and neighbors, or watch children dousing themselves with cold water and playing. Some days, I would sit with my friend’s little brother as he was flying his kite from the roof. The whole sky would be full of them. The whistling sounds they made were a form of swordsmanship. To me they were just kites, but he would say oh that one's Fahad’s, that one's Haroon’s… He knew who each kite belonged to, who had rivalries, which friends would be running out to the streets below to claim the kite that had just been cut, who was the fastest runner. It was like a social gathering in the sky.
 
Over the last few years, I have been learning different bird calls. Up in the highlands here in Tenerife I’ve taught myself to call the blue chaffinches down from their branches - it’s such a thrill to see them flying in from around the pine forest - moving closer and closer from branch to branch. In London, on Hampstead Heath, a bird watcher taught me to beckon and ‘chat’ with owls and another friend in Lewes taught me to call swans to me. When it works you feel like a magician.
 
Hearing el silbo also reminded me of call and response poetry, of mushairas and the great oral tradition (in Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Punjabi, Pashtun, Celtic, and African counties) of telling poetry to our hearts, not written down and read with eyes cast down; but remembered by our bodies and recited to the air.

At University, when I’d finally handed in my coursework at the end of a semester, I'd get the same feeling of freedom and release as having an unexpected day off school. I’d go straight to the basement of the University Library - not to the upper levels where most of the Literature books were - but to the low-lit basement, with its car-boot assortment of books. I would take whatever I wanted from the shelves: Egyptian Cryptography, Child Psychology, table-sized atlases - anything that I knew nothing about and felt excited by got tilted off the shelves and stacked in my arms. After following reading lists for months, and being so focused on a text or question that it felt microscopic, it was like entering a clearing - to be able to read anything at all, after such a long period of dieting and abstinence.

In 2012, I organised a large Poetry Festival for the Olympic celebrations,  called Poetry Parnassus. Reading, sourcing translations and researching thousands of living poets, rappers and spoken word artists had been my life for over a year. After the festival was finished, I moved to Norwich. I had no internet, no 3G, no wifi, no TV -  just a small built-in library overlooking a magnolia tree. I spent the summer evenings sitting in that library on my great-grandmother's chair, at my grandmother's writing desk and did nothing but delight in returning to and being able to read dead poets again. These poets became my new life: Anna Świrszczyńska,  Marina Tsvetaeva, Rolf Jacobsen, Czesław Miłosz, Anna Akhmatova, Wisława Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Vasko Popa...

Libraries make me feel at home everywhere, and constantly make me happy. Amongst London’s expense and hyperbole, it feels like entering a temple, to wander in, and sit in any of these spaces - peaceful, safe places for families, the homeless, students, teenagers, readers and writers - where nothing has to be bought or paid for.  One of my favourite poems, Suntan - by British poet and Librarian, Lorraine Mariner got me one of my first jobs, working with libraries for The Reading Agency, a favourite film of mine (about reading) is Studio Ghibli's: Whisper of the Heart (Mimi wo Sumaseba); and one of life’s delights, is ordering book takeaway from librarians and waiting for the text to come in that it's arrived, or have one of your favourite writer's handwritten journals, letters, or diaries brought to your table.
 
I am dyslexic and struggled with essay writing when I was studying,  especially in exams. I have the reading comprehension of an 8 year-old and am not able to see basic mistakes I make, so have to re-read through things many, many times. Whilst I was doing my undergratuate degree, I got support from a writer as part of the Royal Literary Fund's, Fellowship scheme. This same writer was a lecturer, and told me they’d had to change the system once I’d graduated: I'd managed to shape my path through the system enough that I had all coursework and no exams for my degree, and had (accidentally) done more Creative Writing modules than any student in the history of the University of East Anglia.
 
After I left University, I developed a similar reading process in public libraries - a kind of scavengers’ banquet: whatever books are left on the table or desk I choose to sit at, are my reading material for the afternoon, or morning. It is a good way to get out of fixed reading habits. I can’t help wondering about who has chosen and left each selection - what they are like, where they’re at in their lives - those about to go travelling, those teaching themselves how to grow their own food in a cramped city, those who are learning how to be happier than they were when they first pulled the chair out. 

I have also found some of my favourite books in this way. One of them was The Sweetness of Life - Le Sel de la Vie, written by an anthropologist called Françoise Héritier and translated from French by Anthea Bell. It is a glorious, life-affirming list really. I buy it for everyone who works too hard and lives too little. That’s what I was doing  when I found it. Sometimes I’ve thought I’d love to be friends with whoever left certain assortments of books. One of my best friends and I, Richard Scott, the first time we hung out, went to England's National Poetry Library and chose three books for each other that we thought would be unfamiliar.
 
Libraries, are public places, but also private: a chance for us to sit and read anonymously - without anyone familiar to us seeing what tangent we're following, or what we wish to alter, understand or enhance about ourselves. I see so many wellbeing and mental health books left on desks. Not taken out to be read in front of others, but read here.
 
Today has been a little like a day off school. I was meant to be sitting a diving exam, but it’s been canceled, so I am translating a Latvian poem instead. It’s by Vizma Belševica, with a translation by Inga Gaile - and is part of the open and incredible work of Modern Poetry in Translation magazine. It’s an online, free workshop, that can be done at anytime. A much better puzzle to solve than a crossword or Sudoku. The literal translation is there, with notes, tempting and waiting for me - so I am going to set to.

One of the world’s greatest writers, by some beautiful fortune, chose the sea as her subject. In her acceptance speech, when she won the National Book Award in 1952 for The Sea Around Us, she said:

Today, I got to kneel in loosely blown sand on the oceanfloor and write. I knelt in front of a Pink Smith Damselfish: a dive slate on my wrist, a flounder beside my knee, wet book and stubby pencil in my hand. One of the things I hadn't thought about before learning to dive was holding hands. Sometimes I feel we adults can talk a little too much with an empty space between us and no connection or understanding. The dives have been mute, and yet so full of dialogue, there's been so much laughter under the water, reassurance, affirmations, touch, eye contact that felt more like conversations, physical slapstick, support, and most of all, us all holding onto each other and not letting anyone twist off course, be lifted by the current, or float up too far. It was my friend's turn to be the balloon today and I the kiteflyer, whose hand reached up and caught hers. The level of contact is the kind you give and get when nursing and caring for someone. I felt held all day: by the water and one another.

Whenever I write poetry in the sea, I think of Rachel Carson. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau, she thought of the prose she wrote as poetry, and was called the scientist-poet of the sea. Because we know land better than water, she is more well respected for Silent Spring, her final book, but it is her sea trilogy that I’ve taken into my heart and think is her most evocative writing: The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and Under the Sea-Wind. She once told a friend that after her death, she wanted to be re-incarnated as a tern.

In her life, she only got to dive once. From her writing, you would think she could only exist underwater. She made the quiet sea crackle for me when I read about and listened to the seafloor through archive recordings that she'd described - which had just been captured in the 1940s. I think often of how much the oceans need her hope and sense of wonder now, her voice.

I grew up and spend some of the year near Wenlock Edge and Robert Hart’s Forest Garden. The last time I was there I saw a lone fox pausing beneath his orchard trees. It was the first time I’d seen a fox in the wild. At the time, I was living in London and was used to seeing foxes almost daily: peering in at me through the front window, asleep under a hedge in a council estate, walking on railway lines before the first morning train, next to honking roundabouts in Westminster. They often seemed to occupy liminal places and times. To see them in such a manicured city was always a great, wild gift.
 
Each time I see Robert Hart’s abandoned garden, I feel a sense of grief at what once was. He was a visionary and his garden was a hopeful place, a garden of possibility, showing what you can do with any land, of any size, anywhere. When he was still alive, my mother had come circle dancing here, in and around the trees. I wish still that his garden could live and be restored. I have no doubt it would be a mecca, a touchstone that people could come to and see what their own hands can do. Robert was a fascinating person, he was a soldier and code-breaker in World War II, a vegan, he compiled some of Ghandi’s teachings for Reuters and made his garden to create a nourishing, healing space for him and his brother, who was born with severe learning disabilities.
 
Yesterday, I spent the morning in a forest garden, a small farmstead on a mountain called El Roque, in the south of Tenerife. From it, you can just glimpse the top of El Teide volcano and hikers’ routes, from Roque de Jama, pass at the end of the lane. It seems to be on the stage of a vast amphitheatre of silence and birds, with mountains surrounding it. Beneath grapevines, almond, peach, pomegranate, fig, lemon and custard apple trees - potatoes, corn, cabbage, lillies, fennel, dahlias, onions, lemon grass, lemon verbena and parsley grow; yellow cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and squash are bound up with physalis, like tangled USB cables. The garden is about 600m above sea level. As I harvested, a relief of calima breeze blew in from out at sea. Each time it came, I stood for it as if in church and as I was weeding, the scent of lemon blossom and fennel surrounded me. To pick hot fruit from trees, vines and low on the ground - to feel their soft, orb heat, then to peel back the dry lanterns of physalis, or twist off orange tomatoes, or knock your forehead into grapes, then press them to your mouth is one of the greatest sensual pleasures in life.
 
After working the garden, I returned to sea-level for a phone meeting (with the wonderful Poetry Translation Centre). I am working on a poetic translation of a war poem full of anger and hope, by Somali poet Amran Maxamed Axmed. The poem will be part of an anthology to be published later this year. For over an hour with Erica Hesketh, Edward Doegar and co-editors Said Jama Hussein and Bill Herbert, we looked at the poem like scientists and philosophers, questioning and weighing each word against another, against the original poem’s sound and force and the literal translation’s imagery and meaning. When finished I filled my belly with pressed grapes and went to San Blas beach to feel the cloth of the sea. I wasn’t even three metres out when I swam into a huge, lime-hedge-like school of sweetlips. Over 200 silverish-white fish, flashing their yellow fins as they circled around me. I held my breath in the centre of them as if in the nucleus of a massive bird's nest.

I have just flown to The Fortunate Isles. As the plane flew down alongside the coast, I found a new pleasure in being able to identify and name the places we passed: Corona Forestal, Punta de Teno, Los Gigantes, Montaña Amarilla, Montaña Roja. Their names are way-markers, directions: Forest Crown, The Giants, Yellow Mountain, Red Mountain. I’d felt a similar pleasure when, as an adult, I’d found a hand-drawn map and discovered the names of the fields and woods surrounding the house I’d grown up in.
 
Descending through white to the blue-blues and brickish reds, I admired the patterns and tracks we humans make on the earth, and how, from the sky, the volcano, El Teide, looks like the lips of a mythic fish puckering at the surface. The corona forests surrounding it, are the foothills that Alexander von Humboldt trekked through to climb Mount Teide, and this is the island that Charles Darwin dreamed of coming to.
 
An astonishing book was published three years ago: Andrea Wulf’s biography of Humboldt, The Invention of Nature. In it, she captures this place, what it meant and means to naturalists, geologists and scientists, as well as the circle of thinkers, artists and polymaths that were fusing ideas through meeting, or reading each others work: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir. Humboldt spent six days here collecting samples. A young, seasick Darwin travelled here on the Beagle, but an outbreak of cholera in England meant they weren’t permitted to go ashore. Captain Fitzroy wrote of that day: “This was a great disappointment to Mr Darwin, who had cherished a hope of visiting the peak. To see it -- to anchor and be on the point of landing, yet be obliged to turn away without the slightest prospect of beholding Teneriffe again -- was indeed to him a calamity.”

In his journal, on January 6th 1832 whilst sailing into Santa Cruz, Darwin wrote:

I think if he had been able to dock, this island would have another chapter to its history, a key part in his theory of evolution and book On the Origin of Species.
 
I have never experienced nature as it is here: heather the size of trees, waka-waka birds that glide above you in the dark and sound more like practical jokes, fire-resident pines, blue chaffinches, plants that I’m used to seeing in pots, are forests with eagles roosting in them, and other plants seem so unreal, you’d think you were hallucinating them. All my life, I was so used to seeing wild animals in single figures, so when I swam for the first time in a volcanic reef, with a vast herd of fish, I forgot I couldn’t swear underwater and flooded my mouth with sea. There are many species where the only place they exist on earth, is here, on this or adjacent islands, in the snowy bowl of the volcano, in sub-tropical cloud, or laurel forests. They carry their place names: Teide Violet, Canary Island Pines, Tenerife Blue Chaffinch.
 
After leaving the airport, the first thing I did was go to a local harbour and leap into the water. As I was getting changed I saw two children snorkeling. One lifted her head and said something to the other. Manta was the word the air caught - Spanish for blanket. They were following a stingray. When I was over in the spring, on my last day, I finally got to swim with one: an Eagle Ray, with its dolphin-shaped head. I had almost given up on finding them, but two rowdy men were getting in at the harbour steps, so I thought I’d wait a little longer. I turned and put my head back down and there it was, with me in its wake for the next hour. They move in the water as if blown, and seem to fly more than swim.
 
The modern name for these seven islands is Las Islas Canarias, but I prefer the romance and abundance of the ancient name for this archipelago. It’s how I feel when here.