Nature Speaks

I collected a small jar of water from Llyn Tegid, planning to use it when painting the lake, to let the place itself enter the work, not just as subject but as substance. The water was clear in the jar, calm, almost featureless. I placed it on my desk and forgot about it for a while, as if it were no more than an ordinary liquid, a carrier for colour.

Later, under the microscope, the water revealed more than surface memory.

At first I saw only stillness, a pale light through glass, shapes that looked like grains of dust settled at the bottom. Then, slowly, something shifted. A speck elongated, then darted forward with a sudden snap of movement. Others followed. Translucent bodies, barely more than outlines, each with a single dark eye like a pinprick of night. They swam with short, decisive strokes as though pulled by an invisible thread.

Copepods, someone would say. Oar-footed. Part of the lake’s quiet machinery of life.

But before the name, there was the movement, quick, purposeful, utterly alive. Naming can wait; noticing comes first.

I leaned closer. Another creature came into view, darker, larger, oval, moving with a different rhythm. It slipped in and out of the circle of light, vanishing as soon as I tried to follow, returning only when I stopped searching. I could not hold it in sight for long enough to understand its shape, but its swiftness told me enough. This water was not still, not empty, not simple. It was inhabited.

I had gathered the water thinking I was taking part of the lake with me, a quiet souvenir of depth and weather and time.

Instead, I discovered that the lake had brought its own presence along.

There is a kind of humility that arrives when we shift our gaze from surface to depth. The lake I thought I knew, its long body between the hills, the wind lifting small waves, the still reflection of clouds, now revealed another layer: a restless interior, worlds folded small within a single drop.

What looks calm from the shore carries its own pulse.

What seems quiet holds lives that never stop moving.

I felt something settle inside me, a reminder that stillness is rarely what it seems.

Beneath the appearance of calm, everything moves.

Breath moves.

Thoughts move.

Water moves.

Life continues whether or not we are paying attention.

I will still paint with this water. The pigments will loosen and spread as they always do, colours drifting into one another across the page. But now I know the liquid carries more than memory or mineral. It carries the pulse of hidden things, the lake thinking, moving, remembering itself.

Sometimes attention shows us what is beautiful.

Sometimes it shows us what is alive.

Often it shows us how much we have not yet seen.

To look closely is to return, to the world, to ourselves, to the quiet intelligence that breathes beneath the surface of things.

The wild remembers. So do you.