This morning, walking beside the river, I noticed what appeared to be a few pale stones scattered among the grey shale where the water runs shallow and bright, their rounded shapes so entirely at home among the other rocks that I scarcely gave them a second glance and had almost continued on my way before something, though I could not have said what, caused me to linger for a few moments longer.
As I stood there, one of the stones moved.
A head lifted slowly, as though surfacing from some private and unhurried thought, an ear twitched almost imperceptibly, and what I had taken, without question, to be an ordinary part of the riverbed revealed itself to be a sheep, standing quite peacefully in the shallows and entirely unconcerned by my mistake.
I found myself smiling at the gentle absurdity of it, for the sheep had not suddenly become a sheep at all. It had been a sheep all along. The only thing that had changed was my looking.
How quickly we move from seeing to knowing.
The mind is wonderfully efficient and endlessly eager to help us make our way through the world, and so it names what it sees almost before the act of seeing is complete, gathering everything into neat bundles of understanding and allowing us to continue on our way without having to look twice. We move through the world with countless quiet certainties, believing that a rock is simply a rock, that a tree is simply a tree, that a familiar place has already yielded everything it has to offer, and that the people we have known for years can no longer surprise us, scarcely noticing how often these assumptions save us time and effort while also preventing us from seeing what is really there.
As I remained beside the river, I realised that neither the sheep nor the landscape nor even the morning itself had changed in any way; it was only my attention that had shifted, only the quality of my looking that had deepened, and in that deepening something that had seemed entirely inanimate suddenly became alive once more, becoming again a creature with eyes and ears and a warm body standing in the cool water of the Ceiriog.
For if a sheep can remain hidden among the rocks, not because it is concealed but because I have looked too quickly, then perhaps the world is richer than I generally allow it to be, and perhaps many of the things I long for, the beauty I seek and the sense of meaning that sometimes seems absent from ordinary days, may already be present around me, hidden not because they are secret but because my attention has become hurried and accustomed to touching things only lightly before moving on.
I found myself wondering how many things in my own life resemble those sheep among the rocks, how many familiar places and familiar people I have looked at so often that I have ceased, in some small way, to truly see them.
John Ruskin believed that the greatest thing a human soul ever does is to see something and tell what it saw. Standing beside the river this morning, I wondered whether the harder task is not learning to see in the first place, and whether so much of the world’s beauty waits patiently for the moment when our hurried certainties loosen their grip.
For there are times when the wild does not announce itself with any fanfare at all, but waits with immense patience at the edge of our awareness until something in us slows sufficiently for a head to lift among the stones and for what we thought we understood to reveal itself as something altogether different, and perhaps one of the quiet mercies of the world is that its mysteries do not withdraw from us when we fail to notice them the first time, but remain where they are, among the river light and the moving water, waiting patiently for us to return and look again.
