Nature Speaks

There are places in the world that seem, at first glance, almost empty, and perhaps it is only because we have become so accustomed to looking for what is obvious that we mistake the absence of anything immediately noticeable for an absence of life. A quiet stretch of river can appear to contain little more than water moving around rocks, sunlight catching on the surface, perhaps the sudden flight of a bird or the brief disturbance of something beneath the water, and yet a local zoologist once told me about the small creatures that cling to the undersides of the rocks in the river, living on surfaces that most of us never see. I have found myself thinking about that ever since, not simply because those creatures are there, but because of what their presence suggests about how much of the world exists beyond the particular angle from which we happen to encounter it.

We see the upper surface because that is the surface presented to us. We notice the shape of the rock, its colour, the marks left by water and weather, perhaps the moss softening one edge, and because our eyes have travelled over it we may feel, without ever consciously deciding so, that we have seen it. But beneath it is another surface, pressed into darkness and water, with its own textures and tiny inhabitants, a place that can remain only inches away from us and yet entirely outside our awareness. Every rock has an underbelly, a hidden side turned away from the light, and beneath something so solid and apparently uneventful there may be lives beginning and ending, feeding, sheltering, moving and waiting, whether anyone bends down to look or not.

I sometimes think about something Jung remembered from his childhood, when he would sit alone on a particular stone and become caught in a strange imaginary game. He knew himself as the boy sitting on the stone, but he could also imagine the stone saying “I”, with the boy sitting upon it, until he was no longer quite certain whether he was the boy or the stone. He remembered standing up afterwards wondering who was what. There is something almost childlike about the thought, the kind of reversal a child might accept without immediately dismissing as absurd, but the longer I stay with it, the stranger it becomes, because it quietly disturbs the arrangement in which we usually place ourselves at the centre of experience. I am here, looking; there is the rock, being looked at. Yet alter the question slightly and the certainty loosens. Perhaps I am not simply sitting upon the rock but being held by it, my weight resting for a few minutes upon something that was here before I arrived and will almost certainly remain after I have gone. The rock has not changed, but my relationship with it has, simply because a question has interrupted the familiar way of seeing.

I wonder if this is one of the things poetry understands particularly well. A poem can place a rock, a feather, a tree, a river or a moment of light before us without telling us what we are supposed to think about it, and sometimes a handful of words will remain quietly within us for days or years, meeting memories and experiences that the person who wrote them could never have known about. They are like seeds planted without instructions for how they should grow. We are not handed a conclusion; something is simply placed within reach of the imagination and left there, and perhaps much later we realise that it has sent roots into places we did not know were connected. This may be why the words that alter us are not always the words that explain the most, but the ones that leave just enough unfinished for our own minds to enter. A rock can do this too, if we stay with it long enough, because attention is not always a matter of accumulating information about something; sometimes attention changes the relationship itself.

The river, after all, is not simply the river available to my eyes. It is the water I can see moving between the rocks, but also the roots entering the bank beneath the surface, the insects moving above it, the creatures clinging below it, the fish that emerge briefly into visibility and disappear again, the nests suspended precariously over the water in spring, the dragonflies and damselflies passing through the air, the horseflies I would rather did not find me, and all the other lives that do not fit conveniently into our idea of what makes a place beautiful. Some creatures announce themselves with colour or movement or song; others spend almost their entire existence beyond our notice, and yet none becomes more alive because a human being has finally paid attention to it. Its life does not begin at the moment of our noticing.

I am reminded of this whenever I look at river water beneath my microscope. To the naked eye it is simply water, perhaps a little cloudy, containing nothing that seems particularly remarkable, but place a drop beneath the lens and another world appears, filled with microscopic animals moving through a space that, moments before, had seemed empty. What astonishes me even more is how persistent that life can be. I have kept samples of river water in my fridge for weeks and returned to them expecting to find very little, only to discover tiny creatures still alive and moving in that small, cold world. They had been there all along, unseen not because they were hiding from me, but because my eyes were incapable of seeing the scale at which their lives were taking place.

There is something almost dizzying about that. I can stand beside the river believing I am looking at it while whole dimensions of its life remain unavailable to me: beneath the rocks, beneath the surface, within a single drop of the water itself. The closer I look, the less convincing the idea becomes that seeing something means seeing all of it, and perhaps one of the gifts of attention is not that it eventually makes everything visible, but that it teaches us how much will always remain beyond our sight.

This changes something about the way I think of the river. We so easily speak about nature through the language of what it gives us: the peace of the water, the beauty of the kingfisher, the restoration of walking beneath trees, the inspiration of a landscape. These experiences are real and precious, but the river does not exist for the quality of our experience beside it. The kingfisher does not need to be beautiful to us, the otter does not need to delight us, the horsefly does not need to justify its existence by being useful, and the microscopic animal moving through a drop of water does not become important because I have happened to place it beneath a lens. There is something quietly radical in recognising a life whose value does not depend upon what it gives us.

Once I begin to look in this way, the river becomes almost impossibly crowded. What appeared quiet is full of activity; what appeared empty is inhabited; what appeared familiar begins to exceed everything I thought I knew about it. We name things, classify them, photograph them and write about them, and there is value in all of this, but the name is not the thing, the photograph is not the life, and our attention is not what confers reality upon either. The world does not require a witness in order to be alive.

Perhaps this is why familiar places can be among the hardest places to see. I have lived beside this river long enough to feel that I know it: certain bends and pools, the places where the water becomes deeper and quieter, the moments when sunlight reaches beneath the surface and the trout seem almost to be sunning themselves, the sudden flash of blue that tells me a kingfisher has passed, and the possibility of an otter moving somewhere beyond my sight. Yet for all the years I have spent beside it, there must be vastly more happening within the river that I have never witnessed than things I have. Knowing a place, I am beginning to think, does not mean exhausting its mystery; perhaps the better we know somewhere, the more aware we become of everything we do not know.

And the thought does not remain beside the river. When I think about the hidden lives beneath the rocks, or those microscopic lives moving through water that appears empty to me, I find myself thinking about the hidden parts of our own lives too. There are people we believe we know because we recognise their face, their voice, their habits, perhaps even the stories they have told us, while beneath that visible life are memories we were not present for, griefs that have never been spoken, private joys, old fears, hopes still too uncertain to be put into words, and whole landscapes of thought that may never be visible to anyone else. Perhaps compassion has something to do with remembering this — with leaving a little room around what we think we know about another person, recognising that the part presented to us can never be the whole.

We do not need to uncover everything, and perhaps we should not try. There is a difference between attention and intrusion, between wondering and demanding an answer; sometimes the more respectful form of attention is simply to recognise that there is an interior we cannot enter, a life that exceeds our knowledge of it, and to allow that mystery to soften the certainty with which we judge what we see.

This, I think, is what Attentive Wondering increasingly means to me. It is not a search for symbolism in every ordinary thing, nor an attempt to make nature carry whatever meaning we happen to need from it, but a willingness to remain with something a little longer than is strictly necessary, long enough for the first impression to loosen and another possibility to appear. What if there is more here than I can see? What if the thing I thought I knew is not asking me to uncover its hidden meaning at all, but simply to acknowledge that no single position from which I look can reveal everything that is there?

Perhaps this is why the best questions can feel so much like poetry: they do not close the world down by telling us what it means, but leave a small opening through which our own thought can continue. A poem, a question, a few words spoken by another person, a rock half submerged in a river — any of these can interrupt the familiar arrangement of the world for long enough that we return to it slightly differently, not necessarily having reached a conclusion, but having changed our position in relation to what was already there.

Perhaps wonder begins somewhere within that change, not in overcoming mystery but in becoming more comfortable living alongside it, because we may spend our entire lives surrounded by things we cannot fully know: a river, another person, a rock, ourselves. The desire to understand is part of what makes us human, but perhaps wisdom also lies in knowing that understanding will always have an edge, and that beyond it the world continues.

The rock remains in the river when I am not there. Water moves around it in darkness; creatures cling to its hidden underbelly; microscopic lives continue in water I cannot see into; fish pass through pools I am not watching; somewhere a bird may drink from the river with no one there to see it. Morning comes and light reaches the surface again, and none of this waits for me to return. I find that strangely comforting, because the world is larger than my experience of it, larger than my knowledge of it, perhaps even larger than my imagination of it, and beneath the surface of the most ordinary things are lives and histories that will never become mine to know.

Maybe we do not always need to turn the rock over. Perhaps it is enough, sometimes, to sit upon it and return to the strange question that fascinated Jung as a child, allowing for a moment the certainty of where I end and the rest of the world begins to become a little less secure. The rock is beneath me, holding my weight; beneath the rock are lives I cannot see; within the water are worlds my eyes cannot perceive; around us all the river continues on its way.

And perhaps that is enough: to sit there for a while, knowing there is another side.

Moss & Maye

If you’d like to explore further, Moss & Maye is where some of the ideas, objects and observations that begin here take on another life — through artwork, found and vintage objects, paper, print and things made slowly.

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