Nature Speaks

I usually have several ideas swimming around in my head, perhaps three blog posts beginning to take shape alongside thoughts about something I want to draw, something I have read, or a question that arrived while I was doing something else. Some stay for days, gathering little connections as I go about my life, while others disappear before I have quite understood what interested me about them. I have become so accustomed to this quiet activity that, until recently, I had scarcely considered what allows it to happen.

Then, during a particularly busy period, I found a few minutes to sit down and write and couldn’t think of a single thing to put on the paper. There was nothing I wanted to follow, no half-formed sentence or small curiosity waiting for my attention, and the absence felt unfamiliar. I had made time to write, but whatever usually accompanied me to the page seemed to be missing.

Perhaps I had expected too much of those few minutes. Having spent the day attending to one thing after another, I was asking my mind to become immediately receptive simply because I had opened a notebook, although I was still aware of everything waiting to be done when I closed it. There was a space in the day, but I wondered whether I had allowed enough space around it.

I thought at first about flow, that absorption in writing or drawing when the work seems to carry us along and we lose some awareness of ourselves and the passing time. But what I missed seemed to belong somewhere before that, in the less purposeful hours when there is no particular work underway, only an openness to whatever might catch my attention.

Could the word be reverie, that wandering of thought in which something we notice brings a memory to mind, or an ordinary moment leads us towards a question we had never thought to ask? Or was it incubation, the interval in which we leave an idea alone and return to discover that we can approach it differently? Perhaps both have a place, although they seem to describe slightly different things: reverie the experience of letting the mind wander, and incubation the time we give something to develop without continually working at it. I can drift into reverie without a question to answer, while an unfinished question may remain with me as I turn my attention elsewhere.

I recognise something of this when I walk with Digby. There are stretches when I am thinking about ordinary concerns, and others when something outside myself draws me into a different kind of attention: the way roots hold to a riverbank, the patterns on wet leaves, the delicate remains of a plant I might have passed without noticing a few weeks earlier. I may stop to look without having anything to say about it, and sometimes that is all that happens. At other times, the thing I noticed returns later, alongside a memory or a thought that had seemed entirely unrelated.

Recently, someone left a comment beneath something I had written, describing a small shift in how they were seeing things. Their words stayed with me, and I found myself wondering about this exchange: something I had noticed and tried to put into words had prompted a thought in another person, whose response was now giving me something further to consider. When I finished writing, I could not have anticipated what they would bring to it, or how their words would return me to my own subject with a slightly different understanding. Perhaps some of the hours around the making are shared in this way, through conversations that continue in our thoughts long after we have finished speaking.

What I value in these encounters is the freedom to stay with something before deciding what it means. A leaf can be interesting long before it becomes the subject of a drawing, and there is pleasure in watching water move around a stone without needing to turn the experience into words. I would be sorry to lose that freedom by making every walk another way of getting something done.

Yet it is often within these apparently unproductive moments that I begin to see differently, and this makes me think again about what I mean when I say that creativity matters. I often write about making things, about the experience of putting pencil to paper or spending an hour with colour, but the blank page reminded me how much of my creative life takes place around those visible acts.

It also reminded me how easily the word creativity becomes attached to a particular group of people, as though it belongs mainly to those who write, paint, compose or make things with their hands. There are so many ordinary situations in which we need to imagine something that does not yet exist: a way of explaining an idea to someone who has not understood us, a meal made from what is left in the cupboard, a different arrangement of a small room, or a way forward when a familiar plan is no longer possible.

There is imagination involved, too, in considering how a situation might feel to another person, allowing their experience to alter our first interpretation. In caring for someone, raising children, running a business or navigating a change we did not choose, we may find ourselves needing a response that cannot be supplied entirely by habit. Experience gives us something to draw upon, but there are moments when we also need enough openness to see another possibility.

I wonder what happens to that openness when every available moment is occupied, when even a short pause becomes an opportunity to catch up, check something or take in more information. I know there are seasons when this is difficult to avoid, and it would be another demand to suggest that we must all arrange spacious, contemplative lives. But I am beginning to pay more attention to the small intervals I do have, and to whether I leave any of them unclaimed.

I wonder, too, whether something larger is at stake here than our capacity to make things. So much is said about the need to care for the natural world, to protect what is disappearing and to understand ourselves as part of the living systems around us, but perhaps care begins somewhere much smaller, in the simple act of noticing. It is difficult to become curious about a creature we have never really seen, or to feel the loss of a place that has remained no more than scenery. Before concern can deepen into care, something has first to enter our attention.

This makes me think about all those small intervals that now disappear almost without our noticing: waiting for someone, standing in a queue, sitting on a bench, the few minutes before an appointment, even the moment when a walk becomes briefly uneventful. It is very easy to reach for a phone and fill them, and I do it too. Yet perhaps these were once some of the spaces in which our attention was free to wander beyond whatever we had intended to think about, and beyond ourselves. A bird moving strangely through a hedge, lichen spreading across a wall, the first change in the leaves, the sound of water somewhere we cannot yet see — none of these things demands our attention loudly enough to compete with everything that has been designed to capture it.

And I wonder what happens if, little by little, we lose those opportunities to notice. We speak often about encouraging people to value nature, but perhaps we cannot value deeply what has barely entered our awareness. We may know, in an abstract way, that insects are declining or habitats are disappearing, but that knowledge is different from knowing the particular patch of bank where the wildflowers return, recognising the birds that visit a garden, or noticing that something we expected to see this year has not appeared. Familiarity can make the ordinary invisible, but attention can do the opposite: it can make the familiar particular again.

Perhaps this is one reason attention matters beyond creativity. If there is no room in us to be interrupted by the living world, I wonder how easily we can come to know it well enough to value it, and how readily we will notice when something that was once there is no longer there. Care may begin not with knowing more, but with noticing what is already beside us.

For me, that might mean allowing part of a walk to unfold without deciding what I need to think about, or sitting with my notebook long enough to describe what is in front of me without expecting a finished piece. It might mean following a curiosity that appears to have no practical use, and accepting that some observations will remain observations, giving me something to enjoy without becoming something to share.

I still cannot say exactly what was missing when I sat down that day. Perhaps I was tired, perhaps my attention was elsewhere, perhaps the ideas simply needed longer than I had given them. But the experience has made me less inclined to measure my creative life only by the time I spend writing or drawing, because those hours depend, in ways I do not fully understand, on how I am living when the notebook is closed.

When I next make time to write, I want to remember the hours circling that time: the walk, the looking, the unfinished thought I allow to accompany me without pressing it for an answer. I want there to be room for a leaf to remain a leaf for a while, before I ask what I might make of it.

Some of what begins here — in walking, looking, making and wondering — continues at Moss & Maye, where I gather together art, paper, objects and other things made, found and chosen with attention.