As I walked in the woods, I thought about one who had told me that they always felt worse after a walk. I have to believe that they feel what they say they feel, but I don’t know how such a thing can be possible. Just as I do not understand the other one who tells me that walking is boring.
I think on it and wonder if both conditions stem from a failure to look, really look, at what it is they are walking among. A failure of curiosity. A failure of awe and amazement.
On my walk through the woods, I spent a long time with a severed tree stump, intrigued by the palisade of uprights where the cut had not gone clean through, strands that echo the rings of years maybe? I don’t know. I will ask people who might have some idea to explain it to me, this curious thing.
Meanwhile I wonder how one can wander through a wood, a living and dying wood, and not be stirred to ask such questions: how this, why that?
How can you fail to be delighted by the buttercup-gold of gorse flowers in January, wet with rain?
Am I the only one who pauses to absorb the shapes of gorse-bush trunks and branches, revealed by storms and cut-aways, shapes that make me think of olive groves?
What ails a person that when they see a path disappear around the hill or into the trees, they have no inclination to follow it, just to see where it leads?
No judgement here, just things I do not understand.
Perhaps it is too much for some, the way Nature makes us feel so small and unlearned. I am the opposite: I find it comforting that there is something bigger than me, something older and wiser and more stable. I find it remarkable that such a thing simply welcomes me in and holds me. I know that it will heal me, if I let it, if I engage with it…which takes no more than paying it attention, taking note.
As it happens, I tend to talk to the things that cross my path or stand beside it: the wren that flits and disappears into dried out bracken, the robin that poses on the whinny bush to have its picture taken, the unexpected daisy, the broken birch, the ancient oak. But to talk is not necessary; that’s just me.
You don’t have to ask questions of the trees. Simply go among them, quietly. They will whisper their secrets anyway, in creaking branches and scattering leaves. They will show you how beauty comes from being bent and gnarled and wounded. They will show you what it means to thrive. You need only look and listen. We give life to the trees simply by breathing and they return the favour. Our out-breath is their in-breath, their out-breath our oxygen. Isn’t there something miraculous in that? Breath by breath we sustain each other, you and me and the trees.
The previous day, I had walked on the beach, blessed by sea-light and rivulets in the sand. I thought about artists like Turner and how I have that same urge to want to catch the ethereal – to hold it still – to absorb it – become part of it – and then breathe it back out into the world.
Those feelings are not meant to be analysed, reduced to explanations. They can only be accessed in solitude and yet there is then the desire to share, to say this is how it was.
And that is the thing we can never, quite, do. We can say this is what it looked like. We cannot say this is how I saw it. This is what I felt.
Even the great artists only come close. I look at a Turner painting through my own eyes, not through his. I have a sense of how I might have felt witnessing that moment, which may be close to or a million miles away from what he felt. We look at art, as we look at the world, through our own experience.
Perhaps then the aim isn’t to share an actual experience of a moment at all, or even to catch that moment for ourselves, to relive it, perhaps the aim is to simple put down clues and reminders that such moments are possible – nudges that all that is necessary is to go outside, preferably alone, and be still or move slowly and look closely and listen carefully.
I’ve figured out that I don’t need to know my stonechat from my chiff-chaff to be entranced by their presence. I can be awed by the owl sweeping between the trees even though I catch the merest glimpse of it and not enough to know it’s type. I can tell the gulls’ evensong from their reveille without knowing which flock it is. The susurration of a soft tide will calm me. The glisten of wet shingle will charm me. The vibrance of a storm will exhilarate me. All of these things are healing things. I do not know how they work, but they do, and all I need to do is to put myself in the way of them.
They are everywhere, these angels of mercy that Nature sends into the world. They are in suburban gardens, other people’s gardens, that we can peer at through the fence or over the wall: flowerbeds, shrubbery, vegetable patches, lawns. Tended or unkempt. They are in the weeds that grow between the cracks in city pavements, the creepers taking root on ancient walls. In parks. On roadsides.
There is much to be said for going as far out into the wild as we can, but maybe there is more to be said for noticing where the wild works its way towards us. Go into the woods, go to the beach, the lakeshore, the riverbank, up into the hills, out on to the wild moor, if you can…but if you can’t…go out anyway and just look closely. Look for greenery. Look for flowers.
Look for other kinds of beauty…listen for birdsong or screech – is the caw of a crow really less beautiful than skylark song, or do we just not know how to understand it? Look for butterflies and bees and beetles. Look for sunlight reflecting in puddles or off the glass and steel of skyscrapers. Look for the sky – what is it doing, how is it feeling, today? Look for moss and lichen, those tiny unnoticed forests at our feet and on our walls…touch them…take a magnifying glass to them, or at least a zoom-in photo. Look. Look again. Look closely.
This world is still beautiful. If you go out and look for beauty you will find it everywhere…and in the finding of it you will be encouraged to look again and you will find more, and more, and more easily. You will begin to fall in love again. In love with the planet, in love with life itself. Each beautiful thing is a sacred thing: it is a healing spring, and it asks you to drink deeply.
