The Pulitzer Prize Nominee on reconnecting with nature, tuning into its sounds, sights, and textures, and finding joy in everyday sensory awareness.
I'd like to offer you some invitations to switch on your senses and to pay attention to the more than human world.
The first invitation is, can we learn as many bird and insect, frog and other animal sounds as we know the sounds of the phone, app notifications, or ads on the TV? Can we expand our aural sense, through our ears, out into the world of other creatures, and expand our vocabulary of belonging in and around our homes.
The second invitation is, how many leaf shapes from the neighbourhood do we recognise? Can we come to know whether they are trees, or grasses, or weeds, or vegetable plants, or flowers? Can we know more leaf shapes than we know corporate logos?
The third invitation is how many plant and soil aromas can we find? Can we come to know these are the odours of leaves and roots and sap and the leaf litter? Can we know as many, or more, as we know the odours of synthetic chemicals, like washing up liquid or soap or deodorant, or those things that dangle from the rear view mirror. They are the synthetic signatures of where we live, but there are so many more out there beyond the human world, mostly in the plant world and in that invisible, dark world of rot and decomposition.
The fourth invitation is, can we come to know species and living soil and water through our sense of touch? From the grain and the sponginess of soils to the personalities of bark. Our fingertips can sense things that our eyes cannot see. They feel hundreds of different kinds of rain on our skin or the sensation of different kinds of water flowing around our hands.
There's more action in a single tree outside your house than in all the soap operas streaming online...
These are all invitations to open our senses to the diversity and the particularity of the world, the other species and the living world around us, and to practise sensory awareness, sensory openness.
These invitations are important, first, because they're a source of delight and of connection to others beyond ourselves. Like all living beings, we're made from relationships with other beings. Other humans, of course, but also other beings in the broader ecological living Earth community. And to ignore these is to cut ourselves off from the source of life and relationship, and also the source of joy and delight.
There's more action in a single tree outside your house than in all the soap operas streaming online or on the television right now. Life and death, love and heartbreak, triumph and tragedy. Thousands of different narratives interwoven together and just waiting for us to open our senses and pay attention to them.
There’s also a great practical importance in opening the senses. In a time of crisis – of biodiversity loss, of injustice, of climate change – we are called to act, to change behaviour, both individually and collectively. But action needs to be grounded in real, lived experience of the world, and not only in the unrooted busyness of the mind.
There's nothing wrong with the intellect of course. Without it, we'd be in even more trouble. But our actions are guided solely by what we've read; what we've heard from other people; what we see on social media; we're unlikely to make wise choices – even with the best of intentions.
The practice of paying attention to the songs of birds and the shapes of leaves and the smell of the soil and the feel of the rain, in fact, is a way of plugging ourselves into the living Earth community, and gaining the information that we need to guide the right action in our lives, both individually and collectively.
For thousands of years our ancestors understood this. But lately, we've become a species that's so turned inward to our own voice. When I'm listening to human music or reading the newspaper or watching a new movie or even in conversation with friends, I can’t pay as much attention to other beings. For billions of years, all the way back to the first organisms, they were paying attention to the vast community of life around us, because if they didn't, they died. This inward turn is one source of our many troubles, but an outward move of reconnection and coming back to our senses is one part of this necessary and joyful work.
This practice of opening up to the lives of other species applies across humanity, whether we live in the densest city or way out in the countryside. And in fact, some of the people I know who are the most connected to the cycles of the seasons and the lives of other beings, in fact, live right in the middle of the city, where there's two trees on their street and maybe a few sparrows.
But the key is to do an experiment for the next month, to see what happens if I check in just once a day, even for just a few seconds, with the house sparrows or the pigeons in my neighbourhood, or with the sad tree on the side of the car park. It’s not about expecting a David Attenborough moment. But being interested in the realm beyond that manufactured by humans and experience the delight of the everyday.
Where I live, I look out my window and there’s one tree – a pine that isn’t native to here – and there’s a very common collared dove nesting in it. But watching it over time find a space, build a nest, form a relationship, have eggs, nurture the babies, feed their young; it’s more compelling and exciting and beautiful than anything I have ever streamed on Netflix. Because it’s right here, and it’s real.
Your agency will always be more important than Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to control your behaviour.
And for me, that's one of the things that hooks me. My interior life is pretty damn tedious, because I've been living in this mind for decades now. To have my imagination drawn into the clouds or into the family lives of sparrows or the deep history of a weed growing out of the crack in the sidewalk is incredible: a weed that managed to migrate here from the Mediterranean. That’s a story that is far more interesting than the junk happening in my own head.
But it’s not just the inward turn, but the barriers to our senses. Our phones are full of apps that are expressly designed to steal and hold our attention. The same is true, though less insidiously, with television, radio and magazines. They are drawing us into their own world. But we need to wake up to it, reassert our own agency, and have a vigorous immune system against their agenda. Remember, your agency will always be more important than Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to control your behaviour.
We can’t just blame social media of course. Depending on your country, most of us meet our ecological and physical needs every day without direct connection to the animals and plants and the soil that sustain us. When I have a cup of tea in the morning or have some toast, I didn't grow the wheat. The tea came from China or a plantation in India somewhere. There are so many chains of intermediaries in that global trade that the connection most of our ancestors had with food and people is lost.
Every other animal on this planet is in direct relationship with the source of its food and its shelter and water and so on. And we're not. It's an odd situation that we're in, and not something the human genome has ever had to fight before. If I don't drink any water for a few hours or days, my body sends a very strong signal to go find water and drink it. If I don't listen to birds and observe the shapes of leaves and feel the rain, there is very little in my body that regards that as an emergency. And why? Because it was always there and only could be there – until we removed it ourselves.
But once you start the process of reconnection, you want to keep going. We connect to something within us as animals. We see this is part of our inheritance, to pay attention to these subtle signals. And it feels good and right when we do it. Like when we ran as children. It felt good to be in the human body, with everything working together, moving as our ancestors did, and the joy in feeling the oxygen coming into our blood and so on. The same thing happens with sensory awareness. Just paying attention to the taste of a cup of tea, and wow! I'm connecting to a camellia plant here, and a process of fermentation and the soil of a particular part of Assam. This ecological connection is so rewarding and might actually guide us to say, “I want this connection to be right and to be promoting goodness in the world for other people and for the more than human world. How should I interact with these camellia plants in future?”
For me personally, that would be an extraordinary victory for us as a species, and one we desperately need right now.
As told to Edward Owen-Burge in August 2020 and again in September 2024. This conversation was edited & condensed for clarity.
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