On belonging to the living world

I am standing at the kitchen window looking out into the garden.

A red admiral is opening and closing its wings on the head of a thistle. Two jackdaws are arguing on the roof overhead. A pigeon is doing what pigeons do – moving across the grass with that particular self-important waddle, entirely unbothered by everything. Somewhere in the honeysuckle, something small and invisible is singing.

And I feel something open in my chest.

Not the tightening I wrote about last week – the grief and the glass separation and the weight of anticipatory loss. Something else entirely. Something that feels like landing. Like arriving somewhere I didn’t know I’d been away from.

— 🌼 —

I have been thinking about what it means to belong to the living world rather than simply living in it.

Most of us were taught, somewhere along the way, that nature is the backdrop to human life. The scenery. The place we go to recover from the real business of being alive – the work, the relationships, the endless administration of existing. We visit it. We appreciate it. We worry about it. But we don’t always remember that we are it.

And yet.

The minerals in my bones are the same minerals in the soil outside my window. The water moving through my body fell as rain on this garden, on this forest, on this particular corner of Brittany, long before it became mine to drink. The breath I am taking right now has been breathed by oak trees and housemartins and the small invisible singing thing in the honeysuckle. We are cycling through each other, constantly, in ways so intimate and so ancient that the word relationship barely covers it.

We are not visiting the living world.

We are the living world, briefly conscious of itself.

— 🌼 —

I think our ancestors knew this. I think indigenous people, many of them, still know it – carry it not as a philosophy but as a lived, bodily, daily reality. The land is not something you own or manage or visit. It is something you belong to, as it belongs to you. The relationship runs in both directions, and it carries obligations as well as gifts.

What would it mean to live from that knowledge?

Not as an idea but in the body. In the daily, unhurried, specific practice of paying attention to the life that is happening all around you right now.

— 🌼 —

Here is what I notice when I try:

When I watch the butterflies moving over the nettles and thistles – and I mean really watch, not glance – something in me settles. When I hear the rooks and the jackdaws, even the buzz of the flies, and let it all in rather than filtering it out, something that had been braced begins to release. When I put my hands in the soil, or twist nettle fibres into cord, or crush elderberries into ink, I feel less like a person worrying about the natural world and more like a thread in it. Part of the weave rather than an observer of it.

There is a particular quality to this feeling that I have never found anywhere else. Not in any amount of reading or thinking or planning or scrolling. It only comes through contact. Through the senses. Through the specific, irreplaceable, unrepeatable experience of being a body in the world rather than a mind thinking about it.

I sometimes imagine creeping into a burrow, or tucking into a swallow’s nest, and being held there by the same web of life that holds everything else. And the remarkable thing is – I can. We all can. Not literally. But in the way that matters.

— 🌼 —

Open a window and let the wasp out.

Put a saucer of water with pebbles in it where the bees can drink.

Say hello to the dandelions and the nettles – not just your best roses.

Taste a wild strawberry if you can find one. Read a poem. Watch the sun rise without immediately thinking about the heat it will bring later.

These are not small things dressed up as meaningful. They are the practice of remembering what you are and where you come from. They are the antidote to the glass – the slow, patient, daily work of coming back into contact with the living world that made you and that you are made of.

Our ancestors did this. Indigenous peoples still do. And I think – I genuinely believe – that it is what we are being called back to now.

Not as nostalgia. Not as escape. As the most necessary and urgent act of our time.

— 🌼 —

When I look out at the garden – the butterflies and the jackdaws and the self-important pigeon and the small invisible singing thing – I feel something that I can only call love.

Not the anguished, glass-separated love of anticipatory grief.

The open, present, fully-here love of someone who knows they belong.

We are all one. The same minerals, the same water, the same mystical force that moves through everything and calls itself life.

Come outside. Look what’s waiting for you.

With earth beneath my feet,

Wendy