TO NOTICE YOURSELF NOTICING
Wonder as a teachable thing
The thing about noticing something that you didn’t notice before is that it has the power to transform an entire perspective. The other day out on the grassy knoll, I took special notice of something, a hole in the ground or the lacy structure of a decaying bay leaf, and I was both comforted and terrified by how many things are passing by unnoticed. The world is so so full and I’m also missing it.
The last month has been hard. It has also been beautiful and surreal and confusing. I’ve done many things I’ve never done before, like ask for the attention of a group of children and get it, question the viability of an organization’s outdated practices, and tuck a whole farm worth of animals into bed at sunset. The other day I considered briefly what it meant to succeed at my tasks here both prescribed and personal. I’ve been asked what it would look like if I failed. The only response I could muster was ‘failure would be looking back and realizing I didn’t even try.’
Lately, I don’t often feel like I have a whole lot of time to really notice the feelings inside of me in a meaningful way. Last week I think I spent three days straight talking to people from dawn until the sky filled with stars. Even when my brain was craving quiet and the kind of relaxation that is only possible when you know no one can see you, I couldn’t seem to pull myself from the non-obligatory conversations. This is part of the reality of living in the place you work, that sometimes going into the kitchen at night means getting in a multi hour long conversation about the ins and outs of the organization we are working for. I’m practicing removing myself from the social environment before I feel my brain turn to mush and my sentences tangle themselves into knots that ask their listeners to decipher their meaning. Here, we don’t play ‘guess what’s in my head.’ It’s not a good teaching tactic.
Internally, I also recognize a disconnect between me and the landscape. Before realizing how dark it would sound, I told someone that the Bay area is so beautiful, impossibly beautiful it seems. I told them that people kept asking me if I thought I wanted to settle here, find more work in California, to which I responded that I couldn’t picture a world where I stayed, where any of this beauty was for me. Maybe it’s being transient, feeling like none of this was ever meant to be permanent. Maybe, I said to them, that it was growing up in Chicago, feeling like the flatness, the bitter cold winters, was what life had meant for me. I told them a part of me felt like I was supposed to be suffering in some small way all the time. I almost wished I could take it back, but it felt true coming out of my mouth. It made me notice that a part of me still does not believe that I deserve beauty in its many forms. The person I’d confessed this to just said “Damn.” I think I looked away.
Maybe that’s not it. Maybe it’s not that I don’t think I deserve beauty but that in order to feel connected to beautiful places and new landscapes, I have to have meaningful experiences with them first. I catch myself talking to those with a lifetime of memories here with a desire for some of their love for this place to osmose into me. I don’t always want to explore as much as I want to be shown. This statement, like many other abstract statements, is not always true.
One morning, we were going on a hike. As many things as there are that have been hard about working in this organization, I also could say that a part of my job requires hiking for hours and talking about how to facilitate close observation skills for children outdoors while encouraging a sense of wonder. And that’s pretty freaking cool.
Only a few minutes into the trail, we stopped to do a sensory exercise. “pick up something on the ground at your feet that appeals to you” we were prompted. “Don’t think too hard about what you choose.” I picked up a foot long piece wood with only patches of bark remaining.
“What does the thing you chose feel like? Does it feel different if you brush it on the back of your hand, your cheek?”
I gripped the twig, it was cold in my hands, still damp from last night’s much needed rain. The inner bark was smooth like lakeside driftwood.
We traded objects with a friend. I brushed a piece of lichen across my hand, stretched its webbing between my fingers. Then they said, “Now we’re going to switch to vision,” and everything shifted. It was like my eyes were suddenly turned on. Like I’d just jumped back into my body and remembered I had eyeballs. The light green of the lichen had a million more variations than it had a moment ago. I couldn’t believe I’d been looking at the same lichen the second before.
We stopped and listened to the sounds of the forest. We chose a tree and took it in. Then took a step closer and I was once again catapulted back into my body, meeting the tree all over again. By the time I stepped close enough to touch it, I felt, for a moment, like this tree was a part of me, like I was not as separate from the beauty of the Bay as I often felt, like the natural world everywhere might just be for everyone? Is that a stretch?
For the rest of the hike, and honestly every time I step outside, the amount of noticeable details feels like standing under a waterfall. Sometimes I feel each drop of water like a tap on the shoulder, and sometimes all I can feel is a general rushing and all I know is that I’m awake.
When I’m awake, I see things like a child reaching out so comfortably to touch the ears and face of his family members as they sit on a bench, and I notice how instinctually I wanted to reach out towards a friend of my own. When I’m asleep, I embrace those who are far from me and wake up with the ghostly memory of a dream hug.
I shared with the group that sometimes that amount of things around me that I could notice is overwhelming, but that I simultaneously felt excitement at the importance of introducing skills to young people (but really all people) to empower them to interact more deeply with the world around them. I was excited that a sense of wonder did, in fact, seem to be teachable.
I am excited about:
how noticing one thing always seems to be followed by a deluge of questions
how this way of looking is a form of research
how the maintenance of wonder is and can be a learnable skill
We could all use a little more wonder in our lives for the things that just are around and within us—or at least I know I could. Which is probably why I am drawn to those who see the world for its abundance of noticeable things.
I notice how I remember the names of birds better when someone makes me first identify three characteristics about the bird in real time before telling me its name, or even better, handing me a bird guide and asking me to find it myself.
I notice how it can be hard to understand what we’re noticing. Another intern bent down to pet some red and yellow moss-like plants growing between slabs of stone. To a new comer in this region like me, the reds and yellows were attractive and beautiful. Then someone who’d known this land for over 25 years said “Yeah it’s pretty but unfortunately it’s a sign of drought-induced stress. Those red and yellow parts symbolize a plant’s loss of the ability to photosynthesize. Those parts are dead.” Those plants should be green, especially so early in the year. As we walked to the knoll, I then realized the whole hillside was covered in red and yellowing plants.
I wouldn’t have noticed a difference because I’ve never seen these plants any other way. It got me thinking about how the folks younger than me also wouldn’t be likely to notice these beautiful colors and think of death or of how the creeks are too dry, because they’re growing up in a world where drought is all they’ve ever known. The reality of climate change as something that goes so easily undetected in a world where people have lost the ability to notice nature’s signals landed like both a hopelessness and an answer on my chest.
So basically, I’m writing this to say that there’s about a million things I know and haven’t figured out what to do with, and about a trillion more things that I am aware of only to know that I don’t know them, that I don’t know how to notice them.
I am working on what it looks like for me to hone my noticing skills, both for the lives of the natural beings around me and also for the sensations and feelings that flow through my emotional being before and after I am able to give them names. Because the truth is, I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know if I want to settle in a place, start the long journey of building a community, growing roots. I don’t know what kind of work I want to be doing with a direction any more clear than what I would define as ‘incredibly abstract.’ I am figuring out how to best figure out what direction to head next while trying to maintain trust in the process of life, trust in the process of my life.
Some days, the uncertainty is paralyzing. Some days I have a strange wave wash over me like a little voice whispering in my ear I want to go home only to remind me that no place in the world feels like home right now. Although, I imagine Lake Michigan churning and swelling and sometimes feel like I am tethered there. Is home just familiarity?
The other day someone reminded me that no matter what, this internship will lead me to the next thing. I remembered that I was still excited for all the next things, that being here and also trying to notice what truly calls to me, what feels missing, and steering my slow boat in that direction is the only way to practice the trust I’m trying to maintain. Each day is just practicing and noticing and turning that wheel just a hair to the right.
I know life will unfold whether I move with purpose or surrender myself to the inevitable setting and rising of the sun. But for possibly the first time in my life, I want to ask myself what I want with the intention of believing that I might actually be able to have it.
For the Record
Books I’ve read since leaving Chicago:
Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (SOOO good)
Weather by Jenny Offill
Milk fed by Melissa Broder
Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
Thank you for taking your time to read these words I write. Drop me a line if anything resonates. I love hearing from all the people I can’t see right now.
I just started reading the book you lent me, Deep Play. Some of your descriptions make me think of that, totally immersed in your senses with no conventional "life rules" Fill yourself up!