This day breaks cold and clear, the sky a pale golden pink. The juncos are here with the flurries, though it’s hard to tell who chases which. The wind makes the feeder on the sugar maple outside my window sway, and I find myself wondering if a grouse has just landed for a snack. The jays sing their short, tremolo song – a raspy bell. There seems an air of both urgency and patience outdoors, a chill rush with the acceptance of a long wait. And I am thinking about singularity and knowing.
We identify. Isn’t that the rush? That’s Sam Peabody, like I wrote before. The confirming label that seems to acknowledge both the thing pointed at and the one whose finger is doing the pointing. ‘There you are, so here I am,’ and the like. Quite together. This is knowledge, perhaps, but it’s quite short of understanding. Most authorities on birding beg the novice to put the guide book down, as long as you’re actually looking at or listening to a bird. When you see a flash of yellow, a blotch of black at its head – keep looking. Suppress, for a moment, the urge to call it “Yellowthroat” or “Goldfinch.” Let it be one bird, itself, living, just right now. As soon as your mind plays back recording after recording in the wild attempt to remember the one who sings a chiming waterfall, you’ve stopped listening. You’ve made it “A Veery” instead of “this singular small thing, who is right now in a tree above me in these woods on this afternoon and it smells like mud and my what a lovely voice you have, what are you saying?”
When we identify, we begin to know, perhaps. I am the first to rush to claim what I have seen or heard. And no wonder, it’s been our cultural inheritance since Adam. But it is an impoverished knowledge without understanding. How do we understand a bird, a tree? We stand under them, a gesture of humble waiting. We set ourselves aside, and look. We let the individual speak, or sway, or grow. And then we can go back in and say “I have been with,” instead of merely, “I have identified.”
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Hannah B and I had a recent conversation about walking with others (dogs, friends, partners, etc.) in the woods. Since this conversation I have gone on many walks, and for better or worse, I cannot stop thinking about how another’s presence affects how I am in the woods.
I am hiking with my dad in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Dad is pointing out Chestnut Oak, Northern Red Oak, Red Maple, Cucumber Magnolia, and Sassafras leaves. My eyes are fixed to the ground, scanning it for leaf ID. I am gathering knowledge of my landscape in a certain way, in a different way to how I approach knowledge of the woods on my own. My dad is directing my focus.
“There was this man. I saw him at the bottom of the hill, and then I passed him on the bridge. Directly after this I had a revelation that had nothing to do with the man. The river to my right became louder, so loud that I could no longer hear my footsteps. I tried hard to hear them. Instead I felt them burning, and this energy grew up into my ears. And then the perfect thing made noise in this important moment. A plane flew overhead and drowned out the river and re-moved the heat from my feet.” This is an excerpt from a walk I went on alone in a state park in the city of Raleigh, NC. I was experimenting with my senses in the most “wilderness” place I could find in the city. It became strongly apparent how impacting other presences became as I ventured further from the busy interstate.
These days I find myself wondering alone along the roads and farms where I reside in southern Vermont. I am not by definition “in the woods.” But it is here my senses hone in on the light changes, the smells of fermenting drop apples, the cold wind hitting my face, the way my heart beats when a surprise dog runs up barking at me. It is here that I can really feel myself. It is obvious that I am not outside looking into this environment; instead I am become more aware of my own energy moving through my surroundings. This goes for any kind of walk. It becomes challenging when others join us in these activities because they highlight our human presence, while dampening the acuteness of our senses. Attempting to feel the environment as one, but with another, is difficult. There is nothing wrong with this scenario. It reveals the intensity with which humans interact with the earth. It reveals time and time again the power in human connection, and perhaps the magnetism we cannot help towards each other, blending rather then separating sense of self. Through this I have discovered that it is not wrong to go on any one type of walk, but instead to always walk in cognizant wanderings.
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