How monotonous our speaking becomes when we speak only to ourselves! And how insulting to the other beings — to foraging black bears and twisted old cypresses — that no longer sense us talking to them, but only about them, as though they were not present in our world… Small wonder that rivers and forests no longer compel our focus or our fierce devotion. For we talk about such entities only behind their backs, as though they were not participant in our lives. Yet if we no longer call out to the moon slipping between the clouds, or whisper to the spider setting the silken struts of her web, well, then the numerous powers of this world will no longer address us — and if they still try, we will not likely hear them.

~David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

I’ve been going through my Facebook activity history to establish a timeline for the last three years, which is a unique retrospective, but of course it turns up all kinds of flotsam. It still gives me chills, this passage from Becoming Animal, particularly since much of my day is spent speaking to scrub-jays (okay, okay… you finished all the peanuts), ravens, chipmunks, sagebrush (regular expressions of gratitude), rattlers in season: the numerous powers of the world.

But the Abram quote unwraps a deeper insight: we haven’t just lost our ability to speak to the natural world, we’ve lost our ability to see it.

I often confront the notion, when I talk about photography or natural science, that these are geeky pursuits. Photography — conversations about photography — can devolve into technical jargon, aperture settings or shutter speeds, depth of field, bokeh. Whether a camera is mirrorless or not, the megapixels of a sensor and so forth. A naturalist’s deliberate focus on plant or animal sometimes gets reduced to taxonomy, a glossary of terms every bit as intricate as optics or chemistry.

My wife sometimes chides me for naming things, for knowing the binomials of sixty neighborhood plants, as though doing so made it impossible to appreciate the beauty of a single petal. But that’s a false dichotomy, a rhetorical fallacy of appreciation. Judgement may relax into either-or simplifications rather than vex itself with nuance, but it is possible to hold two complementary notions simultaneously, to manage a pair of horses instead of the pommel of one.

Someone once said that beginning photographers talk about equipment, experienced photographers talk about camera settings, but photographers who have mastered the craft talk about light.

Not only can we hold two different perspectives in our heads at the same time, but we can grasp a quintessence. What is it about what I hear and see — what is it in these conversations — that is essential? And what we find when we look very closely at the world, particularly the natural world, however we do it, through whatever intellectual or intuitive means, what we find is that it is looking back at us with love. We find that it recognizes us.

There’s a misguided idea that we need to “unlearn” what we’ve been taught to recapture that essence. You’ll sometimes hear folks say “I had to unlearn everything I’d been taught about” …oh, you name it — botany, horseback riding — to regain an intuitive understanding of it. As though expertise is something other than a tool, more handcuff than handy. But we don’t unlearn a voyage by going home. The return leg doesn’t somehow dissolve the travel. There was still departure and unfamiliar terrain, new faces, a new language.

The truth is, however, unless we try as we age, we no longer see our environment. There are layers upon layers of obscurity. Cataracts thicken. You walk out the door. The car is waiting where you parked it the night before and you’re wondering whether you have enough gas to get into town, what it was your wife had added to the shopping list, whether you’d remembered your wallet — you’d picked up your keys but the phone was still on the dresser; next week’s dentist appointment still hadn’t been saved to your calendar — whether you’d left enough time to swing by the post office. The fleabane gets trampled between the door and the car: we haven’t been watching.

We all have a memory as kids of adults leaving houses. Of visits or errands. Folks are collecting their things, getting in the car. But there’s a caterpillar we’ve been watching the last quarter hour, and if we go, we will have lost it. We can be both, the kid and the preoccupied dad, but arguably the kid has seen more and lost less.

Photography and natural science are just ways of seeing. They are literal and figurative ways of looking more closely. Both are worth doing for their own sake. There are practical rewards. But there are also existential ones: when we whisper to the spider it whispers back. Not clearly at first. We’re out of practice, and we have to convince it we’re paying attention. When we look closely at the pincushion cactus it looks back. Not clearly at first. We haven’t cleaned that lens since childhood.

But we don’t have to unlearn anything. We just have to remember what it meant to look closely. To look with wonder. And hold that thought.