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One time I saw the damp grass spring upright again after I had walked on it. One time I watched the continuous ant caravans, travelling in both directions, as they walked the phone-wire leading from the maple tree to our house. (I didn't like to speculate on where exactly they were headed in or near the house.)
I cite these events as examples of who I am now, because all of this is recent. So much of life passed without my seeing. I know it must be possible to foster awareness in children (how else did Annie Dillard, for example, evolve at such a young age?). But it was not fostered in me, nor did I foster it—being still totally unaware myself—in my own young children. And thus do we lose our connection with Nature. Those who will forge it must do so later, through will and determination. Oops. Those are not the right words, for all it really takes is that moment of awakening, and that short sharp shift in attention that leads to worlds previously unimaginable.
Here's what I want to do with the rest of my life, now that you ask: I want to be aware of the grass springing up after I walk on it, the leaves swirling in ecstatic wind-powered dances, the ants on safari along my wire.
What will I be able to see from my window once the cold weather makes it unlikely that I will sit on a flat, lawn-surrounded rock and watch the grass spring to life? Well, even within the confines of the house, I will be able to notice: I will see the coiling steam rise from the coffeepot. Thrill to dancing dust motes. Be conscious of all the smells of my life. Hear the silence as well as the gentle sounds of our old house.
When I hear the leaf blower or the siren or the jackhammer, although what I want to hear is anything less raucous, I will not rail and denounce. For I know (but had forgotten for a time) that it is possible to change those noises we term earsplitting and offensive—to change them by adding my own voice to the mix, toning along with the grumble of the idling truck. Thus are annoyances changed to harmony. And we all know the world needs fewer of the former and more of the latter. I used to do this regularly, but at some point I stopped making harmony and reverted to ranting. It's time to go back to what I once knew.
On one of the 24 floors of the condo behind our house lives a musician. During the summer s/he practices with the sliding doors open to the outside, and the glissandos of the flute ripple through the quadrangle of the condo courtyard. I say flute, but like many woodwind players s/he play both flute and clarinet, and sometimes I have to listen closely, as the sound shift and distort with the wind.
Here is my favourite summer moment: it is 3 p.m. and the sun is just about to leave our back deck for the day and emerge at the front of the house. I am in the backyard removing laundry from the line I string in a triangle around our little space. And the flute player is practicing. Sometimes s/he works on technical skills, playing scales and arpeggios (flutes are big on arpeggios). Other times I hear the flute part of a symphonic opus. It is never not interesting. I stand in the warm sun, smelling my air-dried sheets, and I listen to the sweet notes of a well-played transverse flute. Bliss.
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