I often write about where I actually live, which is very urban. I like to write about my local experience and the encounters, non-human and human, in the surrounding area. I’m just engaging with ‘the given’ – that which is directly presented to me – because that’s where I actually am, rather than imagining other scenarios. That might not sound that interesting, but if you let it in, it’s actually quite profound. I find that there’s a tremendous immediacy and aliveness if you are attentive and value what’s actually present.

Like everyone, I like to travel to other places and see beautiful sights. Often in the back of my mind, I would think it would be great to go and live in the countryside someday because I have always been so in love with nature. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live there with fantasised green splendour all around me, rather than my more unprepossessing scenery of high-rise buildings, litter, crowds, noise, and sirens, where the sky is not dark enough to see many night stars? You can’t see the Milky Way,  because of light pollution, though I do follow the moon’s journey every evening with something approaching adoration as she arcs across the sky in all her shapeshifting phases and shades of colour.

In recent years, I’ve been coming around to just accepting that this urban scene is the reality, it’s my home. I’m digging into where I actually am, rather than wishing for some other reality on any level. I’ve surrendered to where I am. I actually like it and I’m not looking to be anywhere else.

This has been solidified by the reality of our flat in the city. I won’t go into the long story but it dates back to the Grenfell Tower tragedy. From that awful fire, huge numbers of flats everywhere in the UK, low and high-rise, have had to be inspected, and may need to have remedial work carried out to replace any flammable materials in the walls, particularly for high-rise ones. We don’t live in a high-rise, but what it means is that this is taking a long time to do, since the high-rise ones are understandably being prioritised. It’s going to be years until they get round to us, and it could be two years or it could be ten years. 

And until then, it’s impossible to sell the flat and move to the country. So I think that gave me the final impetus to fully accept the fact: this is my life right here. And I’ve found that to be powerful.

We’re fortunate to have a big sky vista from our balcony with a vacant brownfield site nearby, giving us unimpeded views. I gaze up at the everchanging clouds and often am amazed by the flow of birds flying past or just soaring high up; the gulls often rising together, spiralling higher, until they disappear from sight. I think they just enjoy flying in synchrony. Sadly, few people seem to look up these days. 

I do my qigong exercise routine outdoors first thing in the morning. I used to approach it as kind of ‘me doing my morning exercises’. Now I find that it’s more a deepening sense of being part of the universal energy or qi flowing through everything in the cosmos, including my body.

Wandering around my local old docks. I watch with rapture, the flights of geese and swans coming and going like an avian airport runway. The deep thwoop, thwoop of the huge wing beats of the swans carries quite far and is mesmerising.

The blackbird happily sings on our street corner in his favourite lime tree, maybe a little louder because of traffic noise, but he accepts the land as it is and the mown grass playground provides worms to eat. The gulls who live around the local docks, nest on tall office rooftops, which they treat like their native clifftop habitat.

I’m speaking of a way of being where feeling and cognition come together in attentiveness and it’s a different mode of being for most people. Rather than knowledge it’s all about encounter. It’s being in relation to the land and belonging to land. Land has me rather than my having the land. It’s reactivating an ancestral enchantment. 

The daoist way is of wu wei, going with the flow, accommodation and the path of least resistance. 

Yet I’m not speaking about just accepting and acquiescing to everything.  It’s not about abandoning the wonderful human gift of reasoning, but not reifying it or letting it dominate life, as has happened everywhere in the Western world.

For example, my local docks have faced a recent challenge of data centres being built that extract the water, returning it unnaturally hotter. This increases the risks of toxic algal blooms which kill fish and waterfowl in their watery haven. I’ve spent many hours over the years, writing and presenting reasoned objections to these developments to the authorities (though unfortunately, often to no avail).  

Actually I don’t see these actions as being different from the daoist principle of wu wei, since in a bigger sense it’s acting for the benefit of the whole ecosystem of my beloved docks, and following the grain of the cosmos. I often have said, only half jokingly, that I am a daoist activist, which I know is a bit of a contradiction.

Gary Snyder, one of the early advocates of bioregionalism and of being place-based said, “Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.”  

And as for what constitutes your place, Snyder says “The size of the place that one becomes a member of is limited only by the size of one’s heart.”

For myself, I feel anchored in place by having the river Thames flowing past at the end of my street and her smooth vast being is a balm and serves to centre me in the local bioregion. I love to see and feel the tides ebbing and surging, as the ocean downstream breathes in and out in concert with the moon. 

Stop searching and you arrive here

where people wander without danger,

look without seeing profound depths.

You who drift a world of dust hoping

to return — what other home is there?

Wang wei 8th century Chinese poet