I love going out walking whether it’s in urban, edgeland or wilder places. I usually walk alone though I’m always in company. The more-than-human world is always all around and is very apparent if we are at all attuned to it.

It’s a diamond day in early autumn where the sky’s azure blue is infinitely clear and sharp. I walk past the local docks and the water is deep and mercurial, always fascinating with its endless changing moods: now shimmering and glistening magically in the sun with golden shards of light, the next moment brooding in infinite dark depth as a shadow of cloud runs across its visage. In another mood, the water is utterly still and reflective and my own mood becomes tranquill. A grebe dives for fish through this glassy mirror with a deft bodily flip, so at one with its liquid home that it leaves barely the tiniest of ripples on the mirror of the clouds floating on the water. Water is a magician of change and I am enthralled by this large expanse of water, my moods shifting with that of the water, and it always opens up my senses.

 A familiar sound echoing through this crystalline autumn air is the robin’s song. The robin becomes apparent in autumn since he (and she too – as both sexes of robin sing ) sings throughout the year. And bird song is much diminished in autumn since most birds have fallen relatively silent after the breeding season or else they’ve migrated away south. The song the robin sings in autumn is in a lovely gentle minor key, a sound inseparable from woodland edge, garden or hedgerow habitats. The robin follows me around with fearless interest on my vegetable plot, and we talk to each other, a glint in his unfathomable black eye as he cocks his head to one side to listen to me. We often sit together, him perched on a low hanging branch above me, close enough to touch, and I wonder what it feels like to be him, with such a different subjectivity from mine.

The local wild rose hips are resplendent in their fullness and soon the blackbirds and thrushes will be feasting on them, as well as the redwings fleeing the winter cold of Iceland and Scandinavia. I linger and gaze at the rose hips rich redness, in wonder at their sheer existence and I’m certainly in relationship with them; there is a sense of some kind of reciprocity with these living beings. And I’m coming to sense that this is the case with every entity which I perceive, not only plants and animals, but all the elements as well.

The wind enlivens me, sometimes a cool caress, at other times a buffeting whistling. It wasn’t that long ago when I felt the wind for the first time in my life when I happened to be cycling. That sounds like a strange thing to say, and it’s hard to describe in words, but I mean I felt it through my body, touching me, moving me, communicating with me. Such a simple perception and yet I’d overlooked it for most of my life; the spirit and breath of the living world inseparable from this bodily organism that is me. 

 I make a point of walking through my little local patch of woods and immediately I feel the calmness of the atmosphere, the thickness of the organic air and the cushion of leaf mould on the ground. A feeling of respect or reverence is naturally elicited; I just wouldn’t want to shout here and if I am with a human companion, I tend to keep my voice low and in keeping with the community of trees; while the wearing of headphones here would feel almost rude if I were out walking in company – and, as I mentioned, I’m always in company. The trees are watching, listening, conversing with one another above the earth while their roots below, connected in intricate detail by fungal mycelia, are in constant communication, exchanging information, nutrients and feelings.

Now I walk past a stand of white poplar trees and the leaves constantly change colour in the  breeze, with the whiter undersides of the leaves flashing in the autumn sun, as the green upper sides turn over in the wind. A gentle cascading rustling sound fills the air as the poplars converse, and I listen and watch. It’s like dry sand cascading down a smooth surface. They have very different voices from the local oaks, who are generally more reserved in their chatter in gentle breezes; or from the rippling wave of voices of the long grasses in the field; or the rich sloshing and slapping of the water on the docksides.

You may think that this is merely a poetic touch and that surely I’m not suggesting that the trees are really chattering; after all, our rational mind explains that it’s just air blowing past leaves and creating a sound. But I think it’s actually more mysterious than that. Because if you think about it, what is a human voice but that of air blowing past two bands of muscle tissue called the vocal cords and causing them to vibrate and create sounds which we call words? All beings – which includes all the elements – are really subjects themselves; there are no objects in the world, everything is in some sense, a subject and animate.

We perceive through our bodily senses, and by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting (usually via a synaesthesia of the senses together), we are participating with myriad other subjects; though in us modern people, much of this lies below our conscious awareness. Prior to language the sensing body experiences everything as in some way animate. Perception is an ongoing reciprocity with all the entities I come in contact with, between my body and the living landscape. Our perception cannot be separated from participation, from relationship. 

Yet the living world stops conversing with us when we withdraw from it and ignore it; when we become fixated on and abstracted in our human creations of written word or smartphone – wonderful though these can certainly be. For then we leave out the majority of beings – which is the vast more-than-human world – and our world becomes one largely of human artifacts, a diminished monoculture of a single species. This is tragic, both for the living world which we thoughtlessly destroy, and also for us as human animals, who are left in an echo chamber of our own thoughts and creations, disconnected from the deeper meaning and interdependence which had previously sustained our forebears for more than a thousand generations. For most of humanity’s existence, indigenous peoples have seen themselves as part of a wider living world and in active relationship with all elements, which includes the wind, rivers, rocks and mountains, as well as the animals and plants; viewing the earth as inanimate or inert is a peculiarly modern view.

Looking at a leaf, the pattern of lichen on a rock, a bird riding invisible currents of the air, the solidity of the earth underneath my feet, attracting my body, are all unfathomably mysterious and wonderful. This can never be ‘understood’ in the way we’ve been trained as disembodied observers, yet I feel we can instead come towards a more congruent and harmonious relationship with this mystery.