Wildflowers sown in the street
Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters and all things are my companions.
From the Western Inscription by Neo-Confucian sage Zhang Zai (1020 -1077)
Opening the front door and stepping into the street, I’m at home, though I had also felt at home in our flat too. I taste the air, not the purest in my urban London locale, though now smelling fresh and moist after a cleansing drench of rain, and the chill air tingles my cheeks. I listen, look, sense and feel, which has over time become a habit of mine, reinvigorating my slumbering animal senses. I hear the plaintive cry of herring gulls above, the dull noise of construction in the background, and I feel the breath of the wind, exploring my exposed skin and swirling gently around my trousers. The sky is moody, clouded with many shades of grey, fast shifting; the breeze is alive and wild, stirring the fallen plane tree leaves on the pavement with a slithering rustle. I am with all the life around without any motive on my part except being fully here, a part of it all. I’m not an observer, I’m a participant. My feet sense the ground and its changing nuances of texture.
By paying attention to the sensual nature of my actual bodily experience, conceptual consciousness tends to be more in the background, rather than in its usual position of domination. Space is created for our more fundamental animate consciousness which we share with all other non human animals. You could say that it’s a kind of taoist immanence: meaning remaining in, rather than abstracting from or transcending our shared living world.
Millwall Inner Dock
Through the days and seasons I know and love all the changes in weather, flowers, buds, leaves, creaturely migrations, and so I am naturally grounded in earth time, rather than clock time. I walk along the side of the old London docks, now all repurposed yet with many remains of their history: old unloading cranes and iron mooring bollards. Towering glass and steel office blocks form a surreal backdrop, the mirror-like surfaces in the shifting light expressing the capricious moods of the weather. Shafts of sunlight pierce the grey shroud and the water surface sparkles in response, as if glad to be recognised. To the gulls who bob on the water or wheel on curved wings in the wind above, this is their brackish winter home. To the people who pass by the water’s edge, engrossed in their phone screens and ensconced in headphones, I’m not sure what it is. They seem to me to be only marginally outdoors, and sadly appear to notice almost nothing.
My partner and I like to do what we can to care for the area where we live and its inhabitants. After all, it’s home. We’ve cleared local scraps of land and planted trees and wildflowers. I regularly remove trash thrown into the patches where I’ve sown wildflowers. It’s right next to the corner where the local drug dealers operate, and they look on bemused, probably thinking I’m crazy; but as I’m clearly not a customer and pose no threat, all is cool.
I realise I’m what could be called an urban animist: someone who has the simple ancient intuition that everything in the world is in some sense alive, even in the city, submerged in so much concrete. From the point of view of my sensuous body, every creature, plant, body of water and sky has a degree of agency and affects all around it, including us. We are in a reciprocal relationship with everything in our immediate locality. I touch the smooth paper white bark of a birch tree, and the tree touches me; as I feel, so am I felt. The moist granite slabs of rock lining the dock, glisten and sparkle from their crystalline nature, and though seemingly immovable, have their own rhythm in an altogether different timescale.
To borrow a popular political phrase in the UK, to me it’s obvious that we have far more in common than that which divides us, though I’m of course expanding the meaning to include all beings. There are those in the rewilding movement who feel that nature should be left alone with no human beings intervening, yet I feel that this inadvertently falls into the deeply ingrained Western philosophical position which sees human beings as separate from nature. In contrast, indigenous peoples have always tended and cared for their locale, which is often also what is needed in urban areas, to help regenerate small areas which have become isolated islands amid the concretisation.
I feed the local swans in the docks in winter since the docks’ largely vertical sides, although covered in moist plant and moss life, don’t provide enough grazing for them. I always take some specially formulated healthy swan food with me on my walks to supplement their diet. In winter, swans range widely trying to find new homes as resident pairs chase off their offspring from their home territories after the breeding season. Daily, I’m captivated by the deep thwoop, thwoop of gathering wing beats, as these enormous pure white beings take to the wing, like angels, skating along the water before gaining altitude.
I feed the birds at my vegetable patch in the cold of winter. I enjoy watching blackbirds bathing in my shallow pond. They need to keep their plumage in condition throughout the year and the blackbird lingers, enjoying the coldness of the water. I feel like I can almost experience what the bird is feeling. I also like the exhilarating sensation of a cold shower in winter. As I sit on my bench, a rustle in the ivy reveals a little rat tentatively climbing onto the log where I put out seeds for the birds. Rats are much reviled and feared by humans, perhaps because they are one of the few species that we can’t seem to destroy despite all our efforts. She is immaculate in her shiny furry coat, sniffing around and holding a seed carefully in her dexterous paws.
We’ve passed the threshold whereby more than half of the world’s population now live in urban areas and this is only going to increase, so we need to find more sane and harmonious ways to live in these environments. Like it or not, for a majority of us, this is our home.
There is much talk these days of a crisis of meaning with many people increasingly feeling disconnected from themselves, from each other and from the world. Yet in a simple way, meaning can be understood as a function of connectedness. The more extensively and profoundly that we feel our interconnection with everything around us and with the more-than-human world, the greater that web of meaning becomes a foundation of our life. The greater our interconnectedness, the more meaningful it is to us. Then there is no alienation or agonising about why we exist; in this rich interbeing, meaning and belonging are inherent. Sensory perception is inherently participatory and so just as we see, we are simultaneously also being seen. In this sense, we are never alone.
Although I’ve shared my experience of urban life and how I don’t feel separation from nature, this experience would be greatly enhanced with some changes. Our cities could really be transformed to our benefit and the benefit of all life. We could green our cities: remove private cars and all other fossil fuel powered vehicles from inner cities; narrow the streets to provide service access only; use the resulting free ground for planting trees and vegetation instead of being perpetually clogged with rows of parked cars; grow fruit and vegetables in the streets, and provide areas for wildlife to thrive in. Cities could really become liveable for all life.
Feeding the local swans
“Beneath the pavement, the beach”
Slogan on Paris streets 1968
