I’ve come to realize how large nature really is by looking
at all the small, mostly unnoticed, parts of it.
Instead of a tree I see bark, buds, leaves, flowers, seed, lichen,
moss, deadwood, crawling insects, snakes, birds, squirrels, dew drops, spider
webs, bees, galls, sun, shade, darkness, silhouettes, brown, red, grey, gold,
birds, moths, root flares...
I hear birdsong, insect calls, the wind moving through the
leaves, the creaking of branches and trunks, the scraping of small animals
scurrying up the bark, drips of dew and rain, leaves falling, silence...
I smell the newness of buds and leaves, flowers, the soil, scents
in the wind, sap, wood, the mustiness of the mosses and last year’s decaying
leaves, rain, pine…
I feel the smoothness of bark, the roughness of bark, the coarseness
of leaves and their veins, the roundness of acorns, the different fibers of the
mosses, lettuce leaves and thread-like strands of the different lichens,
vibrations caused by the wind, the sawtooth serrations along the leaf edges,
the sharpness of a needle, dryness, wetness…
I can taste the air, the sweetness of springtime sap, the bitterness
of the leaves and bark, tea from the roots and stems, the nectar of the flowers…
Whenever I experience anything in nature, and look for
the smallest
of things, the natural world I know becomes that much larger.
