Beyond all this studying
and managing and calculating,
there?s another level
to knowing nature.
You can go about learning
the names of things
and doing inventories
of trees, bushes, and floweres.
But nature often just flits by
and is not easily seen
in a hard clear light.
Our actual experience
of many birds and wildlife
is chancy and quick.
Wildlife is known as a call,
a cough in the dark,
a shadow in the shrubs.
You can watch a cougar
on a wildlife video for hours,
but the real cougar
shows herself only once
or twice in a lifetime.
One must be tuned to hints and nuances.
After twenty years of walking right past it
on my way to chores in the meadow,
I actually paid attention
to a certain gnarly canyon live oak one day.
Or maybe it was ready to show itself to me.
I felt its oldness, suchness, inwardness, oakness,
as if it were my own.
Such intimacy makes you totally
at home in life and in yourself.
But the years spent working around that oak
in that meadow and not really noticing it were not wasted.
Knowing names and habits,
cutting some brush here, getting firewood there,
watching for when the fall mushrooms bulge out
are the skills that are of themselves
delightful and essential.
They also prepare one for suddenly meeting the oak.