The World Does Not End at Our Skin
By H.R. Zimmerer
I can spend a whole morning moving through a world of passwords, appointments, messages and things that need signing, and begin to believe that this is the world in its entirety. Whatever is outside the window becomes a background. Weather is something to dress for. Trees are what stand between the car and the building I need to enter.
Then something small interrupts the arrangement. Moss in the mortar of a wall. A bird disappearing into a hedge with an urgency entirely unrelated to mine. Rain collected in a leaf, holding there for a moment before the leaf gives way.
None of this is waiting for me to notice. That is part of its comfort. A living world has continued beside the one I have been organising, and it has not required my management or approval. I have been walking through it while thinking of somewhere else.
We speak about getting back to nature as though we have been living outside it. I understand what we mean. We want less traffic, more sky, ground that has not been covered over. But the phrase can conceal a strange division: nature over there, human life over here, the two occasionally meeting on a weekend. Food, water and air become so familiar in their packaging and pipes that we forget where they belong. A body seated beneath electric light remains a body. It still gets hungry. It still needs sleep. It still has skin that knows the difference between a warm room and November.
I do not find that knowledge diminishing. It gives me a place to begin when the more complicated accounts of who I am have become tiring. There is the person with responsibilities, history, opinions, mistakes and a name other people know. There is also the living creature standing on a step, feeling damp at the cuff of a sleeve. Both are true. Sometimes I need to remember the second before I can treat the first with any proportion.
Belonging is often discussed as something other people must confer. There are good reasons for that. A home should welcome us. A friendship should make room for the person we actually are. Communities can include or exclude, and being excluded hurts. I would not ask someone to look at a tree instead of receiving the human care they need. Still, there is another kind of belonging that exists beneath those negotiations. We are not visitors to the physical world, carrying out an appointment before returning to somewhere more suitable. We live here. We are made possible here.
That recognition does not require a remote mountain or a perfect stretch of woodland. It may arrive beside a supermarket trolley bay, where a small plant has established itself beyond the reach of a wheel. It may be the same patch of sky seen from a bus stop, or a pot of herbs leaning towards a kitchen window. A modest place can become more particular with repeated attention. The USA National Phenology Network’s Nature’s Notebook programme turns that kind of noticing into a practice of observing plants and animals over time. Familiarity need not mean that we have finished seeing.
I like the thought that attention can deepen a relationship with a place I already pass through. I do not have to wait until my life becomes spacious enough to take me somewhere spectacular. There is a wall at the edge of an ordinary morning. Rain has altered its colour. Something small has found a way to live in the joint between two stones.
My keys are still in my hand. I still have somewhere to go. But for a moment I can feel the wind at my neck and remember that the door behind me divides one kind of shelter from another arrangement of the same world. It does not divide life from scenery. Whatever I have come outside to find, I have never been entirely separate from it.
Further reading
- Nature’s Notebook documentation, USA National Phenology Network – a structured approach to observing familiar plants and animals through the year.
A Place in the World
Even here,
between the back step
and the road,
the earth has not gone anywhere. Moss darkens the mortar.
Rain collects in a leaf.
A wren slips into the hedge,
busy with a life
that does not need explaining. I stand with my keys in my hand
and let the morning continue
without asking it
to become something useful. The damp reaches my sleeve.
The wind lifts the hair at my neck. All this time,
I have been saying outside
as though the world
ended at my skin.
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