One day I went out to investigate the racket: I walked up to a tree, an Osage orange, and a hundred birds flew away. For a week last September migrating red-winged blackbirds were feeding heavily down by the creek at the back of the house. These disappearances stun me into stillness and concentration they say of nature that it conceals with a grand nonchalance, and they say of vision that it is a deliberate gift. Deer apparently ascend bodily into heaven, the brightest oriole fades into leaves. A fish flashes, then dissolves in the water before my eyes like so much salt.
“Unfortunately, nature is very much a now-you-see-it, now-you-don't affair. Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans And every day, you can look." - Sara Amis, "A Daily Heron” No matter how common the experience, every time you stumble across mystery, or independent wild being, it is a surprise and a miracle. You might not see it every single time you go looking, or where you expect to find it. Other times, it will give you the side-eye and swoop away, leaving you longing for retreating beauty. Sometimes, it will turn and lock eyes with you, lifting you out of yourself, changing everything. This is how I understand the divine, and why I continue to seek it in the resolutely non-human world, with which we nonetheless recognize a numinous kinship. I cannot approach the heron, certainly could never touch it I can only look for it, entranced.
Draw parallel to it with the width of one of the marsh’s holding ponds between you, and it will duck its head, eyeing you with suspicion, then fly. “The heron must be used to people, and yet it never lets you get too close.
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