There’s a saying that ‘art needs a chair.’
I saw this last year when I went to Paris to visit the David Hockney exhibition. I noticed something quite strange and, to be honest, quite unsettling.
People came in with their phones and filmed the exhibition. They spent only a few seconds on each picture before moving to the next room.
It was a common occurrence, in the same way as attending a music concert where the audience films the whole thing.
It’s a strange practice we’ve chosen, to use our devices to mediate life, to keep it thrice removed, and so it is when we visit the living world.
Most people visit nature and arrive – if it can be called that. They move through it skimming the surface, then leave, and the land, the place, remains unknown.
In a recent post, talked about a temperate rainforest, and someone I’d met had recently been there.
One of the things they observed was that people turned up, took the selfie, and left. That was it.
So today I’m going to talk about what happens when you return to the same place over and over again.
You do not need to visit the countryside or the wilderness to do this, and you do not need to travel far. Instead, find a patch of land near you, ideally no more than fifteen minutes away on foot.
It could be a hedgerow. It could be a small nettle patch. Maybe it’s a corner of a park that nobody really bothers with.
Try to find somewhere quiet, away from the usual footfall – something ordinary enough that you’d normally walk past it.
And begin each day by returning to it again and again.
During the first few visits you may feel like a tourist, because you notice the obvious things.
If, like me, you’re most likely carrying your categories with you: that’s a plant, that’s a bird, that’s a stream, that’s a lily pond, that’s a tree.
By looking at the land with our categories, we see what we expect to see. But if you keep going back for weeks and then months, things begin to shift.
The patch stops being like a museum you walk through. The self-conscious quality of the early observations, the sense of doing the practice, fades.
You’re no longer concerned about whether someone sees you, and you start noticing, finally, what is actually there.
You begin to notice who visits, what changes when the rain arrives, which insects appear and at what times of day, and how the light falls differently in different seasons.
Bit by bit, the community with which you are biologically entangled reveals itself. It only does this to someone who keeps showing up, and if everything goes well, at a certain point you stop feeling like a visitor to a museum.
This is what place-based attention does when you give it enough time, when you give yourself enough time to go slowly.
It schools you in the particular, the specific. Instead of categorising, you start to feel and recognise the this-ness of each thing, the this-ness of place.
A nettle patch becomes a neighbourhood – not metaphorically, quite literally. You start to know your neighbours, and you notice when things change because you have a stake in it.
That stake is the beginning of belonging. By that I don’t mean belonging in some sentimental sense, but in a practical, ecological one. You are part of what happens here.
The place hasn’t actually changed. You have simply become familiar enough to see it and feel its movement, its flow, its sense of rhythm and timescale.
There is no shortcut to feeling this belonging. There is only the practice of returning, again and again and again.