How to Build a Closer Connection With the Living World Around You
From The Observatory
Source: Earth Food Life Project
Simple daily practices can help us slow down, notice, and build empathy with the more-than-human world—fostering both personal well-being and planetary care.
This article was produced by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
“How to Build a Closer Connection With the Living World Around You” by Bridget A. Lyons is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
For permissions requests beyond the scope of this license, please see Observatory.wiki’s Reuse and Reprint Rights guidance.
Introduction
One morning, I was walking in a friend’s yard in Idaho and saw a monarch butterfly. I stopped to watch him flutter above a purple coneflower—one of his favorite sources of nectar—and admired his striking orange and black pattern for at least the thousandth time in my life.
I live on the coast of central California, where these lovely insects migrate for the winter from places like Idaho. For five months, they sleep in eucalyptus trees down the street from my apartment and take flight to eat and drink when the temperatures are over 55 degrees Fahrenheit. I smiled at our connection: We were both on the same travel trajectory, moving between Idaho and California, exploring and exploiting different ecosystems for the benefits they have to offer us. Despite our enormous differences, we were participating in similar behaviors.
This moment was a bright spot in my day. Any moment in which I get to notice, appreciate, and connect with another living thing is a bright spot in my day. Therefore, I make a point of ensuring that these interactions are a regular part of my life. I know they are good for me; research has shown that being in nature is beneficial to our “cognitive function, brain activity, blood pressure, mental health, physical activity, and sleep.” And a 2020 article in Current Opinion in Psychology confirmed that “incidental exposure to the natural environment can increase attention to others, facilitate collective engagement, and enhance prosociality–tendencies to care for, help, and assist others.”
But my interactions with nature are good for other-than-human creatures as well. Whether it’s with animals or people, connection is the basis of empathy. We need more empathy for other living things to effectively address the biodiversity crisis that threatens the survival of countless species today.
You don’t have to be a scientist or a wilderness guide to foster a connection to the natural world. You don’t need to travel to other continents or read dense research papers to appreciate other living things. All you need to do is step out of your front door. There are other-than-human beings in all neighborhoods and all ecosystems, all of whom are well worth observing and contemplating.
If you don’t already have a practice that helps you connect to other-than-human creatures, I encourage you to try any of the following six activities to begin one. They are all short and simple, and they can be done in any outdoor space. While walking out your front door and simply observing your surroundings can be effective, you might find that a structured exercise helps you focus your attention and prevents you from resorting to checking your device or making a mental to-do list. Anyone can do any of these activities at any age. The more you repeat them, the more meaningful they will become.
The Handmade “Camera”
This is an activity I used to do with my outdoor education students to encourage close observation of species that might otherwise be overlooked. It invites you to make a viewfinder with your own two hands by extending the pointer fingers and thumbs of both hands and touching them together, forming a roughly diamond-shaped box. Once you’ve created your window, close your eyes and move it into a spot in the space around you with your hands either extended towards the horizon or focused on a small area of ground beneath your feet.
Then, open your eyes for 30 seconds and take in whomever and whatever you see within your viewfinder’s opening. Close your eyes, move your hands, and repeat as many times as you want. You can also do this exercise with a partner, taking turns being blindfolded and led around by the other person. The guide is responsible for choosing the point of focus, situating their partner’s hands, and squeezing their arm to indicate the opening of the “camera shutter” and its subsequent closing 30 seconds later. I find this to be a straightforward but powerful activity for developing the sense I like to call “noticing.” It can help you see both big vistas and tiny organisms with fresh eyes.
Species Sketching
Any artist will tell you that drawing a living thing forces you to pay much closer attention to them. To even vaguely replicate a creature’s appearance, you must notice details you would rarely take the time to study under normal circumstances. All you need for this exercise is a pencil and paper. If you’re doing it outside, something hard to draw on, like a notebook or clipboard, helps. Start by choosing a planetary companion to render. Sedentary ones (plants, fungi, mosses, mollusks, etc.) are the easiest to start with.
Before you put pencil to paper, consider the relationships among the creature’s parts. Is this organism symmetrical? Are some parts bigger than others, and if so, how much bigger? How do the parts join, and what are those borders like? Notice if you find yourself making some aspect of the creature bigger or smaller in your sketch than it is in real life. Why is that happening? Pay special attention to curves and textures. If you’re using a pencil, you can’t add color, but you can indicate relative lightness and darkness by shading your sketch. Remember that accuracy and aesthetic appeal are not the goal. The goal is to mindfully examine another living thing’s appearance in detail and discover aspects of them that you might otherwise miss. In the process, you might find that your breath, heartbeat, and mind slow down as well—an added mental and physical health bonus.
Umwelt Haiku
The term umwelt was coined by Jakob Johann von Uexküll to describe the unique way a living thing’s particular senses allow them to perceive their environment. While we can never really know what another species experiences—especially when that species has senses that we don’t (like sharks’ ability to detect electrical currents in the water)—the process of attempting to do so is extremely valuable. It reminds us that there are myriad ways of perceiving the world and that our human one is just one of many options.
Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry that assumes a three-line structure. The first line contains five syllables, the second seven, and the third five again. To compose an umwelt haiku, first choose the living thing whose reality you hope to experience. Consider what their dominant senses might be and what aspects of their environment are most important for them to tune into. Then begin playing with words that attempt to capture their reality—it’s that simple! As with the sketch, accuracy is not the goal; the value is in the process of imagining and considering an alternative view of the world.
Soundscape Attunement
Many of us experience the natural world primarily through our eyes. Yet the sounds of nature are all around us, and they can remind us of an ecosystem’s diversity if we just take the time to listen to them. This exercise is a simple one; it requires only a commitment to silence and stillness, along with a willingness to turn off your phone. Find a spot outside where you can sit safely undisturbed. Close your eyes and listen, at first to the loudest noises in your soundscape. Try to determine how far away their sources are from you and what direction they are coming from. If you can identify the type of creature creating the sound, do so, but then try to drop that label and tune into the textures of the sound in much the way an artist examines the textures of something they’re sketching.
After you have attuned yourself to the loudest noises, work to listen to less loud ones, and then to the most subtle ones you can distinguish. Pay special attention to sounds that seem to be related in a call-and-response or “conversational” fashion. These will remind you that we are not the only species that communicates! The variety of aural expressions you hear might also help you to remember just how many other-than-human creatures are out there, whether you can see them or not.
Movement Mimicry
While we may take our human way of moving in the world for granted, it is unique to our species. Other species move in very different ways, both because they have different body parts to move with and because they encounter various kinds of terrain. Attempting to move like another creature can remind us of this reality while also allowing us physical access to their umwelt. And it’s fun!
To begin, select a non-sedentary creature and observe them in motion for a while. Pay special attention to which body parts initiate their actions, the speeds at which those body parts move, and how different body parts interact with one another. Then try to replicate these actions to reproduce the creature’s unique locomotion style. Feeling silly is part of the process with this one, so let go of your ideas of propriety and embrace the possibility of failure. Yet again, your goal is not accuracy; it’s the process of physically embodying your connection to the creature.
Factoid Collection
I am a huge fan of factoids, those little nuggets of information we learn about a particular living thing that make us say, “Wow!” They enable us to appreciate the unique qualities of other creatures and celebrate the seemingly infinite creativity of life. I like to choose a species I’ve encountered on a foray into the natural world—often one I don’t know and have to learn the name of when I get back to a computer—and do a little research to find three or four cool snippets of information about them. I write these down in a notebook and make a point of sharing them with a friend or two. The process of presenting them to another human being helps me to commit these factoids to memory and might also awaken my friend’s interest in the creature. Learning these details enhances my understanding of this living thing, which in turn deepens my sense of connection with them. As I mentioned above, that’s good for both of us.
There are undoubtedly many more exercises out there that can help foster your relationships with other-than-human creatures. In the end, it doesn’t matter what you do, really, as long as you are noticing, appreciating, and connecting with other living things. The mental and physical health benefits for you are well-established, and your increased sense of belonging on this planet, where you were born, is invaluable. Crucially, your increased empathy for other beings is also guaranteed to boost your motivation to act in ways that make their lives easier—whether that means leaving your lawn uncut to provide invertebrate habitat, writing letters to elected officials that support conservation initiatives, or consuming fewer disposable products that end up in our oceans and landfills where they imperil our fellow creatures.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her 2015 book Braiding Sweetgrass, “So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family.”
These words remind us that other cultures have seen—and continue to see—our connection to more-than-human creatures as a given. We can all reclaim this level of familiarity with and care for these beings. In fact, we must do so if we want to have a chance at repairing the world our species is altering at an ever-increasing rate. That process can start with a step as simple as trying one of the activities described above. Why not start now?
