You Aren't Watching Closely Enough

The Evidence is All Around and You're Missing It

Years ago, we had a cat, a sneaky one. Also, she was a mentalist, one of those performers whose acts revolve around their apparent ability to read minds. Let anyone put on shoes or coat, and she knew her chance had come. As any of us prepared to leave, she’d slink down the hallway toward the front door, knowing sooner or later it would open and, if she acted with precision timing and had a little luck, she’d be able to take a running leap from the bottom of the stairs, evade a blockade of legs and hands, and find herself in the glorious out of doors.

One summer day, I was home alone. I sat to put my shoes on, picked up my keys to leave. When I arrived at the front door, I turned to look back at the stairs. There she was, a few steps from the bottom, looking like a prisoner with a plan.

I was not about to be bested by a cat. I turned, looked straight into her sly yellow eyes, and spoke. “You are not getting out this door,” I said, “You best just go on upstairs.” You could tell by the look on her face she was outraged. However, to my astonishment, she yowled, stood, turned, trotted up the stairs and disappeared around the corner.

I did not gesture. I did not point up the stairs or approach her. All I did was speak to her as I would have to a child. How then did she know what I wanted? Surely, she had not suddenly learned enough English to comply with the commands issued, and yet, somehow, she knew.

I thought of this incident again after a recent visit to a local state park. I frequented there 20 or more years ago but had not been back in a long time. In the interim, the state had built a new visitor’s center. Tucked back among the oaks and sycamores, a quarter mile from the slow, unchanging river, the building swelled with glassy-eyed, taxidermied specimens: the fox, the hawk, four kinds of turtle, the coyote, pheasant, the grouse.

The walls of the back room, I was surprised to find, were glass, floor to ceiling. Outside the window, the staff had installed multiple bird feeders, a koi pond into which flowed a small waterfall. A quiet room, a place for visitors to sit and look out upon the wilds: slight finches, nuthatches strolling upside down on the slick trunks of the beeches, waxwings hunting the final berries of the year.

As I sat, a twitching in the grass signaled something alive. A squirrel raised his head and, in his nervous, twitching way approached. He jumped up on a lip at the bottom of the window outside, raised his furred body to full height and stared in at me. He was mesmerized. You could tell he was thinking how amazing it was to see a human up close. He obviously wondered who had gotten one to sit so still behind the glass. He looked at me. I looked at him. Together, we shared a moment of mutual recognition, each of us aware of perceiving and of being perceived by the other. I knew he knew something of me, though I could not say precisely what. Did he know I was human? That he was a squirrel? Was he aware of our mutual awareness?

Questions of sciurine epistemology aside, in that moment, just as in the moment with our family cat years before, it was clear something beyond the obvious was happening. I could feel it. I’m sure the squirrel could feel it, though naming it was impossible for us both.

We moderns are trained into a bias against noticing moments like this, and into an even stronger bias against ascribing meaning to them. I can only imagine this is part of what people mean when they say our world has become disenchanted. It means we find a kind of materialism in which animals and people never share a psychic connection more plausible than any philosophy which might admit the possibility of such things.

And so we come to expect lives without wonder or mystery. Truth, beauty and goodness all become relative. Meaning grows elusive. Our sense of alienation, from ourselves, our neighbors, the creation becomes the unconscious bedrock out of which we operate. We cannot easily conceive a connection to the created world around us, cannot substantially grasp the difference between indifferent nature and creation, a place made for us, a home.

We end up blinded, but that doesn’t mean little moments of mystery no longer surround us. Perhaps the world is not disenchanted at all, rather we have lost the power to see in it what older peoples saw: a place full of spirits dark and bright, of odd moments, of omens signaling to us that the picture of reality outstretches our ability to perceive. Perhaps, our minds have not been so much enlightened by our educations as they have been dulled to much of our experience.

Yet, hope persists. Impossible things happen every day for those whose eyes are open, for those brave enough to resist the programming. Give it a try. Keep a watch out. Imagine that the world might contain wonders you’re missing and that may emerge, at any moment, from the forest flor to surprise you, to shock you deeper into the wonder you’re longing for.

Let’s see what happens.