Yesterday afternoon I drove up to Davidson, North Carolina, to speak at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Lake Norman.
The meditation was called “What We Notice, What We Owe.”
The question I had sent ahead was fairly straightforward:
What might paying close attention to a tree teach us about how we live with one another and with the more-than-human world?
The answer has become considerably less straightforward.
For the past several months, I’ve been sitting most mornings with the black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg. The practice began as a way of putting some of my doctoral work under pressure outside the reading chair. If I’m going to write about ecological intentionality, creaturely encounter, empathy, perception, and the limits of what one living being can know of another, then I need some place where those ideas can encounter something other than another book.
The walnut has been very good at that.
Again and again, the practice has shown me how quickly attention becomes interpretation. A branch moves, and I call it reaching. A walnut falls, and I call it a gift. A fungal branch comes down in a storm, and within a few sentences I’ve written an entire metaphysics for the tree.
One of the phrases that has emerged from the field notes is:
Availability is not invitation.
Something being present to me, accessible to me, or even useful to me does not mean that it exists for me.
That distinction became the center of yesterday’s meditation.
I brought Edith Stein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty along, although lightly. Stein helps me think about the strange combination of presence and remainder in our encounter with another. Another being can really be given to me without being given as my own experience is. Merleau-Ponty helps unsettle the fantasy that I ever stand outside the world looking at it from nowhere. I am already embodied, situated, implicated, and seeing from somewhere.
But I’ve become increasingly convinced that the philosophical vocabulary works best in public when it follows the encounter rather than preceding it.
Begin with the walnut.
Then ask what has happened to our seeing.
That doesn’t prove ecological intentionality as a philosophical argument, and I don’t want to confuse a warm reception with philosophical warrant. But yesterday did show me something important about how this work can travel outside an academic setting.
People understood the problem because they already know what it is like to encounter something that exceeds their first description of it.
The Lake Norman setting gave us another way into that question.
We call it Lake Norman, but before it was Lake Norman it was the Catawba River. Cowans Ford Dam changed that landscape and created the reservoir in the twentieth century. Roads, home sites, crossings, histories, habitats, and older relationships with the land and water now sit beneath or around what appears at first glance to be simply “the lake.”
The congregation’s own land acknowledgment also names the much older presence of the Catawba and other Indigenous peoples in this region.
So the watershed itself became part of the argument.
A place can be many real things at once: drinking water, electricity, habitat, recreation, property, ancestral landscape, memory, river.
No single description exhausts it.
That is increasingly where my thinking about ecological intentionality is going. Better attention does not necessarily produce mastery. Sometimes better attention makes the inadequacy of mastery more obvious.
And then comes the harder question.
What does that ask of us?
Attention alone is not an ethic. Advertisers pay attention. Surveillance systems pay attention. Extraction industries can study forests, rivers, animals, and people with astonishing care.
The issue is what kind of attention we practice. Is it an attention that makes the world increasingly available to us? Or can attention also make us more available to correction, interruption, and change?
That question became the hinge of the meditation.
Afterward, the congregation has a practice they call “Talk Back,” and that may have been my favorite part of the afternoon. The sermon ended, but the conversation didn’t. We spent a good while talking about trees, forests, mycorrhizal networks, watersheds, attention, and what relationships among organisms might mean.
It was wonderfully nerdy. More importantly, it became communal.
Something that begins most mornings with one person sitting quietly beneath one walnut tree in Spartanburg had moved into a room full of people in Davidson, where they began adding their own trees, experiences, questions, and knowledge to it.
That meant a great deal to me.
I’ve been writing for some time that ecological intentionality should not become another way of making the more-than-human world say whatever we already wanted it to say. Yesterday reminded me of the other side of that claim. Restraint does not have to end in silence.
We can acknowledge that another life exceeds what we know of it and still remain in relationship.
We can act without pretending to possess complete knowledge. We can care while remaining corrigible. And perhaps attention becomes spiritual practice at exactly that point.
Earlier in this work I wrote a line that continues to follow me:
First, the seeing, then the keeping.
I’m less certain now about what either word means than I was when I first wrote it.
That seems like progress.
The recording of yesterday’s service is below, followed by the text of the meditation.
I’m deeply grateful to the folks at UU Lake Norman for the invitation, their hospitality, and especially the conversation afterward.
What We Notice, What We Owe
Thank you for having me here this afternoon.
I’ve been looking forward to being with you all, and I realized while looking through some of your recent services that I seem to have arrived in the middle of a conversation.
A couple of weeks ago, you were thinking about circles of concern. Last week, you were thinking about focus and attention.
So apparently my assignment today is to come in and make things more complicated.
Which, as a PhD student, I feel uniquely qualified to do.
But I do want to stay with that question of attention, because for the past several months I’ve been engaged in a practice that has become much more important to me than I expected.
There is a black walnut tree behind our house in Spartanburg.
And most mornings, I go outside and sit with it.
That’s about it.
I take a chair. I sit for twenty or thirty minutes. I usually take a photograph. I notice what’s happening. Then I record some reflections afterward.
I began doing this partly because of my doctoral research. I study ecology, spirituality, religion, and phenomenology, which is a philosophical tradition concerned, among other things, with how things actually appear to us in experience.
I’ve been developing an idea I call “ecological intentionality,” and sitting with one particular tree seemed like a reasonable way of testing some of the things I was thinking about.
And the strange thing is that the longer I’ve done it, the less certain I’ve become.
I mean that in a good way.
At first, it’s easy to sit beneath a tree and start interpreting.
This branch reaches toward the light.
This walnut has fallen to the ground.
This limb resisted the storm.
The tree is giving.
The tree is communicating.
The tree is teaching me.
Maybe some of those ways of speaking have value. But after sitting there day after day, I began to notice how quickly I moved from what I was actually seeing to what I wanted the tree to mean.
I could see a branch moving in the wind. I could not necessarily say that the tree was “reaching.”
I could see walnuts on the ground. I could not say that the tree had “given” them to me.
One morning I noticed fungal bodies growing from a branch that was still attached to the tree. Several days later, after storms had come through, that same branch was lying on the ground.
Those things I could say.
But the temptation was immediately to tell a story about them. The tree rejected the branch. The fungus killed it. The storm liberated it. The branch had somehow become available for me to take.
And suddenly my twenty minutes of careful observation had become a very elaborate autobiography.
The tree had developed exactly the philosophy that Sam needed it to have that morning.
That should probably make us suspicious.
So one of the sentences I’ve written in my field notes lately is this:
“Availability is not invitation.”
Just because something is available to me does not mean it exists for me.
And that has become one of the most important lessons of this practice.
The closer I look, the more present the tree becomes. But in some ways, the more mysterious it becomes too.
I know more, and I become more aware of what I don’t know.
That tension is at the heart of what I’ve been working on.
One of the philosophers important to my research is Edith Stein. She spent a great deal of time thinking about empathy and about what it means to encounter another being.
Her basic insight, put much more plainly than she puts it, is that another person really is present to me, but the other person’s experience is never given to me in exactly the same way that my own experience is.
I can encounter you. I can know you. I can love you. But I can never fully possess your experience from the inside.
Another philosopher important to me, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, reminds us that we never stand outside the world looking down upon it from nowhere.
We are bodies. We see from somewhere. We carry histories, habits, assumptions, abilities, wounds, hopes, and expectations into everything we encounter.
There is no view from above where I finally see everything exactly as it is.
And I find that both humbling and liberating.
Because it means the goal of attention is not mastery.
The goal might be to learn how to remain in relationship with something that exceeds my understanding.
And that brings me to the title of this talk.
“What We Notice, What We Owe.”
Because attention by itself doesn’t make us ethical.
People can pay extraordinary attention in order to exploit something. Advertisers pay attention. Surveillance systems pay attention. Industries can study forests, rivers, animals, and human communities with incredible care in order to extract more efficiently from them.
So “pay attention” isn’t enough.
The real question is:
What kind of attention are we practicing?
Is it an attention that merely makes the world more available to us, or one that leaves us open to being interrupted, corrected, and changed by what we encounter?
That, I think, is where attention begins to become an ethical and even a spiritual practice.
And here in Lake Norman, you have an extraordinary example of how complicated this can become.
We call this place Lake Norman.
And of course it is a lake.
But before it was Lake Norman, it was the Catawba River.
Beginning in 1959, Cowans Ford Dam was built across the Catawba. Water rose behind it, eventually covering more than 32,000 acres.
Roads disappeared beneath the water.
Home sites disappeared.
Old crossings disappeared.
A river became a reservoir.
And today that water is many things at once: electricity, drinking water, habitat, recreation, waterfront property, economic development, memory.
And it is still water moving through the Catawba watershed.
None of those descriptions is necessarily false.
But none of them exhausts the place.
I also noticed that your own materials acknowledge that this region carries histories far older than the name Lake Norman, including the histories of the Catawba and other Indigenous peoples who have lived in relationship with these lands and waters.
An acknowledgment like that matters when it complicates our seeing.
It reminds us that the landscape in front of us is never only the landscape we happen to see today.
Places carry histories. Watersheds carry histories. Communities carry histories.
Attention can teach us to notice what our first glance leaves in the background.
This is one reason I appreciate the Unitarian Universalist language of an interdependent world.
But interdependence doesn’t mean harmony.
Trees compete for light. Animals eat other animals. Storms break branches. Human goods conflict with one another and with the goods of other creatures.
The same lake can be drinking water, habitat, recreation, power generation, ancestral landscape, and valuable real estate.
Those goods do not always line up neatly.
So recognizing interdependence doesn’t solve our ethical problems.
Sometimes it reveals how difficult they actually are.
One shared world does not mean one obvious good.
And that means attention must eventually become responsibility.
Not because careful observation magically tells us what to do, but because once we begin to see relationships that we had ignored, we can no longer pretend they aren’t there.
That’s true ecologically.
And I think it’s true of our human relationships too.
There are people whom our society has learned not to notice, histories we have been trained not to see, and neighbors we turn into categories long before we encounter them as people.
Attention cannot solve all of that.
But perhaps it can interrupt one of the habits that makes injustice possible: the belief that what we have noticed about another person is all there is to know.
The philosopher in me wants to say that no other being is exhausted by my perception of them.
The minister in me wants to say that this sounds a lot like humility.
And the person sitting under a walnut tree every morning is learning that humility does not mean doing nothing.
That matters because we can turn uncertainty into an excuse.
“I don’t fully understand this ecosystem, so I can’t act.”
“I don’t fully understand another person’s experience, so I have no responsibility.”
But we never get complete knowledge.
We act anyway.
The question is whether our action remains open to correction.
Can we care without pretending to possess? Can we make commitments while remaining willing to be changed by what we encounter next?
My own Christian tradition has something to contribute here.
One of the things Jesus says is, “Consider the lilies.”
And I love that word: consider.
Look.
Attend.
Before the explanation, before the doctrine, before the conclusion, there is an invitation to notice something alive that was already there.
My tradition hasn’t always been especially good at that.
Christians have sometimes been much better at explaining what creation means than at paying attention to what creation is doing.
We’ve been good at turning the world into symbol.
Less good, sometimes, at allowing the world to remain a world.
And perhaps that’s why this little practice with the walnut has mattered so much to me.
It keeps putting me back in my chair.
Back in this body.
Back in this particular place.
Back before the temptation to make the world mean what I need it to mean.
In an earlier piece of my research, I wrote a phrase that has stayed with me:
First, the seeing, then the keeping.
I’m less certain now about what “seeing” means than I was when I wrote it.
And I’m probably less certain about “keeping” too.
But I still think the order matters.
First, learn to attend.
Then ask what care requires.
Maybe keeping doesn’t mean possessing.
Maybe keeping means tending, protecting, remaining faithful to a relationship.
Learning enough about a place that its destruction can no longer be abstract.
Learning enough about another person that their suffering cannot remain a category.
Learning enough about the tree outside your window that it ceases to be scenery.
And perhaps that is where what we notice begins to shape what we owe.
Tomorrow morning, I’ll probably sit beneath that walnut tree again.
I don’t expect it to tell me what to do.
I’ll sit.
I’ll look.
I’ll listen.
I’ll probably misunderstand something.
Hopefully I’ll notice enough to correct some of the misunderstanding.
And then I’ll try to carry that practice into the rest of the day.
Because the tree is not asking me to become a tree.
The Catawba is not asking us to become water.
Our neighbors are not asking us to fully possess their experience before we care for them.
Maybe what is being asked of us is harder and more ordinary than that:
To be present.
To pay attention.
To remain teachable.
And then, with all the incomplete knowledge we have, to act with care.
First, the seeing.
Then, the keeping.
What we notice.
And what we owe.
Thank you.
After the Talk
The formal meditation ended there, but the conversation afterward is part of what I want to remember.
I had asked two questions for the congregation’s Talk Back:
What is something you’ve learned to notice differently because you stayed with it long enough?
And has that change in attention ever changed what you felt responsible for?
From there we wandered, happily, into trees and fungal networks and watersheds and the complicated ways living systems are connected.
That seems appropriate.
The project began, after all, with a very small act.
Go outside.
Sit down.
Stay long enough to notice that the tree is not what you first thought it was.
Then stay a little longer.
I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a great deal of philosophical, ecological, and spiritual work contained in that practice.
And tomorrow morning, I’ll go sit beneath the walnut again.
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