I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to let the world appear.
Not to analyze it.
Not to manage it.
Not even to care for it (at least not yet).
Just to allow the world to show up as something other than an extension of myself.
So much of contemporary life trains us in a posture of extraction. We move through days asking what can be used, optimized, corrected, or explained. Even our best intentions, from ethical concern, activism, and compassion, often arrive after the world has already been reduced to an object of concern. We rush toward response without lingering long enough with perception.
But perception, I’m increasingly convinced, is not neutral. It is already a moral act.
To perceive carefully is to allow the possibility that what I encounter exceeds me… that it carries its own depth, rhythm, and interiority, even if I cannot name it. This is true when I’m listening to another person speak. It’s also true when I’m standing near a tree, watching weather move across a field, or reading a text written centuries ago by someone whose world I will never fully inhabit.
What we often call empathy begins here, not as feeling-with, but as restraint. A refusal to rush in. A willingness to let the other remain partially opaque.
This matters because many of our current crises (ecological, political, spiritual, especially) are not simply failures of care. They are failures of attention. We have learned how to act without learning how to see. The result is a world that feels thin, instrumental, and endlessly available for use.
But when the world is allowed to appear on its own terms, something shifts. Places become storied rather than scenic. Communities become thick with memory rather than data points. Nonhuman life stops being “environment” and starts registering as presence. This doesn’t give us an answer about what to do next. And maybe that’s the point.
Before ethics, there is perception.
Before action, there is address.
Before care, there is the quiet discipline of letting the world show up as more than ours.
Today, at least, that feels like enough.
I’m trying to practice this kind of attention in small, ordinary ways. This past year, that practice has taken the form of tracking a black walnut tree in my backyard… returning to it again and again, not to extract meaning, but to notice what shows itself over time. The notes from that ongoing practice are gathered at samharrelson.com/tracking. It’s a reminder, for me at least, that learning to let the world appear is not a theory so much as a habit… one that grows slowly, like the tree itself.