black walnut Archives - Sam Harrelson

What We Notice, What We Owe: A Black Walnut at UU Lake Norman

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.

Intimacy with Remainder: Toward Ecological Intentionality

Notes toward an ecological intentionality, between one comprehensive exam and the next

The black walnut behind our house is dropping fruit again. It does this every year before I think it should. By late July, while the rest of the yard still seems occupied with the green abundance of summer, the first walnuts begin striking the roof of the shed and landing in the grass with a weight you can hear from inside. Their husks are green and firm at first. Give them a few days in the heat and rain and they soften, darken, and stain whatever touches them.

I have been watching this tree for several seasons now. Watching may be too dignified a word for some of it. I step around the walnuts when I cut the grass. I move them before Lily finds one and decides it belongs inside. I watch the squirrels carry them along the fence and occasionally find one buried in a flowerpot where no walnut tree could possibly grow for long. The tree has become a familiar part of the arrangement of our yard, and familiarity carries its own danger. A thing seen every day can disappear into its usefulness, inconvenience, name, or location. It becomes shade. It becomes mess. It becomes the black walnut behind the house.

Yet the tree keeps exceeding every one of those descriptions.

That excess is where much of my academic work has been gathering. Over the summer, I completed the first of two comprehensive examinations for my doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The paper tried to give a philosophical and theological account of something I have been circling for several years: how another living being becomes perceptible as a life with its own directedness, its own tempo, and its own manner of inhabiting a world.

I have been calling this ecological intentionality.

The phrase names an encounter between two kinds of directedness. A living being tends toward and within its world through the powers by which it maintains and develops its form. A perceiver, also embodied and situated, can encounter that directed life without exhausting it. The walnut reaches through soil, water, light, season, damage, and repair. I encounter some part of that activity from within another body, another tempo, and another set of concerns. Both of us inhabit a larger ecological field that neither of us contains.

That formulation is still under construction. It almost certainly has weak joints I can’t yet see. The first comprehensive paper built the basic frame through Aristotle, Edith Stein, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Ruyer, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Marder, and John of the Cross. It ended by asking what has to happen to a perceiver whose habits of mastery continue to turn a living being into something available for possession, even after the perceiver has learned to describe that being more carefully.

The second examination begins this fall. It returns to several questions the first paper left open, especially a tension between Edith Stein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty that I think may lead somewhere important.

The formulation I am working with is this:

Stein’s non-primordiality and Merleau-Ponty’s écart can be read as complementary disciplines within ecological intentionality. Flesh names the shared sensible field that makes encounter possible; non-primordiality names the irreducible difference that every encounter preserves. Their conjunction describes ecological relation as intimacy with remainder.

That sentence is dense enough to require some unpacking, and I am still unpacking it myself.

Stein and the distance within empathy

Edith Stein wrote On the Problem of Empathy as a young philosopher working in the early phenomenological movement around Edmund Husserl. Empathy, for Stein, has a more exact meaning than the word usually carries now. Stein uses it for the experience through which another’s experience becomes genuinely given to me as another’s, beyond kindness, emotional sensitivity, or the imaginative act of placing myself in someone else’s situation.

If a friend is grieving, I can encounter the grief as real and as belonging to this person before me. I do not live the grief from the point at which my friend lives it. It is primordial there and non-primordial here. The experience becomes present to me without becoming mine.

This is one of Stein’s great contributions. The distance between us remains within the empathy itself. Greater understanding does not gradually erase the distinction between the one grieving and the one who encounters that grief. I may listen more carefully, learn the history, recognize the gestures of a body I know well, and follow the grief into a richer fulfillment. The other person still possesses a center of experience I do not occupy.

Stein calls the lived body the Leib, distinguishing it from the body considered as a physical thing, the Körper. The lived body is a zero point of orientation, a center around which a world opens. Another person appears through an expressive body as another such center. Empathy gives genuine access, though never total access. Something remains.

That remainder is easy to misinterpret as a failure. We often imagine that perfect understanding would eliminate the distance between us. Stein’s account suggests that some distance belongs to truthful understanding. The other’s inexhaustibility is part of what is given.

This becomes especially important when I turn from another person toward the more-than-human world. A dog expresses pain, anticipation, fear, trust, and excitement through a body whose movements I can learn to read. The mode of fulfillment differs from my encounter with another person, and bodily difference matters. At the vegetal limit, the problem becomes sharper. The black walnut discloses directed activity through growth, fruiting, response, damage, and seasonal form. I can perceive a life underway. I do not know what it is like to be this tree, or even whether that sentence asks the right question of a plant.

The tree’s distance from me belongs inside the relation and disciplines it. Stein protects the tree from the confidence with which I might turn my own experience into a theory of its interior.

Merleau-Ponty and the flesh of belonging

Stein gives me a powerful account of the other center, though her analysis can leave a further question waiting. How do these centers belong to one another before empathy becomes an explicit act? What makes encounter possible in the first place?

Merleau-Ponty begins with the body already involved in a world. We don’t first exist as sealed minds and then work our way outward toward trees, other people, water, soil, or weather. Perception arises through a body that can move, touch, see, hear, reach, tire, hunger, and be wounded. The body opens a world because it already belongs to that world.

His later work names this belonging through the flesh of the world. Flesh names the intertwining through which the one who sees is also visible, and the one who touches can also be touched. Reading it as one mystical substance from which everything is made would obscure the divergence carried within that intertwining. My hand belongs to the tangible world it explores. My body stands among the things it sees. Perception carries exposure within it.

This reversibility is never complete. When one hand touches the other, the touching hand and the touched hand can exchange roles, though they never coincide perfectly in one completed experience. Merleau-Ponty uses écart to name a divergence or gap that persists within relation. Belonging has a spacing within it. The world joins us without making us identical.

This is what Merleau-Ponty can bring to ecological intentionality. The walnut and I meet within the same rain, summer heat, Piedmont clay, gravity, and changing light. We participate in the same watershed, though we inhabit it through very different bodies and at very different tempos. The tree is visible because both of us already belong to a sensible world. I am also visible within that world. The encounter runs in more than one direction, even where the directions are unequal.

Merleau-Ponty explains belonging.

Stein protects otherness.

I am trying to determine whether those accounts can inhabit one framework.

Intimacy with remainder

The risk on Stein’s side is that the protection of otherness can leave living beings standing across a distance that has to be bridged. Empathy may begin to look like a passage between centers already formed in isolation. The ecological field, bodily participation, and reciprocal exposure remain thinly described.

The risk on Merleau-Ponty’s side is almost the reverse. Flesh and intertwining can become so encompassing that the other creature’s distinct life begins to dissolve into shared belonging. Ecological writing is especially vulnerable to this move. We speak of kinship, communion, interconnection, and entanglement. Those words can tell the truth. They can also make us feel closer than our attention has earned.

Stein’s non-primordiality may provide an internal discipline for Merleau-Ponty’s flesh. Merleau-Ponty’s écart may describe the belonging within which non-primordial encounter becomes possible. Flesh names the shared sensible field. Non-primordiality names the difference that the field never abolishes.

Their conjunction is what I mean by intimacy with remainder.

Intimacy means that encounter is real. Bodies participate in one world and become perceptible through that participation. The walnut is not a private image projected by my consciousness. Its roots, crown, leaves, fruit, wounds, and responses belong to a life that shows itself through its activity. I can learn this tree. I can be changed by learning it.

Remainder means that the tree’s life never becomes equivalent to its appearance for me. Better knowledge deepens the encounter while leaving the tree’s own center, activity, and history excessive to my horizon. The remainder names the irreducibility of a life whose activity belongs to itself. It requires no occult essence hidden behind appearances.

This may be another way of speaking about love. Love requires nearness, attention, vulnerability, and real involvement. Love also gives up the fantasy that nearness grants possession. The beloved remains more than the lover’s experience of them. Ecological relation may require the same discipline.

The cross and the danger of innocence

My larger theological framework is something I have been calling The Ecology of the Cross, borrowing deliberately from Stein’s final, unfinished book, The Science of the Cross. In the first comprehensive paper, I used the Carmelite tradition to describe the transformation of a perceiver whose appetite for mastery keeps converting what is given into what is available.

Attention alone does not cure possession. I can know the walnut’s species, record its phenology, learn the chemistry of juglone, photograph its bark, and describe its place in the yard while continuing to see it primarily as mine. Better information can coexist with ownership’s deepest habits. The Ecology of the Cross asks what kind of dispossession those habits require.

That word now needs more care than I gave it at first. Cruciform dispossession describes the loosening of a perceiver’s claim to mastery. Material dispossession describes the imposed loss of land, inheritance, access, home, and political power. The first can never be prescribed to people suffering the second. A theology of self-emptying becomes dangerous when it is preached by those who benefit from someone else’s loss.

This is another direction the second examination will take. Melanie Harris’s ecowomanism and LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant’s work on lived memory among Gullah/Geechee women press the framework toward histories and forms of presence that phenomenological attention by itself cannot supply. No perception of a place begins without history. Land carries memory, ownership, labor, grief, displacement, religious practice, and relations with the dead. These may not announce themselves to the solitary observer who believes careful attention has made him innocent.

Intimacy with remainder therefore has political consequences. The remainder includes the creature’s excess over my perception. It also includes the histories my perception has not yet learned to see. Restraint before the other requires curiosity about what has been concealed, suppressed, or made unavailable to me.

The Piedmont and Lowcountry cannot become interchangeable examples of “Carolina nature” in this work. The black walnut grounds my own sustained practice of attention in Spartanburg. Gullah/Geechee lived religion enters as an interlocutor with histories, practices, and meanings that exceed my framework. If ecological intentionality is worth anything, particular places must be able to correct its concepts.

A work still underway

I don’t know yet whether Stein and Merleau-Ponty will finally hold together in the way I am proposing. Their questions are different. Stein asks how another experience is given as another’s. Merleau-Ponty asks how perceiver and perceived arise within an intertwined sensible field. Non-primordiality may turn out to be the experiential form of écart between embodied centers. That is a possibility I need to earn through the texts.

Other questions remain. Can Ruyer’s account of a living form’s self-survey help explain why damage and flourishing are real for the organism itself? Can Maximus’s account of the logoi hold creaturely integrity and cosmic participation together? How deeply does incarnation enter biological vulnerability and evolutionary suffering? What kinds of historical and political analysis must accompany phenomenology if attention is to become accountable?

These are questions for the fall and, likely, for the dissertation that follows. For now, intimacy with remainder gives me a phrase for the kind of relation I am trying to describe.

The walnuts will keep falling for another month or so. Their husks will darken in the grass. The squirrels will carry some away, and a few will remain hidden until I strike them with the mower next spring. I will continue trying to see the tree whose life makes all of this possible, knowing that the seeing matters and that the tree remains more than anything I will manage to say about it.

Perhaps ecological love begins there: close enough to be marked, attentive enough to be corrected, and humble enough to leave a remainder.

References and Further Reading

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Harris, Melanie L. Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2017.

John of the Cross. The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991.

Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda S. Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

Marder, Michael. “Plant Intelligence and Attention.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 8, no. 5 (2013): e23902.

Marder, Michael. “Plant Intentionality and the Phenomenological Framework of Plant Intelligence.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 7, no. 11 (2012): 1365–1372.

Maximus the Confessor. On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua. Vol. 1. Edited and translated by Nicholas Constas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Compiled by Dominique Séglard. Translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge, 2012.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

Ruyer, Raymond. Neofinalism. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Stein, Edith. Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being. Translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 9. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Translated by Waltraut Stein. 3rd revised edition. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989.

Stein, Edith. The Science of the Cross. Translated by Josephine Koeppel. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 6. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002.

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas

As I’ve been working on my PhD Comprehensive Exams this summer, I’ve been frequently asking myself what it is I’m actually trying to write.

That sounds like the sort of question I should have answered a long time ago, especially after years of blogging, teaching, preaching, consulting, podcasting, and now reading for a PhD in ecology, spirituality, and religion. But the truth is that sometimes you only recognize the shape of your work after you’ve been doing it for a while (which I often said to my middle and high school students as they journeyed). You look back over a few poems, a few essays, a few notes written in the early morning before the kids are fully awake, and you begin to notice the threads.

In the midst of this, a phrase came to me while working in the yard to gather oak, maple, and walnut branches after a summer thunderstorm:

Sacramental Place Poetry Rooted in the Carolinas.

I like that term because it gives an expression to something I’ve been working on for years without pinning it down too tightly. I don’t think of my poems as “nature poems” in the abstract. I’m not usually writing about nature as scenery or background, and frankly don’t like the term (or “wilderness”). I’m writing about places that have addressed me in some way.

Obviously, there’s the black walnut tree in our yard here in Spartanburg. Cedar roses gathered from the front yard for an anniversary with Merianna, tobacco fields giving way to pine. Red clay and rain in the Piedmont. The Pee Dee. The Lowcountry. Rivers, ditches, old roads, churchyards, school mornings, family errands, and the small objects children leave behind in the grass.

Those things aren’t decorative, but are part of the grammar of my life.

I grew up in South Carolina, left for a while, and have spent a good portion of my adult life trying to understand what it means to belong to a place without pretending that belonging is simple. The Carolinas are beautiful, but they certainly aren’t innocent. Every landscape here carries memory. Indigenous presence and erasure. Enslaved labor and tobacco money. Church bells with pine plantations. Family stories. Stormwater ditches. Kudzu. Development. Black walnuts and cedars. The land remembers more than we do, and much of my writing has become an attempt to listen (before I offer something of an explanation).

That’s probably why trees show up so often in my poems and essays. Trees have become, for me, a kind of theological tutor. Instead of rushing or arguing in the way we argue, they receive weather, injury, children, birds, insects, drought, and time. They aren’t passive as some Aristotelians might veer towards, though. They’re constantly negotiating relation.

Roots, fungi, water, light, decay, growth, fruit, shade. There’s a whole world of attention happening in a tree, and most of it takes place beneath the level of our human perceptions or notice.

My own daily practice beneath the black walnut in our yard has taught me that attention isn’t a mood any more than creativity, with all of its weirdness and fickle muse, is. Attention is a discipline. Some mornings, nothing dramatic happens. A squirrel fusses while a Northern Cardinal cuts across the yard. A walnut falls. A child’s toy sits where it was abandoned the day before. The grass is wet while my coffee gets cold. But given enough mornings, these small things become more than small things. They become a way of being instructed by the world.

That’s where the sacramental language comes in for me.

By sacramental, I don’t mean that every leaf is a sermon illustration, or that every tree needs to be turned into a symbol as quickly as possible. I mean (almost) the opposite. The sacramental begins when the world is allowed to be itself deeply enough that it discloses more than itself, as Merleau-Ponty has taught me. A walnut remains a walnut while a cedar cone remains a cedar cone, no matter how much I want to apply an abstract level of emotion like love onto it. Red clay remains red clay. But in their full presence, they also carry relation, memory, gift, wound, and grace.

That has shaped the way I think about theology, too. I’m an ordained minister, and I still believe that Christian language has something true and necessary to say about the world. But I’ve become much less interested in theology that hovers above place and more interested in theology that has dirt under its fingernails as I’ve aged. The cross, for instance, has become harder for me to imagine only as an abstract doctrine. It was actually wood before it was a symbol. It was tree before it was theology. The Cross belonged to the same creation that Christian faith too often treats as stage scenery for human salvation.

So when I write about the Cross as a ruined tree, or grace as something greening through what has already been given, I’m not trying to be clever. I’m trying to recover something that should have been obvious all along, in my opinion… faith happens somewhere. Salvation, if we are going to use that word (another one of those words I struggle with, much like nature and wilderness), cannot mean escape from this world that God loves. It must involve learning how to see, inhabit, repair, and love this world more truthfully.

That’s also why family appears so often in what I write. My poems are full of trees, but they are also full of children’s laughter, marriage, errands, school mornings, half-finished meals, books, socks in the grass, and the ordinary clutter of a house where life is actually happening.

I don’t want a spirituality that requires me to leave all of that behind in order to find depth. The depth is there already. The trick is learning how to notice it without sentimentalizing it.

A cedar rose gathered from the yard can become a way of thinking about marriage. A walnut falling in the grass can become an invitation. A child’s forgotten shovel near the fence can become part of the liturgy of a morning. These aren’t grand revelations in the usual sense. To me, they’re more like reminders that nothing here is only here.

The Carolina part matters, too. I don’t want to write as if place were interchangeable. The Piedmont is not the Lowcountry. The Pee Dee is not Appalachia by any means. Spartanburg is not Marion County, though both live in me now (and certainly not Greenville, despite how much some folks in elected offices here seem to want that to be the case). Each place has its own ecology of memory. Each place teaches attention differently. The Carolina landscape has formed my imagination in ways I am still trying to understand: the humidity, the pine straw, the old church Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist languages and songs, the roads between small towns, the sound of summer insects, the uneasy layering of beauty and violence, tenderness and history.

Maybe that is why poetry feels increasingly necessary to me in my present context. Prose can explain, and I do love prose for that. Essays let me follow an idea, trace a history, build an argument, and hopefully make a convincing case. But poetry lets me stay closer to the moment before explanation closes around it. Poetry gives me a way to let the walnut fall, to let the cedar open, to let ruin become river before I decide too quickly what any of it means.

I don’t know that I set out to become a person who writes poems of place. I had no idea I’d have numerous poems published in anthologies and literary magazines. I certainly didn’t set out to write “sacramental place poetry rooted in the Carolinas,” because that phrase only arrived rather unexpectedly after the work had already begun. But I can see now that much of what I write is an attempt to practice a kind of ecological attention. I’m trying to attend to the more-than-human world, to the household, to memory, to Christian faith, to the old wounds and stubborn grace of this region, and to the ways all of these keep speaking through one another.

That may be why I keep returning to the same images of trees, rain, children, ruin, roots, rivers, crosses, fields, and birds. The “ordinary” holiness of a yard in the morning.

I’m writing because I want to remember that the world is alive with address.

I’m writing because I want to learn how to receive that address without rushing to master it.

I’m writing because the Carolinas have made claims on me, and I suspect I will spend the rest of my life learning how to answer.

These days, that answer often comes as a poem.

And with that, here’s a poem I wrote:

The Walnut Keeps Time in Spartanburg

At the edge of the yard in Spartanburg, where the black walnut leans into its own weather, morning arrives without asking to be believed.

The children have left their small offerings behind: a sun-faded ball in the clover, a plastic shovel near the fence, one damp sock folded by rain into the grass.

The tree receives them all with the old patience of wood, lifting nothing, refusing nothing, making a chapel from shade and green husk.

I sit beneath it with coffee gone cool and a book open in my lap, trying again to learn what the world says before I ask it to mean something.

The walnut does not hurry. It darkens its fruit slowly, lets squirrels argue overhead, lets ants keep their bright roads through the red clay.

Somewhere beyond the yard, traffic gathers itself toward school and work, toward errands, bells, the ordinary liturgies of another Carolina morning.

But here, under this rough crown, time is not a line so much as a widening ring, the hidden labor of root and rain, the way a life grows inward before anyone sees what it has become.

I think of the cross, not polished and lifted high, but once a tree, once sap, once leaf, once a body drinking light from the same sun that warms my hands.

Maybe grace is like that, not arriving from elsewhere, but greening through what has already been given: this yard, this breath, these children growing louder, this marriage of errands and mercy, this Piedmont soil holding more memory than I know how to carry.

A walnut falls. Then another.

The sound is small, almost comic, a wooden knock against the day’s closed door.

Still, I hear it as invitation.

Pay attention, it says. Nothing here is only here. Even the bruised fruit splitting in the grass is busy becoming food, stain, shadow, and prayer.

What the Soil Remembers

There is a black walnut tree in the backyard of our house here in Spartanburg. Every September, it drops its fruit, and the thick green husks split open, staining the ground (and the fingers of our children) dark. The squirrels know the timing better than we do. The tree has been doing this longer than anyone on the street has been alive.

But according to a growing body of research, it has been doing something else during that time too… something largely invisible and harder to name. Beneath the soil, networks of fungal threads connect the roots of the walnut to other plants and organisms in ways scientists are still working to describe. And the question those networks keep raising is not simply biological. It is perceptual. It is asking us whether we know how to pay attention to what is right beneath us.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at Princeton University working across institutions in the United States and Europe published new findings on mycorrhizal fungi (the microscopic threads that link plant roots underground). Using imaging techniques refined over several years, they mapped not only how the architecture of these underground networks forms, but also the fluid motions occurring inside fungal tubes roughly one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, through which nutrients flow back and forth throughout the organism. These networks move carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus across remarkable distances through the soil, allowing plants and fungi to exchange resources through a shared infrastructure that predates our street, our city, and the entire textile economy that built it.

As one researcher put it simply, there are all these things happening underground that no one ever thinks about because they cannot see them.

That invisibility is part of what makes this hard to talk about in practical terms. We tend to extend moral consideration to what we can perceive… and the soil beneath the tulip poplars and white oaks lining the creek corridors through Spartanburg is not legible to us in ordinary ways. But legibility is not the same as presence.

The forests surrounding Greenville and Spartanburg sit at a remarkable ecological threshold. The southern Appalachians are considered one of the most biologically diverse regions of the temperate world, according to the South Carolina Native Plant Society, and the Piedmont foothills carry that diversity into the clay-heavy, iron-stained soils that anyone who has gardened here knows immediately. Those soils formed over millions of years as the ancient Appalachians weathered and eroded, leaving behind a mineral complexity that still shapes which species grow where, which fungi partner with which roots, which relationships persist, and which collapse under pressure.

The forests here also carry a complicated history. The mid-twentieth-century abandonment of row crops allowed forests to return to the Piedmont, though not the oak and hickory that typified earlier centuries. Loblolly pine colonized the abandoned cotton fields first. Sweetgum, tulip poplar, and red maple followed. The visible forest changed, but the deeper processes in the soil continued shaping recovery in ways the canopy did not reveal. Seedbanks persisted underground while fungal communities survived in fragments. Mycorrhizal networks that had supported older forests were interrupted but not entirely erased. When we walk through Croft State Park today, or along the Pacolet River corridor, we are moving through forests still rebuilding themselves after those earlier disturbances. The soil carries those histories in its structure and microbial communities. In that sense, the forest remembers… not through anything like human memory, but through ecological processes unfolding across decades.

Plants and fungi developed a partnership lasting over 400 million years, one that may have enabled plants to colonize dry landmasses and transform them into prolific habitats for terrestrial life (Springer). The relationship is not incidental to the forest, but is constitutional. Mycorrhizal fungal networks linking the roots of trees facilitate inter-tree communication via resource sharing, defense signaling, and kin recognition, influencing what researchers describe as sophisticated behavior among neighboring plants (ResearchGate). Some researchers have gone further, exploring what a recent paper in Symbiosis called “extended plant cognition” and the possibility that plants benefit from the cognition and behavior of mycorrhizal fungi to enhance their own survival, including foraging complementarity, expanded perception of the below-ground environment, and shaping the mycorrhizal community to meet survival needs.

The language here is careful and contested, and it should be. This is not the same as saying trees think in the way we do. But the underlying ecological picture is not nothing. Responsiveness within a forest does not appear to reside solely within individual organisms. It emerges through relationships linking plants, fungi, and soil communities in ways that begin to look less like isolated biological transactions and more like what phenomenologists might call a field of distributed perception… awareness that is not located anywhere in particular but present throughout the whole.

I have been exploring this idea in my own writing as ecological intentionality (the practice of attentive presence that recognizes humans as participants in, not observers of, the living world). What the mycorrhizal research keeps returning me to is how thoroughly that participatory logic runs through the forest itself. The sweetgums and beeches, the stands of loblolly along the old field margins, the black walnut in the backyard… each of these participates in a network of exchange that extends through the soil and across time in ways that our usual categories of “individual” and “organism” struggle to hold.

This matters for more than philosophical reasons here in the Upstate. As I wrote earlier this year about Project Spero (the proposed AI data center at the Tyger River Industrial Park), the questions it raised were ultimately about more than megawatts and gallons of water. They were about what kinds of relationships between land, water, and intelligence we are willing to normalize in this place. The project was eventually withdrawn after months of community opposition (a moment of civic attention worth studying carefully). But the broader pressure it represented has not disappeared. Proposals like it will keep arriving in communities like ours, asking us to decide how much of the landscape’s capacity (including its soil capacity, its fungal capacity, its slow-built ecological memory) should be redirected toward sustaining planetary-scale computation whose primary benefits flow elsewhere.

The question for a forest, if we can ask it that way, is not whether development will come. It is whether the networks beneath the soil can persist through what arrives. Those networks are not infinitely resilient. Mycorrhizal interactions play a foundational role in global patterns and structures of forest diversity, with mycorrhizal tree type systematically mediating the strength of competitive and cooperative dynamics within communities (Nature). What that means at the scale of a particular watershed is that the diversity and responsiveness of a forest depend not only on which species are present aboveground, but on the web of relationships in the soil (many of which are species-specific, many of which take decades to establish, and all of which can be severed quickly).

Donna Haraway has a word I keep returning to in this context, one I thought about recently when writing about the first signs of spring… composting. The idea that life continues through processes of breakdown, recombination, and transformation. Nothing simply disappears. Things are continually folded back into the living systems that surround them. The brown leaves underfoot right now on the trails at Croft carry last year’s sunlight and last year’s rain into the soil that is already shaping what grows next spring. The forest floor is composting memory into future life.

The black walnut in our backyard does not need me to make this argument. It has been making its own version of it for longer than the street has had a name, through a language of carbon, phosphorus, and fungal exchange that we are only beginning to have instruments sensitive enough to partially read.

The question is not whether that language is happening. The question is whether we are willing to develop the kind of attention it requires… and whether we can build that attention into the civic and ecological decisions we are already making about this place.

More Reading…

Simard, Suzanne W., Ryan, Teresa L., and Perry, David A. “Response to Questions About Common Mycorrhizal Networks.” Frontiers in Forests and Global Change (January 2025). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/forests-and-global-change/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2024.1512518/full

Ma, Xiaofan and Limpens, Erik. “Networking via Mycorrhizae.” Frontiers in Agricultural Science and Engineering 12, no. 1 (2025): 37–46. https://journal.hep.com.cn/fase/EN/10.15302/J-FASE-2024578

“Research Reveals the Underground Traffic Between Fungi and Plants.” Princeton University, March 25, 2025. https://www.princeton.edu/news/2025/03/25/research-reveals-underground-traffic-between-fungi-and-plants

Leyval, C. et al. “How Mycorrhizal Fungi Could Extend Plant Cognitive Processes.” Symbiosis (2025). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13199-025-01065-y

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) — Global Mycorrhizal Mapping Initiative: https://spun.earth

South Carolina Native Plant Society — Upstate Chapter https://scnps.org/upstate

Letting the World Appear

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.

Tracking a Tree

Back in January, I started tracking a black walnut (juglans nigra) in our backyard as part of coursework in my PhD studies. It seems like an innocuous thing to “track” a “tree,” doesn’t it? Those are in the form of regular audio reflections and pictures I’ve collected here.

The above video is from a snippet of reflections that I put together using Google’s fascinating and important NotebookLM. If there ever was something beneficial that has come from our early explorations with AI, this is definitely one.

Turns out, the practice (ritual?) has been quite transformative for me as a human. Moving from the winter months of little growth and “change” perceptible to us to an onlsaught of green sprouts and leaves emerging day-by-day over the spring and summer to the development of seed pods to now observing the falling leaves (and seed pods) has been an experience outside of our own conceptions of time. From phenomenology to existentialism to Christian ecology, it’s been quite the journey so far.

I hope some of that transformation has in some way contributed to the story of the black walnut that I’ve shared so many insights, tears, prayers, and reflections with over the course of the year.

You can see the images and hear the full audio recordings here at https://samharrelson.com/tracking.