life is unfathomably rich and gorgeous OK .
Life tip: guy who doesn't know birds goes on a walk every day and sees brown birds. Guy who is curious about the world learns the birds and sees that there are many different types of brown bird. Look, that one is a tree sparrow, not a house sparrow!
Guy who doesn't know birds goes on the same walk 10,000 times. Guy who knows birds goes on 10,000 different walks. Find something that interests you and delve. esp. if it's something common and everyday, because then you see something amazing commonly and everyday-ly.
ALSO tip. There is only so much human-scale variety a commute can contain. So change your scale. In the first few pages of Dr. R. Wall-Kimmerer's Gathering Moss she mentions having her hand-lens (magnifying glass) with her always , and I saw this and went hey, I should also do that. And yes! Absolutely do that if you have the means! For the micro-scale critter or the moss or such, a few steps away is a different world. Look closely and see them and see their variety.
Anyways, it is nice to be able to look at things very closely on a whim.
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The "thing" about nature is that every part of it flourishes with smaller sub-components. This post, which, up to this paragraph, I had written 6 months ago, was inspired by myself seeing the Capillary Threadmoss Ptychostomum capillare growing on an old stone wall.
At the time I was, indeed, fresh off the heels of Gathering Moss and was just beginning to learn about the mosses in my own life. P. capillare caught my eye because its bright green reproductive capsules are lifted above the body of the moss by thin, reddish stalks, presumably so they are more likely to be buffeted by the weather and get washed away to grow somewhere else. I didn't have my hand-lens (which, like Dr. Wall-Kimmerer, I also had held onto since undergrad), but I did have a phone which could zoom in a little bit. I took a photo and looked back at it later. Delightfully, the moss had a small brown caterpillar, which I think is a Large Yellow Underwing Noctua pronuba, nestled deep within it. I had stopped to look at a moss, and ended up with both a moss and a caterpillar.
before writing that first part 6 months ago, this sort of thing was already on my radar. during my undergrad, I had stumbled into a course led by an ornithologist, and bird-watching was a requirement. Usually, I would stare down at the ground while walking, to be sure of my footing, to look for bugs and worms and mushrooms, to avoid eye contact. I now had to also look up at the trees, or I'd flunk out. It was frustrating at the start, since a lot of birds can look very similar (especially when moving quickly through foliage), but once things clicked ...
... I had unlocked a new world to explore.
Both of these instances speak to the bigger thing I alluded to at the start of this post. A lot of us are left scurrying in the concrete/stone/brick "karst landscape" of urban environments, and to get out to nature can be an undertaking, especially for those of us who can't drive. deprivation from nature can mess you up; we're apes that lived in tropical forests, then subtropical forest and scrub, then the "wilderness" in general, for most of our time as Homo sapiens sapiens. we're naturally curious beings and there is a burgeoning body of research indicating we start to lose our minds if we don't see enough green (even just the color green)! I think that starting to stop and poke around at moss, weeds, so on, things that turn up where-ever the heck, is a super important thing to try to learn to do.
after all: P. capillare is a specialist on bare rock, so it is abundant in manmade habitats which are close-enough-to-rock, and it flourishes in artificial lighting. Pigeons, seagulls, and others, they are naturally dwellers of bare-rock islands, and find our buildings nice to live in for the same reasons the moss does. Dandelions and other plants are specialists for disturbed ground. House mice and house spiders and so on, they naturally flock to sheltered places like caves and tree-interiors, ... or, houses. we created towns and cities for us but it works well enough for non-human life too. They're our neighbors. Go say hi, get to know them, & spend time with them when you're feeling blue.
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