Melissa Kirsch in her New York Times newsletter "The Morning" of 4 Feb 2024 muses about an Alastair Humphreys essay "A Single Small Map Is Enough For A Lifetime". British explorer-author Humphreys asked himself:
... With the climate in chaos, I can’t justify flying all over the globe for fun anymore, burning jet fuel and spewing carbon for selfies. It feels particularly inappropriate to write books that encourage everyone to get out and explore. If I love wild places so much, I’ve begun to wonder, am I willing to not visit them in order to help protect them?
And so he sought adventure closer to home:
What if this bog-standard corner of England was actually full of surprises if only I bothered to go out and look? Maybe the things I’ve chased from India to Iceland — adventure, nature, wildness, surprises, silence, perspective — were here too?
It's in the spirit, he said, of the late Terry Pratchett's philosophy, "The Importance of Being Amazed about Absolutely Everything". So Humphreys walked around the land within a seemingly-featureless square on a local map, and sees a "common reed":
... Family: grasses. Class: monocots. Kingdom: plants. Domain: eukaryotes. The sprawling immensity of life, too complex for me ever to grasp, had been ordered and tidied and simplified for this single plant in front of me: Phragmites australis.
There I stood on a damp path atop deep layers of late Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary rocks, gawping at a common reeds, surrounded by multitudes. I could glimpse wonder and the connection between everyday observation and the curiosity that spins off into wider exploration of the cosmos. ...
This lead Humphreys further into the history of the area and its marvels. Melissa Kirsch concludes her morning commentary on the Awareness Enterprise with a leap into the mind:
A high-resolution map provides a satisfyingly orderly way to make sense of the environment, to catalog what’s here now and what was here before, to pay close attention to what’s going on in the world. Is there some kind of analog we could apply to our interior lives, territory that feels far more vast and ungoverned and in need of organization? Is there a way to shine a flashlight upon the disused bridleways of the mind?
Meditation suggests it might be possible, but the rapidity with which our internal terrain changes makes the possibility of any definitive guide all but impossible. This necessitates, I suppose, close attention. A commitment to visit and revisit our intimate landscapes, mapping and remapping the contours of home.
(cf What We Know (2006-08-15), Full Moon Metaphors (2007-10-29), Verlyn Klinkenborg (2008-07-11), Abject Reptile (2008-07-29), Specificity (2009-05-31), Turning Attention Inward (2011-04-17), Pay Attention (2013-12-05), Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (2015-10-24), Mantra - Attention, Attention, Attention (2017-05-27), Attention Means Attention (2019-09-18), ...) - ^z - 2024-02-04