Even if you include all the senses, you quickly realize that we can sense only a small part of our world — and cannot actually see some of the most important aspects of it: all the way from the enormous planet beneath us, through the cells of our body, to our emotions and thoughts and to the social entities that we ourselves compose. Have you ever seen the United States? Where does it exist, actually? Confirming the existence of things unseen is probably the most ever-present challenge that we face. What is she feeling about me? What am I really feeling about her, for that matter? Are they telling us the whole story in the news media? What’s really going on here? We live in a world of continual supposition and guesswork. We are asked to believe vast amounts about invisible things that we simply take from other people. Why somebody did something, why political events occur, the nature of those twinkling lights that we call stars, and the fantastic, complex yet invisible world inside ourselves. What we “know” about these things is mostly what we have been told about them.

In the midst of this ocean of the invisible there are traces, or clues to many amazing things. Today I would like to pursue clues to something that is invisible for interesting reasons. This may sound almost like a riddle. Here goes: it is invisible because we are only tiny parts of it: it’s far too big for us to see. Yet it is also all around us. We cannot see it because it is too familiar and we cannot see it because it is too unfamiliar.

Now what could this possibly be? I will not leave you hanging, for I have come to understand that the whole of Nature is a living being — not just a complex combination of living beings, not only an integrated system, as some scientists have come to believe, but an actual living being, with mind on its own level. One might ask: “Why isn’t this obvious? Why has it not been known for a long time? If it is alive, and we are in the middle of it, it should be pretty obvious.” To begin with, many people from an Indigenous or Native culture would not be in such ignorance. For people in our culture, this is why I went  through some of the many ways that a thing can be invisible. I hope to shake up the familiar known that surrounds us. This being of Earth is certainly too big for any of us to see all at once. Walking in any woods, or even looking from a mountain top, we can see but a few miles at most. It moves too slowly for us to realize what it is doing. It may seem in some ways so familiar to us in our emotions that we take it for granted. Yet the idea of Nature as a living being is also shockingly unfamiliar.

Let us start with the familiarity. We all depend on the atmosphere for every breath we take, and although we were told in grade school, we forget that the air, which we cannot see, is an intricate,constantly balanced system that spans the whole globe and all the oceans. It supports us continually, yet we generally take it completely for granted. Some even imagine that we have complete independence from Earth. We breathe every 3 seconds yet scarcely notice it: it is too familiar.

It is hard to pick up a handful of soil and make a case to most people that it contains a whole universe of organisms in a vast web of interconnections and balances. That it may even be part of the living body of Nature. Dirt is already defined in our culture: it’s dirty. Granted that this vast world is also invisible because its individual inhabitants are mostly too small to see, yet this world is well concealed behind a common, dismissive definition. We walk on it everyday, and we are mostly concerned with washing it off our clothes.

It begins to be clear that there are not only physical causes of invisibility but also cultural attitudes. I have read about the soil for some time and know about its amazing contents, yet I still mostly feel that dirt is dirty. How often do I register the air that I breathe, or become aware of the turning Earth beneath my feet? We are blinded by familiarity. If all of these cultural attitudes and familiarities could be removed at a single stroke, we would stand rubbing our eyes, straining in the brilliance of a new and unfamiliar world.

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I have found, instead, that even with powerful visions and intellectual inspiration, the idea does not grow quickly or easily. There is a lot in the way inside me – ways of thinking, assumptions about the world, that I have operated with ever since my school-days. These attitudes create a solid floor from which I see and estimate everything. It has been necessary to dismantle the floor, and it is taking a long time. I am still opening up to new vistas, new experiences and deeper understanding of this world that creates and surrounds us at every turn.

 One part of the “floor” is an automatic assumption that everything, including the Earth, can be objectively observed. We can all see clear, objective photographs of Earth from satellites, but the living Earth that is being honored on this web-site arises from a hierarchy of ecological webs that are scarcely visible in any of our photographs. Zoom in from this whole Earth to the leaves of a tree in the Amazon jungle, to insects crawling, perhaps eating a leaf, and a frog waiting patiently for an insect to come within range of its long tongue. These are not random encounters. Each one of the beings has an ongoing relationship to the other beings – the insect to the tree, frog to insect, and even frog to tree, because it regulates the population of the insect. Now multiply by the number of species of leaf-eating insects in the Amazon – maybe half a million kinds (and how many trillion of actual insects?) – and a web of interconnection is revealed that goes far beyond our ability to conceive. The automatic urge to “observe” perhaps automatically says: “Well, all these half million insects are basically the same, so we can treat them as a unit.” But they aren’t – these insects span a range of form and behavior that is fascinatingly varied. So too their relations with both trees and predators.

With this realization, the machine of observation can perhaps be slowed to a halt, and you can get out of the cab and look around with wonder, feel the air, listen to unknown noises, and feel the presence of a woven entity that actually includes you, the former observer. You are still observing. Perhaps now for the first time an automatic machine is left behind that was actually blocking out much of what is to be seen and felt. Seen in this moment, the observation vehicle was not so much an observation technique as a way of applying a world-view to the stream of observation, and thereby narrowing the real observations to a parching trickle.

That observation vehicle is still there, motor running, ready to run away with me, but now perhaps I can allow the separate observations to connect with others, to let them be twigs that weave together into a nest for a great big bird.

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