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To understand the shore, it is not enough to catalogue its life. Understanding comes only when, standing on a beach, we can sense the long rhythms of earth and sea that sculptured its land forms and produced the rock and sand of which it is composed; when we can sense with the eye and ear of the mind the surge of life beating always at its shores—blindly, inexorably pressing for a foothold.
“Caroline from babyhood had no ‘wooly’ of any kind whatever.” Such “objectless” children constitute an example of…the failure of some children to develop a normal degree of relatedness with their nonhuman environment, because of their having to be excessively absorbed with their interpersonal relationships in the home.
In my childhood backyard, there were large ferns beneath which I existed for long hours in the summer, imagining and tending to a world of dirt, potato bugs, and the layer of cool air under the canopy of fronds. I've only thought recently about what kind of longing comes over me when I pass by a randomly situated copse on the freeway and have an urge to simply be in it. And I've only recently thought about this longing in the context of climate breakdown, walking alongside a creek and coming to a place where the banks form an enclave, where I can transport myself momentarily to a world after collapse, a post-apocalyptic state of survival, one that is “prior” to the aliveness of this world. If I feel grief about anything right now, it's about the idea that this prior state would not happen in my lifetime—a wish perverse, bizarre, shameful. A retreat into a world in which the clear lines that can now be perceived are rendered fuzzy, blurred, diffuse shapes. A return to a time and experience before my own aliveness.
We both long for and are anxious in relation to becoming one with the environment, Harold Searles argues in The