The Ecology of Awareness is a memoir in stories, drawn from four decades of field ecology and fifty years of contemplative practice. It follows an ecologist’s long education in attention — the practice of noticing — and the slow recognition that how we attend to the living world is inseparable from how we live in it.
I lived on a farm in Brook Valley. There was a brook running through the middle. We didn’t see it as splitting the farm in half, but as the central connection that allowed so much life to fill the place. We could hear it through the house’s open windows, a constant presence beneath everything else.
Deer came to drink along the banks every morning. Birds of every kind used it for drinking and bathing. Large white wading birds appeared occasionally, standing still in the shallows with the patience of creatures who understand the trout will come if they simply wait.
We never caught the trout. They were just part of the life of the brook.