The magic spell of sitting still

I've just finished reading the excellent Rewild Yourself written by Simon Barnes, in which he proposes 23 spellbinding ways to make nature more visible and reverse our disconnect with the natural world.

Many of the spells I know already - I discovered the Spell for Making Birds and Beasts Come Closer (binoculars!) when I was a youngster (I still remember being given my first binoculars, and I now own a pair with very close focus that are excellent for insect watching too). Other spells are on my wish list to cast - How to Turn into a Swan (hiring a canoe for an afternoon, yes please!), or How to Breathe Underwater (snorkelling or, much more likely for me, using a bathyscope or aquascope to glimpse the underwater realm).

One of the spells gave me particular pause for thought - The Bottomless Sit. It's basically sitting still and keeping quiet. I've done this often enough; one memorable time I was just sitting on the patio late one summer night, and a hedgehog came ambling along and literally snuffled around my bare toes (while I held my breath!). But I do have a tendency, when I visit a nature reserve for example, to try to see everything, which entails doing a lot of walking and not much staying still. So I've decided that every now and again I'll find a spot - be it a hide or just somewhere quiet - to sit and spend an hour or more just watching and listening.

So this was the spell I cast when I visited my local nature reserve at Paxton Pits the other day. It's a place you could spend all day exploring (and it'll be getting even bigger as the current working quarries become part of the reserve). I always have a walk around here; there's so much to see, so much ground to cover. But this time I headed for the Cobham hide and just sat and watched and sketched a bit, for about an hour or so (nature journal page finished off later - click to embiggen all pics).

There wasn't very much happening - the usual moorhens, some ducks (teal and gadwall), and a pair of long-tailed tits flying back and forth, gathering nesting material. Fairly unremarkable, you might think; but the longer you sit and take it all in, the more you are drawn into the quiet rhythm of the place.

It'd be nice, you think, to see something special, but as Simon Barnes puts it, "Not every sit ends in a rarity. Many a sit will bring only the ordinary everyday wild things - but you find that you have moved a little closer to all wild things than you were before. You are becoming less an observer of the wild world than a living part of it - and that's as good as seeing a kingfisher, maybe even better... the truth of the matter is that it's wildness that you're seeking... the wildness in you... The wildness that comes in the waiting. In the sitting."