Paperchain

A reflection for Earth Day on our connection to each other and the natural world, with inspiration from writers on keeping faith, noticing, and living with uncertainty.

It turns out that my uncle, who is never ill, has been saving it up. We visit him and my aunt at their home - usually neat and gleaming - and find it unspooling. Piles of clean laundry wait to be folded, a morning’s washing up thumbs its nose from the sink. I watch my uncle move in a new way from his chair to the kitchen, noticing the way his trouser legs have hollowed. Here it is, I think, the centre cannot hold.

As we sit and talk in the conservatory, birds flit outside the windows - goldfinches, chaffinches, robins, blue tits. My uncle is the person I go to for help to identify plants, butterflies, moths and birds - he knows his stonechat from his blackcap, his lark from his lapwing. On visits to my grandparents’ house, I'd go into his childhood bedroom to peer into the display case holding his butterfly collection, moving with morbid curiosity between rows of colourful wings pinned against blue baize, wondering at the way life could be stilled, mid-flight.

Today I see his parents revealed in his face, in the way he speaks, the way he is sitting, and realise that we are a paper chain of dolls holding hands across generations, spanning centuries. He is a portal to people who are no longer here, to a phase of life that has dimmed and faded, just as I am a portal for my son. All of a sudden the past, which was my present, is alive again; I am playing cricket with my dad, uncle and brothers on my grandparents’ tiny lawn, walking with them in a rowdy gang up Telegraph Hill, peering into Grandad’s tool-lined shed, and behind the paper where he hides. I am eating tinned potatoes spooned from Grandma’s best blue tureen at a long table peopled with familiar faces, listening to the hum of adults talking as I read cartoons on the floor.

I wander with my aunt into the garden in the same way that we always do, to see what’s coming up, speaking our language of flowers. We stand at the place where the rose arbour used to be and look at the collapsed metal coldframe, its legs snapped under the weight of Bodmin snow. The pretty new greenhouse has blown over, a pane of glass lying shattered among the gravel. I twitch, wanting to pick everything up, to reassemble the pieces, to make everything good again.

Instead we talk about the weeds - always infuriating to them - how now they are taking over. I tell her how last year illness had made it impossible for me to garden, but that left to its own devices, the garden had swayed with oxeye daisies, mint and teasels, flushing green and purple, feeding butterflies and bees in the summer, and flocks of chattering goldfinches in the winter. “And this year”, I say, “I’m better and starting again, making space for something new.”

She nods and smiles, and I smile with her, thinking about the effort it takes to keep a life together, a body, a home. I think about my preoccupation with our unclipped hedges, our unfixed fence, our lounge carpet mottled with thirty years of stains, about our inability to hold it all together at once.

But what if keeping it all together isn’t the point? What if the point is delighting in discovery, in all life’s small moments? Do I know how to live like this, in noticing and with uncertainty?

On noticing

As always, I turn to writers for answers. I go to our community bookshop, The Bookery in Crediton, to hear Michael Malay talk about his book, Late Light. The book, which won the 2024 Wainwright prize, is about extinction, belonging and migration - a memoir woven with natural history and a celebration of outsiders - moths, crickets, mussels and eels.

“The smallest windows have the biggest view,” he says, telling us how belly down is his favourite view. I find his words and ideas, his gentle enthusiasm and curiosity, inspiring and reassuring. A university lecturer in English and Environmental Humanities, his answers to the interviewer’s questions are peppered with quotes and references that I scribble down feverishly. He tells us how the microscopic is connected to the macroscopic, how he believes that we are one organism - that individualism is a false, neoliberal construct - and we all nod and hum in agreement. He talks about how noticing - paying attention - creates a triangle of gratitude, responsibility and care, in an unending loop.

He talks too about slowness as a radical act, about it being the gateway to noticing. “The faster we go, the less we notice and the less we care”, he says, referencing Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, writer, philosopher, activist and founder of the Emergence Network. Bayo says, ‘To slow down in times of crisis—times that in so many ways require action on all fronts—can seem counterintuitive. We are constantly met with pressures to achieve more, act faster and be better.”

I go home clutching Michael’s book and my notes, feeling new avenues of understanding opening up, feeling better despite the late light, that doing less and noticing more might be our way out of crisis, and that this is something I can do.

“Doing less and noticing more might be our way out of crisis, and that is something I can do.”

On uncertainty

But what of uncertainty? As a species we’re afraid of uncertainty, even though it’s built into the foundations, the scientific principles of life. Seneca, stoic philosopher of ancient Rome said, ‘The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, it hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. The whole future lies in uncertainty - live immediately.’

I listen to Margaret Heffernan talk about her book, Embracing Uncertainty. She says that she’s noticed artists, writers and musicians interacting with the world in a looser, more open minded way.

“Artists are seen as the antithesis of scientists,” she says, “but the irony is that artists and scientists think in quite similar ways - they move towards uncertainty because they know that's where you're going to create and discover something new.”

She mentions a thought experiment, “I was standing on a train platform,” she says, “and the announcer says, the train for London, Paddington will arrive in two minutes on platform one. And I thought, that sounds so absolutely certain. Imagine if they went on to say and then you will get on the train, and then you will have this cup of tea, and they went on and on, enumerating all the things that were going to happen, every moment of every day of my life, until the day that I died! And I thought that's really interesting, because actually, it's horrible. And as I enumerate this certainty to other people, the look of happiness and relief - how fantastic a train arrives on time - just turns into one of horror. They say, but then we'd have no choice. And you realise that actually, without uncertainty, you have no freedom, you have no discovery, you have no invention. That's actually where the zest of life comes from.”

“Without uncertainty, you have no freedom, you have no discovery, you have no invention.” — Margaret Heffernan

On keeping on

Slowness and uncertainty, noticing and caring. I can do these things. If this is what life is really about, then perhaps I can do it after all. Perhaps we can make the difference for future generations by doing less, noticing and trusting more. Perhaps making friends with the unknown is the way to begin to find answers, noticing is the path to action.

When we get home from our visit to my uncle and aunt I go into the garden. I dig and I dig, until I feel the familiar rush of love for earth and birdsong and belonging. I notice the way that the light seems silver and new, the way that the evening chorus is building as the days expand. And I delight in these noticings, take a deep breath and dive into the uncertainty of not knowing anything.

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Recommendations

Birdsong BBC 4 Ireland (BBC iPlayer) This is the most beautiful way to spend 59 minutes. Irish Ornithologist Sean Ronayne is on a mission to record the birdsong of all Ireland’s bird species. The production, pacing, and storytelling are spot on. Plus Sean is a bloody hero.

BBC R4 Free Thinking on Uncertainty (BBC iPlayer) An hour hanging out in the company of very clever people as they discuss uncertainty across science, art, economics and daily life, unpacking how uncertainty shapes creativity, decision-making and public perception - from quantum physics to asteroid predictions, and from entrepreneurship to Dutch healthcare.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein. A fascinating and accessible history of how humans learned to understand, and try to manage, uncertainty. Bernstein traces the evolution of risk from ancient times to modern finance, showing how ideas of probability, chance and prediction have shaped the way we make decisions. It’s a brilliant read for anyone curious about how we’ve come to live with (and sometimes struggle against) the unknown.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on Slowing Down in Urgent Times on Atmos. Atmos is a nonprofit media organization focused on the cross-pollination of climate and culture, delivering award-winning journalism and creative storytelling through a biannual print magazine, daily digital features, original newsletters, and more.

Emergence Magazine. A beautifully curated online journal exploring the intersection of ecology, culture, and spirituality. Through essays, films, interviews, and immersive storytelling, Emergence invites us to slow down and listen deeply to the world around us. It’s a space for reflection, wonder, and reimagining our relationship with a living Earth.