The Welsh coast.
By Roland Ashby
Bird watching is akin to praying. Or, more precisely, bird waiting is an act of contemplative prayer. The Welsh poet and Anglican priest R.S. Thomas, who lived by the sea in North Wales, was a passionate bird watcher. His poem ‘Sea-Watching’ (below) explores the relationship between prayer and bird watching while looking out to sea.
What he discovers is that in the waiting for a rare bird to appear, the apparent emptiness of the scene is filled with a sense of presence – its absence was as its presence, he writes, and the bird can suddenly appear, he adds, when one is not looking, and also at times one is not there.
A sense of the divine presence can indeed come in activities like bird watching and waiting, because it is in such times that we become aware of being itself, something that Thomas Aquinas defined as God. In such times of silent, wordless waiting, with the mind focussed, calm and still – as in times of contemplative prayer or meditation - a sense of wonder, peace, joy – and love - can arise from simply being.
Indigenous Australians call this experience Dadirri. Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann writes:
“When I experience Dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of Dadirri is listening.”
To practise Dadirri, she says,
Simply sit and listen to the earth and environment that surrounds you. Focus on something specific, such as a bird, a blade of grass, a clump of soil, cracked earth, a flower, bush or leaf, a cloud in the sky or a body of water (sea, river, lake...) whatever you can see. Or just let something find you be it a leaf, the sound of a bird, the feel of the breeze, the light on a tree trunk. No need to try. Just wait a while and let something find you, let it spend time with you. Lie on the earth, the grass, some place. Get to know that little place and let it get to know you, your warmth, feel your pulse, hear your heart beat, know your breathing … Simply be aware of your focus, allowing yourself to be still and silent ... to listen ...
The pleasure of contemplation like this is a lot like the pleasure of play, Aquinas says, because it “has no purpose beyond itself”. We do it because it is worth doing for its own sake. This is what author, Spiritual Director and Anglican Priest Margaret Guenther described as “holy uselessness”.
Sea-Watching
Grey waters, vast
as an area of prayer
that one enters. Daily
over a period of years
I have let my eye rest on them.
Was I waiting for something?
Nothing
but that continuous waving
that is without meaning
occurred.
Ah, but a rare bird is
rare. It is when one is not looking
at times one is not there
that it comes.
You must wear your eyes out
as others their knees.
I became the hermit
of the rocks, habited with the wind
and the mist. There were days,
so beautiful the emptiness
it might have filled,
its absence
was as its presence; not to be told
any more, so single my mind
after its long fast,
my watching from praying.
– R.S. Thomas (From Laboratories of the Spirit, 1975)
In his reflection on the poem, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, a renowned poet himself, comments on the idea that its absence was as its presence:
the emptiness that might have been filled by the presence of the long-awaited visitant becomes itself a kind of visitation: the beauty of the empty seascape is all we need to absorb (or to be absorbed in). Absence and presence coincide ... [and] the expanse of waving water reveals itself as the object we have been waiting for: the visitant is not an intruding item coming in from somewhere else, and in that sense the act of watching at its most sustained and intense, with the mind ‘fasting’ from thoughts and images, imperceptibly transmutes into prayer, into something that (however silently) affirms a relation, a dimension of grace.[1]
Of the lines ‘Ah, but a rare bird is rare/It is when one is not looking/at times one is not there/that it comes’, Williams writes:
Its visible presence cannot ever be taken for granted. It comes when ‘one is not there’ which could be either, frustratingly, when one is literally not around to see, or when the busy ‘I’ is not there, when self-preoccupation has been silenced and the attention rests fully on what is there beyond the self.[2]