Go down to the sea

I must go down to the sea, to the lonely sea and the sky, (from Sea Fever, by John Masefield)

The impulse to go off into the woods, down to the sea or up on the moor is all about the impulse to look away from the human. To stop staring into the mirror of culture and find something else, something beyond: a breath of fresh air.

It is the fundamental spiritual urge. Spiritual as opposed to the religious urge, because religion is a cultural vessel for spirituality. Whether religious or not, almost everyone has an upwelling desire to try and see past our human perspective and this is a spring which pours through our lives. It might run partly through religious canals, which are after all designed for it (some might say to contain it, and some might say to harness its power), or it might find its own way entirely: waterfalling, streaming or seeping through our inner marshland as a sense of wonder, of beauty, a feeling for the wild.

The Oxford Junior Dictionary shed lots of its nature words a few years ago, to make room for the new words which have become prominent in the lives of most young children now. Words like attachment and chatroom displaced words like acorn and conker. It's a sign that we're allowing ourselves to fall more deeply into human life, and away from the more-than-human.

I lived for a while in a very landlocked and urban part of the country, and hearing the cries of seagulls in the background of phone calls home used to feel like a huge breath opening in my chest. I didn't know then what I know now - that I have to attend to the non-human. Thankfully, I can get basic rations by watching birds who still whirl through the air in our streets and parks, by noticing the fungi which spring up after autumn rain, by giving myself up to the clouds out of the window, or by looking closely at a wildflower by the side of the road. But you have to pay the attention, and very humble things like pigeons, clouds and weeds are hard to attend to in our world of global image-sharing.

We hungrily consume 'nature' on computers and TVs. Fabulous footage of distant places, amazing plants, extraordinary animals. Photos of beautiful landscapes, wild skies, green river valleys. But the trouble is, it's not nature. It's photography. You don't get a lungful of it. It doesn't soak the bottom of your jeans and you don't get to pick a bit of it up and carry it home.

Like Narcissus, we are held in a gaze of rapture. We think it's nature, the other, but it's still just us. We need to look away and go down to the sea, or at least the park, before we drown in our reflection.