we are not invisible

if we think we are, we are not paying enough attention

A sea so flat it is a mirror, a portal, and here I am, on my paddleboard, floating in that great unblinking blue. No wind, the water thick and slow as paint pooling on a palette—a thousand shards of colour—and it is so clear that I can see the sand and stones on the seafloor, and the red seaweed, and the wings of kelp, all of them pulsing slowly in the lazy tide.

I like to think I am invisible here, and in the silence of the morning, the stillness and the peace, it would be easy to believe that I am. That I am nothing more than a whisper; a visitor who makes no mark and leaves no trace.

But this cannot be. Even if invisibility is what we sometimes yearn for, it can never be.

Ten metres away are two common seals slipping their heads out of the water, watching me from afar, the abrupt huff of their breaths skimming over the surface of the sea and telling me: we are here, we are watching. And the fulmars, flying overhead, interrupt their journey back to their nests in order to swoop low and inspect me—they are using precious energy to understand whether I am a threat. And beneath me, on the gleaming white sand, I see a crab with its pincers facing skyward, and with each small rock of my board the crab jabs its pincers up—it, too, saying: I am here, I am watching you. And then (the magic!) a shoal of fish, gleaming black then blue then silver, swims in the space suspended between the crab and I, and they are shimmering in the sunlight which, for a moment, has muscled through the clouds, but this same sunlight casts my shadow through the water, and the shoal, in the hammer-blow of shadow, suddenly splits in two, a panicked cleaving.

We send ripples into this world whether we mean to or not.

A scientific paper published a few weeks ago found that in the Amazon, when a predator is spotted, small birds begin to call. To us, their calls might seem like just more noise in the canopy’s cacophony—something to appreciate, a peaceful soundtrack to the buzz of our chattering minds—but the call is anything but peaceful to the other creatures of the forest: it is saying danger. And when those small birds call danger, a whole community takes notice. Other birds share the warning, and so too do monkeys, and after the warning is spread and shared, the whole canopy becomes silent and still. Watching. Waiting for the threat to pass. One hundred lives holding their breaths.

Another new paper shows that urban birds, the ones we share our cities with (blackbirds, starlings, crows, sparrows, magpies, ducks…) are more fearful of particular people; they do not fear all humans equally. Surprisingly, it is women who they fear more than men. My PhD team found the opposite to be true in jackdaws: they are more wary of men than of women. We do not know why for either case, but here the why is not the point; the point is that the nonhuman world is paying so much more attention than we realise. In fact, jackdaws remember individual human faces, as do American crows—and crows pass information about people to the next generation. A man walking down the street might not notice a crow sat on a rooftop watching him, but that crow might have seen that man before, when she was young and her father was with her, and her father might have a history with that man, might have taught her: that man is not kind. And now, years later, she might fly away if that oblivious and once-unkind man so much as glances towards her.

If we think we are invisible, we are simply not paying enough attention.

What I am getting at here is that we are not separate from what we call ‘the natural world’. We are within it. With every decision that we make, every movement, every step, we send ripples into it and touch one, one hundred, one thousand other beings in both significant and infinitesimally tiny ways. And in return we are touched by a trillion ripples, some so large they might knock us over, some so small they are just the brush of gossamer thread against our skin.

Think of yourself in a forest. Perhaps you are walking down a footpath, daydreaming. A bird calls out and you hear it but do not really register it, and you certainly do not know that the bird is talking about you. The call is relayed for half a mile in all directions, twenty animals shouting about your presence—but you walk on, oblivious, while one hundred creatures still themselves, watch and wait for danger to pass. And perhaps because all those creatures have paused their activities, one hundred insects get to carry on living where before they would have been eaten—and look, your walk has saved one hundred lives! But some of those insects are predatory, and they consume one thousand smaller beings that otherwise would not have been eaten—and on and on it goes, one ripple turning into ten, one hundred, one thousand, spreading ever-outward from you, vibrating the gossamer threads that connect us all, thrumming through the world, through space and time, without you having the slightest idea at all.

Sometimes it is a comfort, I think, to imagine we are invisible. It lets us off the hook, lets us disengage, lets us underestimate the impact that every one of our actions, no matter how small, may have on the world—on humans and nonhumans alike. But to imagine ourselves as invisible, to think that what we do does not matter in this world, is also to deny ourselves our power.

Many (most) of the ripples that we send into the world are unintentional, and their impacts cannot be known. Of course this is the case: we cannot spend our lives trying to predict or quantify every potential outcome of our actions, especially when those outcomes may impact individuals many orders removed from ourselves. This life is incomprehensibly complex, after all, and even our most powerful computers, our most intricate mathematical models, cannot predict what will happen as a result of the next breath we take, the next step we take, the next door we open or close. But that is not the point. The point is that we do have control over some of the ripples we send out into the world. The words we speak, the foods we eat, the beings we help, the kindness we offer, the thoughts we choose to share, the small decisions we make that add up to a way of living, a way of existing in this world. Each of these small decisions ripple out and out and out, and who knows where they go, or what they turn into, but they have an impact. They make a change. And that is power, isn’t it?

To imagine ourselves invisible is to deny our power, to deny our place in the great web of being, to deny the impact each of our small lives have.

There are many in this world who would like us to believe we are powerless, invisible.

We are anything but.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I lie very still on my paddleboard, close my eyes. The seals, eventually, leave. The fulmars do not stop swooping low to inspect me. The fish may or may not have found one another again: I do not know. All I know is that I am here, an inextricable part of it all, making ripples even when I tread as softly as I can, and in return being touched by a trillion other unknowable, unpredictable, untraceable ripples.

Fantasiemarmorpapier (Ölmarmor) (1901) Laura Lange (German, 1868 – 1953)

This seems like the perfect post in which to share two debut books I enjoyed recently, one a memoir and one a novel. Books seem to me (and I am biased, of course, as a writer and reader and someone whose life revolves around words) as one of the ultimate acts of intentional ripple-making. We send our words into the world and we do not know where they will go, who they will touch, how they will be received and what they may or may not change, but we send them nevertheless, and in that act there is great hope and great power. And oh how grateful I am that the ripple of these words found me—both Kimberly Warner’s debut memoir Unfixed and Carys Shannon’s debut novel Truth Like Water.

Unfixed, at its core, is a story of love and belonging and finding sense in chaos, and threading through the narrative, weaving the story together, are three bodies: a body of water, a body not behaving as it should, and a body lost beneath the waves. It is a phenomenal memoir, at once heavy and light and utterly captivating, and I came away with that delicious feeling that something within me had shifted slightly.

After finishing Unfixed, I read Truth Like Water. This was one of those beautiful and entirely unplanned pairings that sometimes happens with books, where they complement one another so well that mirrors and portals open between the two.

In Truth Like Water we explore, through the eyes of a young woman trying to make sense of her mother’s drowning, how truth can behave as a liquid thing, slipping into the shape of whichever vessel carries it. The novel is set in a coastal Welsh town where the estuary, the centre of the story, captured me completely. The silty mudflats, the horses standing stoic in the sea, the landscape reflecting that nothing is ever quite as it seems… it is a gripping and gorgeous debut, and I cannot wait to see what Carys writes next.

Thank you both for sending your words to ripple out into the world.

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