I started walking again in the spring. A group of friends and I joined a “Walk Across Texas” virtual group, together committing to walking 832 miles over the course of 8 weeks. I wanted accountability to get outside even as the semester’s intensity picked up and final exams, paper grading, AI worries, department meetings, and graduations filled the calendar. We live in different states, so I “walked across Texas” in Colorado.

   The most cherished result of this walking group was unexpected. As I walked, I noticed—sometimes intentionally, sometimes tangentially, often intermittently. I saw the patches of snow (Colorado spring is a fickle thing) and the bold crocuses. Later, I saw the daffodils in their yellow glory, “tossing their heads in sprightly dance.”

   Another day I saw those same daffodils hunched over, weighed down by yet another spring snow, wet, beautiful, and dangerous for the flowers in need of gentler weather. The daffodils sprang back, then faded, and then were replaced by other blooms. The grass grew greener, faded branches started to bud, and yards full of dead leaves were renewed, suddenly featuring small green bushy things. Yards were aerated, leaving those strange little pellets scattered. Pansies showed up in pots, and then so did marigolds. Tulips, then lettuce, then roses, sprang up outside our neighbor’s apartment.

   Now that we’ve reached June, the trees in our neighborhood are “fluffy,” to use my brother-in-law’s term. He grew up in the West, and his default tree is a fir tree, so he is continually in awe of the trees he now knows in Tennessee—trees that fluff out and become round, bushy, all-encompassing beauties that encroach on meadows and yards. The trees in our neighborhood are transplants, like me, and I love them, as they are the trees I grew up with in Virginia. (I hope that it is just fine for them to be here, transplants to Colorado, like me.) The days are hot and sunny, then cloudy and full of thunderstorms, and the neighborhood looks different each day.

   As I think on this experience of noticing, I think too of a beloved essay by Simone Weil. In “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Weil states, “prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God.”¹ Her essay states that “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies,” and she calls for us to see every act of attention as good. Even if we do not succeed in solving that mathematical problem, “this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.” This connection between attentive studies and attentive prayer is one I preach to my students who are embarking on a season of scholarship in college, and I’ve carefully grown my own ability to attend to ordinary study. But this spring I also began building up my attention span for ordinary nature. This raises the question: What would it look like to apply Simone Weil’s words to nature and not just studies?

   Partly, for me, it looks like noticing that I am being formed through my walking and noticing. I notice more and more as my attention stamina grows. It also looks like noticing that the changes in the neighborhood’s mostly tidy nature come partly from seasons and partly from the labors of human hands. My neighbors plant the tulips, the lettuce, and the roses, and they tend to them daily. As I come to know the plants and the yards, I come to know (even if slightly) the people who lived with them. Weil suggests that building attention through studies can result not just in better ability to pray but also better ability to pay attention to people. My attention to nature seems also to be increasing my ability to see the people around me, at least in how they live in relationship with plants.

   I’m attempting to live with plants this summer, too. Optimistically or foolhardily, this spring I bought a raspberry plant—a fall gold raspberry plant, to be precise. It is supposedly one of the options for attempting to grow raspberries in a container instead of in the ground, and so I will attempt it on my small apartment balcony along with the zinnias and snap peas. The zinnia seeds have rewarded my patience already; they have sprouted after a week and a half of waiting, and their flowers will show up before the seasons turn again. But the raspberry plant—it is patience on a grander scale. If it survives in the slightly suboptimal conditions of a large pot, I will still have to wait a year, watering it well, cutting it down for the winter, and giving it trellises and fertilizer, before there’s a chance of fruit. However, this plant will let me taste the flavors of a golden raspberry, something I’ve never found in the store. And it will let me taste the flavors of a raspberry that grew under my attention, incorporated into the rhythms of my days.

   This gardening is profoundly ordinary, but it feels significant, and I’m tempted to find a spiritual metaphor in it. Partly this is the influence of Christina Rossetti, an author I studied for my dissertation, and her odd and wondrous book Called to Be Saints.² In this devotional, she meditates on the minor festivals of the Church, pairing the saints’ days and other holidays with scriptures, stones, animals, and plants to inspire her readers to live lives attuned to God. She discusses many plants: daisies, mistletoe, chickweed, gorse, snowdrops, violets, cowslips, honeysuckle, St. John’s Wort, the yellow flag, harebells, the scarlet pimpernel, ferns, marigolds, blackberries, and blackthorns. In her introduction, she states, “I think the Gospel records more lessons drawn by our Master from a seed or a plant than from a pearl…Let us learn something from the grass of the field which God clothes.”³ She sets out to use these plants to teach us of God and to teach us to be saints.

   One would expect, when turning to these descriptions of plants, to find easy correspondences and detailed explications of what we should learn from each. Yet Rossetti is coy. (Those familiar with nineteenth-century religion will think of the word “reserve.”) Attend to her description of the iris, for instance, which is the flower she chose to pair with the apostle Peter:

   Let us take for our subject the Yellow Flag or Iris, which frequents river banks, marsh lands, and pools; not disdaining to unfurl even from ditches its golden standard, adorned with rare gradations of texture and pencillings of colour. That which it craves is water: and thence, whether presented to it in sweet running shallows or in cups of stagnant ponds, it sucks uncontaminated nourishment, thriving on food convenient for it; swaying and stooping amid shifting winds and ripples, yet steadied by its great creeping root as by an anchor. Three is, so to speak, the dominant number of the Iris. The petals of the blossom are three; the inner petal-like structure is threefold, each section terminating in a cloven or double tip delicately notched along the edges. In September the stalks appear decked, in lieu of flowers, with green capsules from two to three inches long; each of these forming a triple vessel, and containing in three divisions many pale brown seeds…The leaves, shaped like so many swords, stand edgeways towards the flower stalk.

   The Yellow Flag lacks not medicinal properties, and yields a black dye: its berries supply a flavour which has been deemed palatable. Yet were these things not so, this Iris by its mere intricacies of beauty would still, without speech or language, declare to us the glory of God, and no less than the firmament would show us His handiwork.

   Can the flag grow without water? –Job viii. II.⁴

Reading this description, we can notice the attention to the need for water, its deep anchoring roots, its patterns of threes, and its sword-like leaves. If we ponder it, we can see connections to Peter’s life: Peter drew a sword in the garden, Peter betrayed Christ three times before the rooster crowed and confessed his love to a resurrected Christ three times on the shore, Peter was the “rock” of the church which could align with an anchor or roots, and Peter threw himself into water twice in pursuit of Christ. Rossetti, however, does not make these connections for us. She describes the yellow flag in slow, painstaking detail, provides a delicate drawing, and ends with a connection to Job. No explicit lessons are here, just details.

   When giving writing feedback, I often have to tell students to “unpack” a statement, or to stop trusting their readers quite so much—tell your readers what you want them to understand—don’t assume they’ll arrive at the same conclusion without an explanation of your logic. So: Is this naïve of Rossetti? A flaw in her writing? A lack of skill?

   I suggest that she is instead trusting in our attention. She trusts that whether she draws an explicit lesson or not, there is something valuable in calling us to attend to the yellow flag, and to attend to the scripture passages that began this section on Peter. She trusts it means something or does something to us, and she lets it be, waiting for our participation. In the spirit of Weil, we can perhaps see Rossetti as providing an attention obstacle course for us to run—she cheers us on, not able to run the course for us, but hoping we will arrive at the end, gaining enough “attention stamina” to receive truth and meaning.

   This lack of handholding actually helps Rossetti’s writing resemble real-world engagement with nature more. Nature itself does not come with an interpretive handbook, or with interpretive audio commentary. Rossetti invites us to wrestle with her words and by so doing prepares us to wrestle with nature by ourselves, seeing nature as it is before leaping to conclusions about its spiritual meaning. Maybe for now I should just let my zinnias, raspberries, and snap peas be zinnias, raspberries, and snap peas, letting the possible meanings grow as slowly as the plants.

   As I let these grow, I realize that Rossetti’s Called to Be Saints, my own writing in this essay, and the previous essays in this journal focus on the beautiful and the familiar. This is not problematic in itself. I’ve seen an iris many times, but Rossetti’s description made me notice aspects of it that I had seen but not known. She helps me see how “its mere intricacies of beauty…declare to us the glory of God.”⁵ The known and loved beauty communicate much.

   Focusing on the intricate beauty of a familiar flower, however, still leaves out much of nature, even familiar nature: what of the annoying or disconcerting elements of nature that we regularly encounter? Walking around my neighborhood, for instance, I’m confronted with clouds of gnats that threaten to get into my eyes and mouth. What of gnats and wasps, stinging ants and bird poop, jellyfish and mosquitos, thorns and stinging nettles? They do not often show up in the poems of the Romantics, and they have not shown up in this essay so far. But they are just as much part of familiar, ordinary nature as the flowers, trees, sky, and birds, even if it does not feel quite as natural to see God’s glory in them.

   Rossetti suggests there is great value in attending to the disconcerting. In Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite, she humorously states that “fishes proper are, I think, as a class and to human instinct among the least sympathetic of living creatures. Their surface is comparatively cold and hard; their eye corresponds. Which of us, even supposing such a chance to occur,—which of us would feel drawn to fondle a scaly slippery person?”⁶ Fish, then, are disconcerting and alien, something she restates later: “fishes might at first glance appear the creatures least allied to man.”⁷ However, Rossetti does not stop by noting the disconcerting elements of fish. Although they are alien in being “so cold, so clean, so compact,” she continues: “yet have they an abundance of good gifts whereby to honour God and cheer man. Gold or silver of a hummingbird does not surpass the vivid lustre and delicacy of their changeable tints.”⁸ She pushes her readers to consider the distinctive beauty of fish, and then to see the correspondences the Scriptures craft between fish and men, leading her readers to see the alien and disconcerting as opportunities to move beyond what is immediate or natural for them and into what is true and right. Pointing to Luke 11:9-13, for instance, she reminds her readers that when Christ “sets before us by the example of an earthly father the excelling love and bounty of our Heavenly Father,” he “enumerates ‘a fish’ among other ‘good gifts’ of this world.”⁹ Rossetti points to the Scriptures to show that there are more ties between humans and fish than are evident at first glance—and that we need to learn to see their beauty even if it takes more work.

   Edward Taylor similarly offers a compelling model of attending to the less immediately likable aspects of nature. In “Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold,” he offers a loving depiction of a wasp that draws out its beauty and dignity.¹⁰ Anyone who has been stung by wasps and faced the lingering pain of their attacks may be forgiven for entering this poem a bit pleased that the wasp is chilled. Even if familiar, wasps are not likable creatures.

   But Taylor reshapes the ways we see the wasp—even inviting us to become like the wasp. He begins by describing the wasp in detail, stating that the northern wind has chilled the wasp, who now “lay bathing / In Sol’s warm breath”:

Which with her hands she chafes and stands
Rubbing her Legs, Shanks, Thighs and hands.
Her petty toes, and fingers ends
Nipt with this breath, she out extends
Unto the Sun, in great desire
To warm her digits at that fire.

The reader now imagines the delicate, precise movements of a wasp. Next, Taylor pushes us to see the wasp through the lens of personification, describing her as preparing to fly “as if her Pettycoate were lin’de, / With reasons fleece,” and describing her as offering thanks to the sun as she flies home. So far, Taylor has not explicitly given his readers instruction via the wasp, instead simply asking them to see the wasp’s movements and plight. At the end of the poem, he still focuses on sight; he turns to God, asking for God to enable him to see better—to attend better to the wasp:

Lord cleare my misted sight that I
May hence view thy Divinity,
Some sparkes whereof thou up dost hasp
Within this little downy Wasp
In whose small Corporation wee
A school and a schoolmaster see.

Taylor sees God as enfolding sparks in the wasp that attention can reveal to us, inspiring our own work and praise. When attending to the wasp, he will be transformed:

Till I enravisht Climb into
The Godhead on this Lather [ladder] doe,
Where all my pipes inspir’de upraise
An Heavenly musick furrd with praise.

Seeing God’s care and presence in the wasp will enrapture Taylor, enabling him to reach God and praise. The stinging, undesirable wasp has become a path to God.

   By seeing this wasp and the floppy, cold fish through the eyes of Taylor and Rossetti, we avoid eliding the differences and variety within nature, and we avoid pretending that the nature we encounter each day is all sunshine, daisies, and skylarks. This protects us from one ethical issue—lying about what nature is—that arises in attending to nature. Weil aptly describes the tendency of human nature to “give a sideways glance” to failed schoolwork, and that applies to our tendency to give a sideways glance to the uncomfortable in nature, too.¹¹ She encourages her readers to attend fully to their mistakes, and it is just as important to attend to the aspects of nature that we similarly avoid.

   The lovely and the disconcerting both offer invitations to our attention. Both, too, build our “attention stamina” in ways that prepare us to better worship and love God. Attending to the disconcerting may, in fact, help us see God more truly. He is, after all, both lovely and (if we’re honest) disconcerting. Practicing attending to the disconcerting may help us avoid making God over in our own image, erasing the aspects of his character that may not immediately appeal to us. We cannot erase the wasp’s sting. We cannot erase God’s judgment, or mercy, or complexity, or mystery, or holiness, or…whatever it is that you particularly like to minimize in your conception of him.

   By attending to what is uncomfortable, we avoid the intellectual dishonesty of selective focus. We must also avoid, however, the trap of treating nature simply as a meditation tool or using it as a resource and then moving on to what we really care about, whether what we care about is tending to the soul’s relationship with God, preventing environmental degradation, or advocating for social change. I do not want to minimize this real danger. We could read Taylor’s poem as erasing the wasp through treating it as a “school and schoolmaster.”¹² But the poem itself pushes against this reading. Its attentive description of the wasp’s movement and appearance occupies a whole stanza of 28 lines; the prayer to God describing lessons is a stanza of 16 lines. By attending to the wasp at such length and at first, Taylor asks us to see the wasp in itself as well as attending to it as a lesson. Rossetti similarly raises the specter of erasure with her typological readings of nature. However, as scholar Lynda Palazzo states, “although she never rejects the Tractarian assertion that we can learn from creation by analogy and symbol, she accords each aspect of the physical world its own independent function in relation to God.”¹³

   Rossetti’s poem “To What Purpose Is This Waste?” presents this concept well, encouraging us to meditate on the beauty and power of nature without coopting nature into our own egocentrism.¹⁴ She takes for the poem’s title the disciples’ question to Jesus when the woman pours expensive perfume on his head: “they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste?” (Matthew 26:8, KJV). Throughout the poem, she describes nature that is unseen and unused by humans—such as the “honey of wild bees in their ordered cells / Stored, not for human mouths to taste.”¹⁵ The speaker of the poem judges this, “smiling superior down, What waste / Of good, where no man dwells.”¹⁶ She falls asleep, however, and a vision comes upon her, humbling her and expanding her sense of value and worth. She realizes the importance of “eyes of small birds and insects small”—not just human eyes—and of beautiful nature “kept back from human hands.”¹⁷ The gifts of nature are for other creatures and members of nature, not just humans, and the activities of nature continue with or without our eyes on them. These activities, too, are properly seen as “a hymn, an incense rising toward the skies.”¹⁸ Nature’s value is not determined in their worth to humans but rather in their worth to God. Our human attention matters, Rossetti affirms. But it is not the only important thing, or even the most important—God’s attention matters most. The anointing perfume and nature’s gifts are not valued according to human economy but to God’s.

   May we come to know and love the fish and the wasp—to see them as creatures worth attending to. May we also come to better know what we already love, like the flowers and the trees, and to live in a mutually beneficial relationship with them all. But may we also remember that the importance of our human attention fades in the presence of the attention of God. May we all be grateful that his attention matters much more than ours, and may we turn to him to sustain us as we try, and fail, and try again, to attend well to nature.

¹ Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting on God (Taylor & Francis Group, 1959), pages 79-87.
² Christina Rossetti, Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1912), xvi.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid., 333-335.
⁵ Ibid., 335.
⁶ Christina Rossetti, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Benedicite (Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1879), 113.
⁷ Ibid., 276.
⁸ Ibid., 113.
⁹ Ibid., 278.
¹⁰ Edward Taylor, “Upon a Wasp Child with Cold,” in The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald E. Stanford (Yale University Press, 1960), 465-467.
¹¹ Weil, 82.
¹² Taylor, “Upon a Wasp Child with Cold.”
¹³ Lynda Palazzo, Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology (Palgrave, 2002), 69.
¹⁴ Christina Rossetti, “To What Purpose is This Waste?” in The Complete Poems, ed. R.W. Crump (Penguin Books, 2001), 208-212.
¹⁵ Ibid.
¹⁶ Ibid.
¹⁷ Ibid.
¹⁸ Ibid.