On the Company of Creatures

The industry of small things

I spend, and have always spent, a lot of time alone. Having grown up in the lush green hills above Montego Bay, in a house surrounded by three acres of land, teeming with the potent rise and fall of complex life, the sense of belonging I feel in natural settings is hardcoded. 

Which is no doubt the reason why, from very early childhood to the middle age of now, I have relished solitude, particularly at dawn. Something about that threshold lends a feeling of expansion, a magical sense of renewal and unfolding, backgrounded by a symphony of trills and caws and chirps ― all the industry of small things gearing up to greet the day.

This proclivity does come with its own challenges, of course. The line between solitude and loneliness is fine ― one doesn’t always know which side one’s on. Like the last five months I have spent in Accra, Ghana, for example, renting a room in a five-bedroom house I have had almost solely to myself. 

Bar a love affair which ended, and a brief, ten-day house guest, I have probably spent three quarters of my time out here alone, just one of many such examples from the last five years in particular where I’ve travelled solo on the strength of gut-led hunches to different parts of the world. But that is a suite of other stories.

The offerings of a giant

I’m very well supported by my people back at home - each day is gladly peppered with voice memos, texts and calls - nonetheless, there’s no real substitute for face-to-face connection. Except, perhaps, for the other living things with which I share this enclave, and without whom I may well have gone full Havisham (I say hi to the people in my neighbourhood, of course, but aside from the lover who is no longer here, my more meaningful connections are at home). 

The poofy mango tree out front, with its shape and the glamour of an afro. The wildly prolific avocado tree out back, which gifts me several pears each day, like offerings from a giant. If I stretch my arm through my upstairs bedroom window, I can almost touch its upper reaches. Its easy, graceful sway in breeze a steady source of comfort. 

And then there are the many birds whose names I do not know, which helps me see them clearly, in a way. I appreciate their forms and calls without the need to label. They simply are, as I am ― we’re all breathing here, together. Within the lemon-coloured walls surrounding the yard outside this green and yellow house, all kinds of things are going on each moment.

Attention renders loneliness illusion

Sitting on the downstairs stoop out front the other night, listening to the chirp and whirr of crickets, or whatever they are, that telltale sound of tropical heat post-sundown, I noticed in the streetlights’ beams and the outside lights of neighbouring houses, a plenitude of moths I hadn’t seen before nor since, as if some annual hatching had occurred. 

There in the shadows by the big green gate was a frog on the hunt for the insects, projecting its tongue towards the bounty. Up in the space between the top of the gate and a post was a massive spider's web, in which some undead moths were trapped and writhing. Huge, fast bats zoomed through the darkness in between. Not for the first or last time I thought to myself, My god, what do I know about this life? As Edwin Starr once said in a different context, absolutely nothing. 

What the hell is it like to be a moth-eating frog? Or to grow a mango from your boughs? Or to spin a web from your body? Or to be the thing that’s spun? Considering all the different sensory experiences happening in tandem is as humbling as it is incomprehensible, and also reassuring: attention renders loneliness an illusion ― everything belongs. 

To zoom in to other possibilities is to zoom out of our unrelenting minds, notoriously unreliable interpreters of truth. Remoteness may engender dark imaginings at times, but the birds will build their nests and ripened fruits will fall from trees, and at any given moment you can close your eyes and feel what it is to be a creature of this earth.

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Featured image by Graham Holtshausen.