The Web of Noticing

Kathleen Jamie, Scotland’s Makar (aka poet laureate), confessed to an inquiring friend that she didn’t exactly pray when her husband fell critically ill – but that she found herself noticing things with a new intensity. The cobwebs, the ‘shoaling’ light, the way the doctor listened, the slender shape of the feet of the man in the bed opposite on the ward. ‘Isn’t that a kind of prayer?’ she wrote, in one of the most beautiful essays on observation (or anything else) that I have read. ‘The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?’

 

I found myself thinking of this idea of noticing as prayer-in-the-world when I walked around Beatrix Potter’s farmhouse in the Lake District with my children during their Easter holidays. Realising how carefully she made her home, and how her illustrations were inspired by tiny details of the world around her. The green gate in Jemima Puddle Duck was her own gate. The sprightly lettuces were based on those growing in her own cottage garden. (The V&A has a wonderful deep dive into Potter’s sketchbooks, exploring how her illustrations drew on places she knew well.) Potter gives the impression of being someone who walked through life with her eyes open, relishing what she found around her. A master of what Jamie calls ‘maintaining the web of our noticing’.

 

I am definitely an apprentice rather than a master in this art, but since I began to paint seriously on maternity leave (only two and a half years ago, though it feels like so much longer!), I’ve found my own noticing powers deepening. ‘The First Rose’, at the top, was inspired both by Beatrix Potter and by the earliest rose to unfurl in our garden this year – which is still on my desk, smelling incredible, vying for my attention as I paint. For me it's a reminder that, though I often lament the lack of nature in London, it is all around – a plant pushing its way up between paving slabs is as natural and wild as a stretch of moorland, and plucky and subversive.