Noticing

Some of the poems [by the monks of Enlli and places like it] read like jotted lists, or field-notes: 'Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent'...

...For these writers, attention was a form of devotion and noticing continuous with worship. The art they left behind them is among the earliest testimony to a human love of the wild.

-- from Robert Macfarlane's extract Island, published in Archipelago.