With the Gaze on Me: Living with the Rhythms and Moods of Nature

Before sunlight falls on the water, fog blankets the lake, sheltering the living from the night chill. A grey heron is awake and alert as usual, preparing to hunt. Focused, it scans the water without sound or sudden movement. It extends its neck as long as possible, making its body more slender. And whoop, it gets its catch. In January 2024, I was in Bhigwan Lake in Kumbhargaon, about 70 km from Pune, Maharashtra, where some 300 species of birds, some local and long-distance migrants, are seen on the backwaters of the Bhima River. Every year, I visit the birds that throng Bhigwan Lake as my way of humbly honouring them. Passionate local birder Sandip Nagare who is our guide (along with the villagers of Kumbhargaon) started Agnipankh Flamingo Point, a beautiful conservation initiative that also sustains local livelihoods.

Sun rays flash gentle beams on water and the dance begins. Black-headed ibis, with their shiny heads and long bills, begin fluttering around in a chaotic pattern. Hundreds of great cormorants flap their wings in a splash-dance. Bar-headed geese walk along the shores. Astonished at their migration from the high-altitude lakes of the Trans-Himalayas to Maharashtra, I bow at their resilience. I look closer through my binoculars and dream of being a bar-headed goose flying at 150 kmph, above Mount Everest, and resting along azure blue waters in Maharashtra. My daydreaming is interrupted by hundreds of brown-headed gulls squabbling for fish and being attacked by a marsh harrier trying to snatch their fish from them. This gangly raptor, adept at hunting, swoops its way into a flock of gulls, scaring them off, and in the general melee, we see fishes jumping out of the water. After a while, we see a marsh harrier feasting on a little grebe, tearing it into small morsels. It stares at us with a razor-sharp gaze as our boat approaches close, then flies off, holding the dead grebe in its talons. In another corner, a Pallas’s gull rests with its mouth open, trying to cool down. 

By mid-day, the fog has dissipated, and the sunlight is sharp. Open-billed storks, painted storks, black-winged stilts, black-headed ibis, cormorants, river terns, shovelers, little grebes, and spot-billed ducks are all congregating in a ritualistic morning dance and taking turns to fly in flocks. They move in collective rhythmic patterns and settle again in shallow waters far away. Flamingos have flown to other shallower waters down south, but the few that remain seem to be thronged by visitors. Boats surround this small flamboyance (flock of 50), trying to get good photos. The flock seems nervous of the unwanted attention. With a slight run-up, they launch into flight one by one, flapping their wide outstretched wings to glide through the skies and scour the land. I notice a little lift in my body as if a muscle remembers being a bird in some lifetime, wanting to transcend the human body at that very moment. I am reminded of my sudden gravity as I hear a high rolling “chirrit!” of a small pratincole. A flock of them sit on stones, looking at us with their tiny, shiny, black eyes. Shared curiosity engulfs me as I feel gazed at and seen. Seen from the eye of a bird, a whole new experience of who I would be to the “other”. As cultural ecologist and philosopher David Abram puts it, “Our eyes have coevolved with many other eyes, and are always, in a sense, waiting to be seen by eyes that are not just human”.

Being looked at, witnessed, and experienced by other beings reveals our interbeingness. A kinship that existed for aeons, forgotten only a few centuries ago. It is a sense of calm and reassurance of shared existence. Often subsumed in our attention deficit lives, we forget that more-than-humans continuously witness us. Trees hear us. Water remembers us. Dogs smell us. Lizards call out for us, and Earth embraces us, too. Sometimes, because I am an introvert, I feel that I am not “seen” enough. At those moments, I remind myself of all those special moments of being seen. A special moment from last year was when a snow leopard and four of us sat at a distance of 12 metres for three hours in Langza village in Spiti. At several moments, looking at each other, our interconnectedness was so evident. We see, we breathe, we move, we smell, we trust, we are very different, yet not so much. Often, a tailorbird in my balcony in Pune notices my presence while I am folding clothes, sipping tea, or pacing up and down, but it remains unafraid, hopping around, trusting our interbeingness. And I wonder what that interbeingness reveals in me and what my responsibility is when a spider sees me when I unexpectedly come upon her spinning her web.

Being seen by more-than-humans unravels the depths of our lives and bodies. Dipping my feet in the river as she winds her way through my toes, lapping up the soil I tread on, I find a measure of peace. I feel my skin soften. My body is light. And I sway. The awareness of my body shape merges with the shape of a river. I dwell for a few moments like a river. When climbing a mountain, the body is experienced in a different way. Knees start to communicate, lower back starts to open up, hands coordinate with legs, and lungs communicate their own language of exhaustion and thrill. A sense of being in our own body is revealed. Our body, in close mediation and rhythm, tells us how to be in another ecosystem. Contemplation and depth of our own bodies is revealed through awareness of another being and ecosystem.

 

This contemplation and awareness is what brings us closer to the rest of nature. So when a river is threatened to be damned, it feels like we are damned too. When a tree is cut, we feel the cut through our body too. It is an open space of coexisting reality that is ineffable, wondrous, mysterious, and revealing all at the same time. A state of knowing that doesn’t require proof and evidence but a heart that thrives on intuitive intelligence and is shaped/reshaped by “other” beings. Indigenous and other nature-dependent communities have always lived with the rhythms and moods of the natural world. An Adivasi elder, part of the movement against mining in their sacred forests in Central India, once told me: “Why do we oppose this project, you ask? Let us assume that we Adivasis will have to leave the forest if the government and the mining company displace us. But our forest deities have no other place to go. Where will the birds and animals of this forest go?”

  

But how can we nurture this intuitive way of being? While I live in a city, rushing across distances, I constantly try to remind myself to pause and slow down. Pay attention. We must extend ourselves to really notice, heed, and listen to nature. We have to be attentive to plants in our balconies, to the trees changing colours, and to flying foxes breeding and eating fruits. We have to pay attention when starlings start swirling in the sky in winter, and flamingos flock to mudflats. We have to be attentive when an oil spill in the ocean or wetland kills thousands of pelicans. We have to be attentive and alarmed when a river is “developed” and turtles displaced from their habitats to be put in a sanctuary. Honouring the more-than-human world around me with wonder brings in the responsibility of standing up whenever the forests, birds, wetlands, rivers, and communities (immediately dependent on them) are threatened. Our radical solidarity must extend to the marginalised humans and more-than-humans. As what we protect now will protect us!