There was an egret at Spring Lake this morning who had clearly not checked his phone yet, and I found myself envious.
It was just before seven. The walkway at the Meadows Center was still quiet, the light coming in low and gold across the water, and there he stood — a great egret, white against the green, absolutely motionless at the edge of the lake. Not waiting, exactly. More like inhabiting. As if the word “patience” was something humans invented because we’re bad at it, and the egret had simply never needed it.
I had my phone in my pocket. I had checked it twice before I got out of the car.
The egret was fishing. That is the technical description. What it looked like was something closer to total absorption. A quality of attention so complete that it made the rest of the lake seem slightly out of focus by comparison. Every few minutes he would strike, quick and clean and certain, and then return to the stillness as if nothing had happened. No celebration. No checking to see if anyone had noticed. He was not performing. He was just there.
I find this genuinely difficult. Not the fishing, I have no illusions about my reflexes, but the being there. The full presence in a single place, without the background noise of everything else that wants attention. I stood on the walkway and tried it. I lasted about ninety seconds before I started composing this in my head, which I recognize as a kind of defeat.
Spring Lake is a particular place. The water comes up cold and clear from the Edwards Aquifer, as it has been doing since long before anyone was there to notice. The Meadows Center sits at the headwaters of the San Marcos River, one of the most biodiverse river systems in the state. In the early morning, before the day fills up with itself, the lake has a quality that is hard to describe without sounding like you are overselling it. Still. Alive. Indifferent to whether you appreciate it or not.
The egret knew all of this, or knew something more immediate than knowledge: that the water was clear, that fish were moving, that this spot at this hour was worth standing in. That is the entire curriculum. He is not working toward anything. He is not optimizing his morning. He is, in the fullest sense I can manage, present.
There is a version of nature appreciation that is really just scenery. We pass through beautiful places noting that they are beautiful, and move on to the next thing. The egret is not scenery. He is a participant in the same lake we are standing beside, doing something specific, operating within a web of relationships we can observe but not fully enter. Paying attention to that, really paying attention rather than glancing, changes the quality of the experience. The lake becomes less of a backdrop and more of a place.
This is, I think, what engaged ecology looks like at the scale of a single morning: the difference between being somewhere and being present somewhere. The egret does not need a seminar on interdependence. He lives it, one strike at a time.
I did not catch any fish this morning. I did not achieve stillness. I checked my phone again before I left the walkway. But I stood there longer than I meant to, watching something that had no awareness of my schedule or my opinions, and I came away with the particular quiet that comes from having actually seen something rather than just passed it. That is worth something. It might even be worth getting up early for.
If you live within reach of Spring Lake, or any waterway that wakes up before you do, consider going before seven. Not to exercise, not to photograph, not to post; just to see what is there. Bring your phone if you must, but try leaving it in your pocket for ten minutes. Find the egret, or the heron, or the kingfisher doing its patient work at the edge of the water. Let it be better at being there than you are. That is the lesson, and it turns out to be a gentle one.