Poking around: The how & the why:
Moore, Kathleen Dean
THE LAST WORD Poking around: The how & the why KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE I wish to speak a word for the unheralded art of poking around. Two things are necessary to do it right: space-both in terms of...
...If someone asks, "Who are you...
...Or, in spring, I find myself asking where that gopher is now, the one that last night raised a lumpy mound of earth in the pasture...
...Thus parents call their children slowpokes and tell them to hurry up unless they want to be left behind...
...it is not enough to say, "I am Kathy," or "I am a professor...
...Of course, there is no law against thinking while you poke around, but I find my mind doing something different...
...The whole point of poking around is that it is good in itself, like music, or moon-rise...
...For the art of poking around means prying at things with the toe of your boot, turning over rocks at the edges of streams, lifting logs to search for snakes or a nest of silky deer mice, and kneeling to examine the tiny bones mixed with fur encased in a predator's scat...
...Poking around is recreation, re-creation, in the most literal sense...
...Wonder: Knocking snow into the winter creek, I puzzle over why the clumps turn clear before they melt...
...But I don't want to make too much of the instrumental value of poking around...
...Hope: Curling up in the depression in which a deer has recently slept, I find myself hoping that the animal hasn't left ticks behind...
...Insight is born of analogy-connections...
...As Thoreau observed in Walking, the sun shall "perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank side in autumn...
...John Locke said that what gives each person his or her personal identity is that person's private store of recollections...
...Those who do it measure things with the span of their hands...
...In the Middle Ages, a person exploring the countryside just for the joy of it was insulted as a poke-easy, a lazy one...
...The more complete answer will acknowledge that a person is partly her memories: I am a person who remembers a flock of white pelicans over Thompson Reservoir, pelicans banking in unison into the sunlight, banking into the shadow, flashing on and off like a score-board...
...It requires less serious thought than walking, at least the kind of walking advocated by Henry David Thoreau...
...Every time you notice something, every time something strikes you as important enough to store away in your mind, you create another piece of who you are...
...Kathleen Dean Moore is chair of the philosophy department at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.allis, Oregon...
...They look into the sun when they see a shadow pass across a field...
...Like most pleasurable activities, poking around has its solemn enemies...
...Or, sitting on a damp log, I long for the varied thrush to sing again before my pants soak through, and for the late winter sun to drop below the oaks and begin to warm my back...
...So I poke around at the frozen edges of Winter Creek in late afternoon when the sun comes in low over the knoll and throws a long, rippling shadow from each dried cattail across the creek and up the farther bank...
...They greet one another with: "What have you found...
...They spit in rivers to make fish rise...
...If so, then people should be careful curators of the assortment of memories they collect over the years...
...He insisted that you think while you walk, "like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates while walking...
...And since truth is in the details, seekers of the truth should search for it there...
...They carry seeds in their socks and rocks in their pockets...
...Two things are necessary to do it right: space-both in terms of time and place-and the ability to pay willing and close attention...
...Poking around is more focused than watching, yet less systematic...
...Ideas, after all, start with sense impressions, and learning comes when we make connections among our observations...
...Unlike hiking, poking around has no set destination...
...When I wander a field, my mind turns reflexive-ly from analysis to wonder and hope...
...It is more intense than strolling, but more capricious than studying...
...Poking around is a guaranteed way to learn...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 5
