The Daily: 19 May 2026

Today is St Dunstan’s Day. Dunstan was a beloved bishop of Glastonbury in the early 10th century. He used his skills at casting bells and crafting music to bring beauty into his church. He believed music both glorified god and brought more people into the fold. Today, he is the patron of bell ringers, and his day is marked with chimes and pealing bells. He is also patron of bell makers and many other sorts of smithing and metalwork. I’ve also seen his name associated with brewing, though I can find no reason for that.

That is all well and good, but St Dunstan’s Day is also a notable weather marker. It is one of several days in May that sees a resurgence of winter weather. If the Three Chilly Saints don’t bring the cold on the 11th through the 13th nor Cold Sophie on the 15th, there’s one last shot for winter on the 19th. Interestingly, here in central Vermont for the last four years, we’ve seen a freeze or freak snow or some resurgence of winter very near, if not exactly on, the 19th. I don’t know what that means… except that May is not yet reliably summer in the mountains this far north.

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Sense making…

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. Take a month and write a few posts on how to notice the world. Because we don’t care much about what we don’t see. But also because very few writers talk much about the other ways to perceive, and I think scent, sound, texture, and even the ambient feel of a place are more important than vision. Sight can be blocked or confused. But it’s hard to fool your nose, and sound cuts through all the visual obstacles. So here are a few lessons in making sense of your place…

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Today, we’re going to start with something stationary, a being that operates on very slow time-scales relative to humans. You might not even consider such a state to be alive. But I figure everything in the universe changes in some directed way. Everything eats, exchanges energy and material with its surroundings, grows, reproduces, dies. Everything is a system that has a boundary. Within that system is a distinct being, an I-am, even if that being never names its self.

As a child, I was taught that if a being possesses all these qualities, then it is alive. As a scientist, I saw evidence of this changeful spark in every rock sample, every mineral thin section, every mass spectrometer analysis of elemental isotopes. As a gardener and naturalist, I daily discover the life bursting out of soil communities, out of stream beds, out of ocean sands. Each of these beings is a system, just the same as our human bodies are systems. If we are alive, I know no reason to think differently of other bodies, however dissimilar those life processes may be.

But anyway…

We’re going to start with the solid, rocky world. For this project, you will need a pen and notebook. If you have artistic talent, maybe some colored pencils. It might be helpful to have a small guidebook for rock or mineral identification. If you have it, a 10x magnification hand lens is handy, but not necessary. This is more about using your own senses than using sense augmentation tools.

In this exercise, I want you to choose one thing. It may be best to select something small at first, a single rock or a small section of exposed soil, though if you have experience with observation, you might try something more complex like a bit of river bank or a road cutting exposure of bedrock.

The first step is to sit down and pay close attention to everything about your chosen subject. Spend some quiet time seeing, smelling, listening.

Note its color or colors. Is it dark, light, speckled? Is there a play of color like opal? Is it reflective, shiny, dull? Is it glassy? Muddy? Opaque? Is it composed of many smaller parts or particles? (Note on terminology: If your subject is a rock, then the smaller particles are likely minerals; if this is a layer of rock or sediment, then the smaller particles are very likely other rocks. Even the tiniest grains are parts of rocks, not single minerals…) Notice the orientations and connections of all these parts.

If you have a hand lens, use it to study the surfaces. Do any colors or patterns jump out with magnification? What are they? Do you see different structures? Or does it just look the same at magnified scale as it does at the scale of unassisted vision? (Note that this is highly unlikely…)

Notice the relationship your object has with its surroundings. Is it continuous? Is it an erratic? Does it cut through or intrude into its surroundings or does it flow seamlessly into its surroundings?

What do you smell? Is it salty? Sour? Acrid? Oily? Does it smell wet? If so, does it also look wet? Is there a sound? Or many? Get very close, block out other sounds, and hear the vibrations in your subject. Is there a shushing whisper? Is there a whine or high whistle just on the edge of hearing? Is there gurgling?

Hover your hand over the subject. Do you feel air movement? Is it warm or cold relative to its surroundings? Do you feel a prickly sensation? (This is how I feel electrical charge… it might feel different to you.)

If you can pick your subject up without disrupting its relationships, then do so. Feel the texture. Is is smooth, striated, jagged, rounded? Feel the heft. Does if feel heavier than it looks? Is it light? Is it squishy or crumbly?

Spend a few minutes just taking in these observations without critique.

Then pick up your notebook. Write down every single thing you can sense with no judgement or analysis. Do not open your guidebook. You are not naming yet. You are writing down what you sense with no preconceptions to cloud your perception.

Also do not take your subject out of its context. This is not an exercise in breaking relationships to look at a broken thing in isolation. To the contrary, you must pay very close attention to relationships and connections because those relationships are essential to the story of this being.

If your subject is a bit of stone, note its orientation within its place. Is it the same color as its surroundings? Is its texture the same? Or is it different? And how? Does the stone contain parallel lines? These lines may indicate the original depositional surface. Are the lines horizontal relative to the current ground surface? If not, what angles are made between surfaces? (You don’t need to measure, but something that is vertical is a 90° angle to the original horizontal plane, halfway between is 45°, and so on.)

Focus on the relationships and orientations of grains and minerals in your subject. Do they all face one direction or is it a jumble? Are the particles rough and angular or smooth and rounded?Are particles similarly sized? Or is there some sort of size distribution? (ie A few large particles in a matrix of small things.) Is there continuity between grains and minerals or is there “filler” between larger particles? What percentage? (ie Is it mostly filler with some larger things in the matrix, or mostly things with a little matrix between, or no matrix at all?)

Note the relationship to other rocks. Is there a sharp contact angle between rock types? Does your rock type cut off or is cut through by surrounding layers? Is your rock an erratic? (ie Is there continuity with other rocks or does it seem to be very different?) What is the contact surface between your subject and its surroundings like? 

If it helps and you have the skill, you might draw your subject and its surroundings. Instead of letting the white spaces around your subject’s immediate vicinity trail off into “here be dragons”, give some indication of what is going on beyond the map edges. This can be as simple as saying “Same” next to an arrow. Or it can be a detailed explanation if you feel like stretching.

If you can’t draw (I can’t) and if you have a camera or a phone with a camera, then take pictures. Especially of your subject in its undisturbed position.

However, because you can’t record anything except its visual appearance with a picture, you must focus on taking detailed notes. That is your complete sense record, not the images.

Now, here’s an advanced observation… As you closely study this subject and its surroundings, do you feel any awareness from your subject? Is it paying attention to you as well? Let your vision go unfocused or close your eyes entirely and breath slowly and deeply for a minute or so, quieting the mind. Focus your awareness on your subject. Now, what do you feel?

As soon as you hear an answer to that question in your mind, write that down with no explanation or criticism.

When you feel fairly confident that you have taken in all the raw data that you can, you can pick up your guide book. Now, it’s time to name. Read through your description. Study your sketch. Refer constantly to your subject. In the margins, record labels for everything that you find significant. This might include mineral names, fossil names, rock types, structural features like bedding planes or fault striations. If you are working with a more complex system, this might include names for rock layers and large-scale features like volcanic intrusions or fault lines.

As you are naming, begin to work out the story of your subject. This will be a rudimentary narrative such as “this stone is a metamorphic rock composed mainly of quartz, light feldspar and biotite”. You could add details about how you think the subject came to be where you found it. “This stone was part of a bed of gneissic rock, probably formed in some orogenic event. It was eroded out of its original formation and was carried here along with the many other erratics around it. Probably glacial till.”

You might also try a bit of prediction, recording your opinions of what will happen in this subject’s future. “Left undisturbed, this stone will be further eroded by wind, temperature, and chemical breakdown from the surrounding plants, fungi and microbes. The parts that will last the longest, the quartz and feldspar, may find their way to a transport system such as a river, eventually making their way to the ocean to be deposited as sand. The biotite will erode almost completely, transforming into clay and molecular compounds that may be taken up in other living organisms. Or may simply remain in this location, becoming soil, which eventually will be buried, compressed, heated, fused and turned into a sedimentary rock such as shale.”

How does this story feel to you? Could you write a story like that about yourself? Where in that story do you begin or end? Or are you in the story at all…

This is why I conduct these exercises. To learn all I can about the world, yes, but also to learn about my place in the world. To understand who and what I am through the lens of beings that seem utterly dissimilar — but which often prove to be oddly analogous. This is what I think it means to be an Earth-dweller… We are all part of one great system… which is itself part of one great system… and so on…

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Next week, we’ll tackle plants…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2026