Last winter, during a snowfall, I looked out toward the ditch behind the house and saw a pair of amber eyes watching me. A fox. Still, alert, not especially bothered by me, but shivering with the cold. We looked at each other for a few seconds. Then he turned and disappeared into the dark.
I had some sausages left over from my supper. I placed them in a bowl and left them out near the ditch. As I was setting the bowl down, I had a sense of myself as my mother’s son. She would do things like that. Quiet acts of provision in recognition that other lives were going on alongside hers.
The fox has frequently returned. Not every night and never close. But enough that I notice him properly. During the warm weather at the start of May, I watched him stretched out on the bank beside the pond. He was lying on his back with paws in the air. The sun was on his belly. Entirely relaxed, as if he owned the place. I’ve also glimpsed him slipping through the hedgerow with things in his mouth, doing things I couldn’t quite endorse.
He stays wild. He doesn’t come when called, doesn’t linger. Sometimes we stop and look at each other, no more than that.
Being in the company of wild animals sometimes makes me think about John Moriarty. He once wrote about crouching in the heather beside a hare. The hare stayed a while, then bounded off, and John felt the warmth it had left behind in the moss. “It was,” he said, “as if the hare had taken Europe out of me.”
By “Europe”, he meant the rational mind that we inherited from the classical world and intensified through the Enlightenment. John never advocated abandoning reason, but he pointed to something beyond it. A way of knowing that doesn’t operate through analysis or abstraction, but through direct contact. He was trying to name what we might now call the meta-rational. It is not rational, not irrational, and not anti-rational. It is something that begins where rationality reaches its edge.
John believed that animals held a kind of knowledge we’d forgotten how to receive. Something older and more embodied than symbol, metaphor and idea. They were not mere biology either. They are creatures that carry presence, and in that presence, something sacred.
John turned away from academic philosophy and toward what he called “the soul’s journey through the world.” On this journey, nature wasn’t a backdrop. It was the stage, the script and the audience.
Watching foxes, we might start to understand what that means. There’s a conversation going on around us all the time. Not in words, but in gestures, in instincts and in small interruptions. The fox doesn’t speak, but he unsettles something in me. That’s what John Moriarty was trying to name. The quiet authority of the non-human. The way a wild animal can touch your life without touching it at all. And how, if you pay attention, even briefly, something shifts.
This is remarkable not because it is profound, but because it is so ordinary. The power not of miracle or spectacle, but of presence.
On Easter Monday morning, I watched two cock pheasants argue over territory on the lane that leads to my house. They weren’t fighting exactly. They took it in turns to run after each other. Up the lane, one bird had the upper hand; down the lane, the other. There was a rhythm to it. A strange, almost camp choreography. They weren’t trying to hurt one another. They were playing out a pattern as old as the hedgerows.
I could have looked at it all day.
Moments like that don’t demand interpretation. They don’t ask for meaning. But they hold your attention in a way that feels increasingly rare. Not the kind of attention that scrolls or scans, but the kind that settles. The kind that opens.
I’ve come to understand something important about John’s writing. There’s huge depth in almost every line. He wasn’t just talking about animals when he wrote about the hare. He was talking about perception. About how a moment, properly seen, can shift the centre of gravity in your day, or your life.
In that sense, the fox, the pheasants, the very shape of the lane are part of a curriculum. Not a formal one. Not designed. You don’t study it. You enter it. It teaches by immersion and not by instruction. This is the meta-rational realm. This is a kind of learning that bypasses the intellect while not denying it. It shows rather than tells. And if you stay long enough, you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten.
This, I’ve come to realise, is the education I care about most now.
We talk a lot about alienation, as if it were psychological, or social, or economic. But what if it’s ecological first? What if the dislocation we feel has everything to do with our separation from the more-than-human world? What if wildness was an antidote to separation?
We weren’t made to be cut off. In our natural state, close to the land, alive to other lives, we belong. Not metaphorically, but actually.
Years ago, I was involved in a community daffodil planting project in the part of inner-city London where I used to live. One of the local Labour councillors, a proper old-school socialist, suggested we involve two young brothers from the estate. They were growing up in neglect and had been in trouble with the police many times. Their bad language was a form of protest. Their anti-social behaviour was also a protest. Few cared to accept that. So, they became the focus of great moral indignation. The councillor had a mindset and a heart that went far beyond middle class decorum. He came up with an inspired idea. Give the boys a job and some responsibility. He put them in charge of the planting. On planting day, he gave them little badges and caps and told them to make sure everyone had enough bulbs. I was amazed by how seriously they took it.
The real surprise came a few months later, in February. I was getting off the bus one afternoon when I spotted the two boys lingering outside a Turkish tea shop. They ran over when they saw me and said there was something I needed to see. They led me to one of the flower beds where some of the bulbs had gone in. Tiny green shoots were beginning to push through the soil. For a moment, we just stood there, looking at them. I remember watching the boys watching the shoots. There was no defiance in their faces, no front. Just attentiveness to what was unfolding.
What was it that made it so easy for the emerging daffodils to reach them, when so many of us with our well-meaning meetings and outreach efforts couldn’t?
That attention is what John Moriarty was pointing to when he wrote about crouching beside a hare and feeling the warmth it left behind. Not a symbol. Not a lesson. Just a moment that rearranged something in him.
And he wasn’t just talking about animals. He was talking about perception itself. About how the world, if entered properly, teaches without effort. About how belonging happens not through explanation, but through contact.
The fox, the pheasants, the daffodil shoots, they don’t teach in any formal sense. But they hold a kind of quiet authority. In their company, something in us begins to shift.
What emerges through these encounters isn’t information, but orientation. What emerges is a different kind of knowing that doesn’t ask to be justified. It’s just felt as true. This is what John meant when he spoke of the soul’s journey through the world. He wasn’t rejecting reason. He was recognising that reason alone cannot carry us home.
Not everything has to be profound. Sometimes, presence is enough. Presence and the warmth it leaves behind.
Consilium 
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