The first thing I saw yesterday was the trees shivering. A breeze was nuzzling the tiny branches of the hemlock and spruce. The forest was alive.

Two turkeys came to visit. They’ve been around a lot this winter—under our bird feeder, pressing arrow tracks along the road. The sun turned their brown feathers an iridescent green, blue and orange.

I stepped outside and took a breath of the purest air, fueling my lungs with life itself.

One day, three small things. How wonderful to be at home in this world!

For most of us, most of the time, we’re not at home. We’re on the world but not in it. We force reality through the filter of thinking. Home becomes something separate, not something we are.

This makes us alienated from the world and from ourselves. It makes us lonely.

Knowing home makes us feel wanted.

Barry Lopez said: “The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.”

I’ll go further: being isolated from home means we’ve isolated from love.

This all indicates that noticing is the door to loving. Attention shakes the detritus of thought from our minds and opens our hearts to what is.

What’s more, loving is the gateway to caring. It inspires action to nurture the only thing we have, the thing that birthed us and sustains us.

We feel whole again. We feel at home.

Can we notice the difference?