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Available for over a year

This week the famous Hintze Hall at the Natural History Museum was reopened by the Duchess of Cambridge, who I think spoke for many of us as she recounted being taken there as a child and looking up in awe and wonder at the towering diplodocus. It seems to be one of the iconic childhood memories that’s burned into our collective psyche. How deep the connections we make as children, when our attention is truly and positively captured! In fact, I read a lovely phrase this week from a nature poet who said that ‘attention is the beginning of devotion’. And certainly for one little boy, Richard Sabin - seeing the skeleton of a blue whale in a back-room of the museum on a childhood visit stirred a devotion in him so strong that he ended up as the curator of mammals there ... recently overseeing the painstaking feat of moving that same whale into the Hintze Hall, as an inspiring replacement for Dippy. You may not be able to get to London any time soon to see the refurbishment, but of course that needn’t stop any of us from attending meaningfully to nature itself. And the Big Butterfly Count this weekend - the world’s largest butterfly survey - is one way not just of helping the natural world by tracking the (dwindling) numbers of butterflies in Britain, but also, I think, of being helped, ourselves, in the process. The idea, simply, is to sit for 15 minutes in the garden or in a park, and to pay attention, and count butterflies - which can be a delightful, meditative way, within our restless culture, of learning again to ‘be still’, as the psalmist says. I’m reminded of Simone Weil, who wrote that ‘prayer’ is ‘absolutely unmixed attention’ - and watching butterflies has to be one great way of being prayerfully present - devoted! - in a non-religious manner. Jesus himself referred his followers directly to nature, surely for good reason. ‘Consider the lilies,’ he said, ‘Look at the birds of the air.’ We can learn so much about our own place within the natural world because we are part of it, not set apart from it - a truth we forget, in our busy, grown-up schedules. I loved watching butterflies as a child. It’s another powerful memory. And when my son was about to have a heart operation a couple of years back, I went out with him that same, summer morning to look for butterflies. Not only did it keep us calm, but we learned together something more about transitioning from one stage of life into the bright but as-yet unknown colours of a new phase. It gave us some hope - which, I have to say, is also the loveliest name for the museum to give to its whale.