Wonder. What Gerald the slow worm taught us about paying attention.

I want to tell you about Gerald. Gerald is a slow worm — technically a legless lizard, not a snake — who lives in the garden behind my building. I know he lives there because my daughter found him in September 2023, during what I would have described as a fruitless forty-five minutes she spent crawling under the hedges looking for 'something interesting.' What she found was Gerald. She named him immediately.

She spent the rest of that afternoon with Gerald. Not touching him — she understood he was a wild animal and should not be handled. Watching him. Noting where he went. Describing him to me in careful detail: length approximately thirty centimetres, silvery-grey, moves like slow water. She set an alarm for the next morning to go and see if he was still there.

He was. She has seen him or suspected his presence fourteen times since. She has not found this extraordinary. She finds it completely ordinary, in the way that children find extraordinary things when they have learned to look.

Gerald is still there, as far as my daughter knows. She checks. Every autumn, she spends forty-five minutes under the hedges. The slow worm is still the occasion. The attention is still the practice. The practice, repeated, is still producing something.