How will we care for the places all around us? Of course, we can take actions to reduce our impact on the environment. We can plant gardens. We can stop flying so much. But there’s more. We can also honor and praise. It’s easy to gasp with awe over places that are wild and “pristine.” But we can also admire the ordinary.

Harriet Sams is an archaeologist, ecotherapist, freelance lecturer, yoga teacher, member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, mother and student. She and her family have recently returned to their native England after living for two years in France. While in France, as she writes here, her relationship with some annoying fences radically changed:

“I spent a long time upset about the French obsession with electric fences. They’re threatening, they seem to vibrate with menace, and they exclude me from the land. For a long time I tried to undertake acts of beauty to come to terms with this exclusion, this necessity to control and contain animals, at the expense of the right to roam. It didn’t seem to ever quite assuage the grief and longing I felt.

“Suddenly fence posts began to speak to me. I mean really speak to me. These sentinels, seemingly inert and silent, complicit in the electric fences, began to shine their presence. Split logs pushed into the ground, they are so alive, so dynamic in the landscape. The biodiversity they support, the beautiful twists and splits of their beings—all bring my attention closer to them and I find I’m falling in love.”

May we undertake this practice: Hang out with the ordinary or disliked until it becomes lovely and extraordinary.