The redbuds and dogwoods are still in bloom here in Staunton, Va., though they've put out leaves. The maples are shedding samaras, the seed packets that spin to the ground. An hour before dawn, the old moon rises over the Blue Ridge. Birds are already chirping up and down the street.

Yesterday I heard crows mobbing a hawk. On an isolated lane, a pair of young squirrels nearly scampered over my feet. I haven't been in a car in 58 days. In this small city, the natural world continues to make itself known. There are traces of human toil, too, traces of husbandry and craft: in stone walls, in bodark hedges, in houses built by hand.

Every walk is a slow progress through what philosopher Owen Barfield called "the concrete world of sensuous experience."

Stephen L. Talbott quotes Barfield in "The Meaning-Filled Universe," an essay in the spring 2026 edition of New Atlantis. "We are all materialists now," he begins. "As children of this current scientific era, we experience things around us as if they were nothing but collections of inexpressive and indifferent particles ..."

Talbott takes aim at radical materialism, at the idea that because all matter is composed of tiny particles that are the same, the qualities that we perceive that make a thing (a bird, a rock) a particular thing, are unreal. Differentiation is unreal.

In the radical materialist view (as I understand it; Talbott doesn't say this), qualities and meanings only exist because an over-evolved portion of our ape brain (itself composed of indifferent matter) ascribes qualities and meanings to things. Language is just a survival mechanism that produces an illusion of meaning.

In the radical materialist view, will (mine or a squirrel's) is illusory, too. Everything, every motion, is physically determined by the laws of physics to the exclusion of any other cause. The purely materialist world is one of "inescapable causal bonds."

It's a grim picture, and a lesser writer than Talbott might use it as a chance to make a case for religion, or magic, or even the notion that man is special. Instead he turns to Barfield to ask us to consider that meaning is not just something that we ascribe to things, not something that we project onto clumps of particles.

Talbott argues that meaning exists in the exterior world--the twist of a tree or the direction of the wind is expressive, though not exactly an act of will, and we perceive meaning, draw it in to our interior world, then use it. The world is our interior, Talbott says.

Our meanings "are given to us from a world that is actually there. The more we attend to this, the more we come to realize that the entire mental and affective content of our lives derives from the expressive contents of the world."

The language of thought and feeling and the abstract language of modern life consist of words derived from words once bound to an exterior reality.

This is Barfield: "To what, precisely, does each one of them refer--the tens of thousands of abstract nouns which daily fill the columns of our newspapers, the debating chambers of our legislatures, the consulting rooms of our psychiatrists? Progress, tendency, culture, democracy, liberality, inhibition, motivation, responsibility--there was a time when each one of them, either itself or its progenitor in another tongue, was a vehicle referring to the concrete world of sensuous experience with a tenor of some sort peeping, or breathing, or bursting through."

My wholly unscientific hypothesis, supported now by thousands of hours of long aimless walks, is that the concrete world--the world of birds and rocks and old dormer windows--is full of secrets that want to be disclosed. There is a real world out there. And it wants you.

Brooke Greenberg lives in Little Rock. Email brooke@restorationmapping.com.

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