Well, the robins are often unseen. Not least because I shot four minutes of video of Tane - all lovely close ups as he pecked around my feet and eyed me with his head adorably tilted only to delete it before editing it into two rather gorgeous videos. Since then, they've been largely unseen because as soon as Tane appears, Garden Robin (whoever he or she is) torpedoes in and chases him off, leaving Tane, breast ablaze, swearing at his opponent from the next fence along. It's very frustrating.
I have also been thinking of the unseen in the light of something I read recently... a paper by two academics recommended to me by the loveliest of the people I met in Vienna. The paper talks about how the sea is "hidden" - it's where our waste goes and we don't think about it. Out of mind, out of sight. Or vice versa. Meanwhile, the pollutants enact "slow violence" (a term coined by scholar Rob Nixon) as they poison the food chain in the oceans, concentrating in the apex predators.
All that we don't attend to.
Simone Weil says the "afflicted man", a person whose dignity has been destroyed through suffering, is invisible, such that he ceases to exist. It is only through acts of "creative attention", which has to withstand the pain of witnessing such affliction, that he can be re-created and seen.
Darker mornings and early evenings could - and often do - make me want to enclose myself in the bright comfort of my home. But maybe it matters to seek out the unseen, the hidden, the forgotten.
That's heavy duty -- the tendency of not seeing the afflicted person, the invisible. How to witness.