In April 2020, as lockdowns began across North America, a minister in Vancouver made a small but profound gesture toward the families watching from isolation. Jen Cunnings, Minister of Children, Youth & Families at St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church, opened a children's book and read aloud to a congregation that couldn't be together. She chose No One But You, a 2011 picture book by Douglas Wood illustrated by P.J. Lynch—a text that wasn't about togetherness at all. It was about something stranger and more essential: the irreplaceable, singular nature of each person's encounter with being alive.
What the story actually does
No One But You is not a narrative in the conventional sense. It's a poetic meditation structured through obsessive repetition—a liturgical pattern that builds like a mantra. Throughout, Wood sets up variations on a single theme: "No one but you can feel the rain kiss your skin or the wind ruffle your hair... no one but you can walk through a rain puddle in your bare feet." The pattern accumulates through dozens of small, sensory moments: no one but you can hear a red bird singing from a treetop, see the morning sun sparkle on water while dangling your toes, hold a turtle and count the plates on her back, roll a dewdrop onto your tongue, smell the earth after rain, whistle through a blade of grass, smile your own particular smile.
The book makes a radical argument: there are things—many things—that simply cannot be taught, shown, or explained to anyone else. They can only be discovered by you, directly, through your own senses, in your singular body, in your irreplaceable moment. This is not metaphor. Wood is being literal about sensation.
Why sensory particularity matters spiritually
What makes this book spiritually potent is its insistence on irreplaceability. In contemporary culture, which reduces experience to the shareable—the photographed, the documented, the collectively witnessed—Wood's text argues that the most important things belong entirely to the individual. Not because they're selfish. Because they're incommunicable.
You cannot feel my rain or perceive my light. Your tongue knows the taste of honey in a way mine never will. Your ears hear the bumblebee differently than anyone else's ears could. This isn't poetry about loneliness; it's poetry about the structure of consciousness itself. Your vantage point on the world is unique and, by definition, unrepeatable. When you feel the softness of a puppy's muzzle, make it feel safe and cared for—that encounter exists nowhere else in the universe. No one else can give that puppy what you're giving it. No one else can receive what you receive in that moment.
This is contemplative philosophy embedded in a children's story.
The reframing Jen offers: solitude as spiritual practice
Jen's decision to read this during lockdown was not accidental. She doesn't hide the difficulty: "I can imagine just like me that I am I'm missing time with my friends and with you no members of my my family just like you are it's it's hard not to be with them." She acknowledges the genuine pain of separation. And then she shifts the frame.
"But it's pretty beautiful to be reminded of all the beautiful incredible things that only we can do and we can experience."
This is the move. When we cannot gather, what becomes visible? The existence of an entire category of human experience that never required gathering in the first place. The rain still kisses your skin when you're alone. The stars are still above you, still available for your wish. A puppy in your arms still awakens the same tender competence and care. Memory still connects you to everyone you've loved. These things don't need an audience to matter.
Jen is suggesting—without denying the real loss—that involuntary solitude can become an invitation to notice what's always been true: that your consciousness is inherently singular, and that singularity is not a tragedy. It's the ground of real presence.
How the story teaches contemplative attention
The structure of No One But You is a template for contemplative practice. It grounds itself entirely in the five senses and the emotions that flow from direct sensory encounter. Sight. Sound. Smell. Taste. Touch. These aren't metaphorical or symbolic. Wood is anchoring spiritual teaching in the body and its perceptions.
When you hold a turtle and count the plates on her back, feel the hardness of her shell, try to imagine what swims in her consciousness as she returns to the water—you're engaging in what contemplative traditions might call "bare attention." You're noticing, without needing to judge or interpret or photograph or share. That knowing is yours alone. It can't be given away. It can only be lived.
This practice of presence—of attending carefully to what only you can perceive—is radical in a culture built on the assumption that experience becomes real only when it's witnessed or validated by others. The story suggests otherwise: your direct experience of the world, unmediated and unseen, is the actual ground of spiritual life.
Memory and continuity of self
Partway through, the story shifts. After cataloging present-moment sensory experiences, Wood turns to time: "no one but you can remember your own memories all the things you've done all the places you've been with all your favorite people and of course no one but you can make your new memories the ones yet to come."
This move is crucial. The irreplaceable nature of experience isn't just about the moment. It's about the continuity of your singular consciousness across a lifetime. Your memories—your private internal sense of where you've been and who you've loved—is accessible only to you. No one else can remember your childhood the way you remember it. No one can have witnessed all the moments that have shaped your particular understanding of love, beauty, fear, joy.
Your future, too, is singular. The moments you will witness and feel and know—they belong to your vantage point and nobody else's. This is what it means to have a self: a continuous thread of irreplaceable experience that is yours alone to know and to witness.
The paradox of love
And then the story makes a final turn. After establishing the radical particularity of every person's experience, Wood writes: "no one but you can feel the feelings in your heart knowing that someone loves you and saying the words only your lips can say I love you."
This might seem to contradict the whole thesis. Doesn't love connect us, make us less alone? Yes. But notice the paradox: even love is irreplaceable. Someone else cannot love you the way you need to be loved. Your beloved cannot be loved by anyone else's love. When you say "I love you," those specific words from your specific lips matter because they come from your singular heart. No one else can be that specific form of love for that specific person.
This is not solipsism. It's radical interdependence understood through the lens of particularity. You need others precisely because their irreplaceability complements yours.
Jen's theological grounding
After reading the story, Jen places it explicitly within a spiritual frame. She speaks of blessing: "God God has gifted us with so many blessings and the blessing of sight and of hearing and of taste all and feeling is such a gift and so we give we give God thanks and we remember the blessings that we have and the feelings that we own."
From this view, your unique vantage point—the irreplaceable nature of your experience—is not a limitation or a tragedy. It's a blessing. A divine gift. Each person is equipped with a singular way of knowing creation, a unique lens through which the sacred can be encountered. In contemplative traditions across many faiths, this idea appears: that each consciousness is a distinct instrument through which God or the universe or existence itself can know and experience itself.
Your particular way of seeing the sun sparkle on water, your specific taste for honey, your singular way of loving—these are not minor or replaceable. They are ways that the divine is knowing itself through the particularity of your body and mind.
What this becomes in practice
For families in lockdown, separated from friends and extended family, this story offers something unexpected and valuable: permission. Permission to stop feeling that your solitary experiences are incomplete or secondary to shared ones. Permission to notice the irreplaceable quality of what's happening in your singular life right now—the rain, the stars, the memory, the capacity to love—without needing to document it or frame it for others or feel ashamed that you're not gathering.
It's also an invitation to what Zen practitioners call "bare attention," what contemplative monks across traditions recognize as the foundation of spiritual practice: the simple, devoted attention to what's actually present. That practice doesn't require special circumstances. It requires presence.
The story's deeper teaching is this: the spiritual life is not primarily about collective experience, though that matters. It's about the quality of attention you bring to your irreplaceable encounter with existence. It's about noticing. About presence. About recognizing that your singular way of knowing the world is itself a form of grace.
Where to go from here
Consider reading No One But You aloud, either to children or to yourself. Notice where Wood's words land in your own body and senses. Spend a morning or afternoon practicing the story's implicit invitation: pick one sense—smell, taste, touch, sight, or sound—and attend to it with full presence for an hour. Not to achieve anything or document it. Simply to know what only you can know.
Explore other works by Douglas Wood, particularly Old Turtle and Grandfather's Prayer to the Earth, which carry similar themes of singular presence and interconnection. If you're drawn to the contemplative practice beneath the story, investigate meditation traditions in your own faith lineage—the practice of noticing, of presence, of allowing experience to arrive unfiltered.
Most importantly: trust that your particular way of encountering the world matters. That the rain you feel, the memory you hold, the love you give and receive—these are not secondary or incomplete. They are the primary substance of spiritual life.
