Seek always the embrace of nature as it will hold you when others can’t.
This morning, while listening to a meditation talk on awareness, I noticed an up-swell in wind outside my living room window. Like an orchestral crescendo it rose until peaking then fell back to relative quiet. As it rose, I felt the sensation of being surrounded by this rising wind. Intellectually, I knew it was a bitterly cold wind if I was to experience the fullness of its embrace outdoors-- but I wasn’t. I was sitting bathed in the warmth of my home, the early morning sun upon my skin. Yet the sound seemed to envelope me with comfort. Like the familiar touch of a loved one; a hug, perhaps.
How do the sounds of nature center us? What is our orientation to them? Why did the wind through a hedgerow of trees across the road from our old country home always situate me on an expanse of shore; the wind- waves washing onto banks of packed sand while I was standing in my yard surrounded entirely by fields many miles away from any beach?
Think of your experience with spring peepers in April and May, cicada in midsummer and crickets as summer wanes. The soothing sounds of the natural world persist in areas where their habitat is supported. If we are fortunate, we hear them in the quiet beyond the roar of vehicles and human activity.
Nature sounds are a powerful anchor for meditation. A healing balm in the storm of life.
Yesterday, our trail walk in the late afternoon light was a meditation on sensory orientation in the natural world. The cold pierced us, even in the protection of the woods; a snapping, crackling sort of cold that caused a deep chill to set in if you stopped moving your body for long. And we did stop in our very tracks to listen to what the trees were saying.
“Wait—what was that sound?” and we all stood still on the trail of snow that slid like sand beneath our boots each footfall that we took.
We paused in silence as the trees muttered in winding, dry-aired, creaking turn as though they were acknowledging with us, their shared experience of the deepness of cold that February day.
Further along, we were stopped short by the quiet brilliance of late day sun causing a dazzling shimmer upon the bark of young birch caught in a a near unimaginable depth of snow in comparison to its almost total absence merely a week ago.
Here it was the bright silence which captured our collective attention.
Listening is important in the forest, as in life. But in order to truly listen we must pause and be present to what is. And this is an uncomfortable experience for many, so habituated to busyness and distraction. To some, a trail walk is an exercise in fitness, not listening. And while fitness is good, so too is listening. To practice true listening takes intention and patience and a distinct willingness to begin again when thought intrudes and tries to take over felt experience.
Sometimes the forest sounds capture your entire imagination.
A cacophony of crow caw’s the other afternoon alerted me to something going on. It seemed to be a mobbing of sorts. Their excitement was contagious. My husband, Paul and I stopped on the trail but search as I did, no obvious source of the excitement could be found. We continued on a lower section of trail down to the pit and when we reemerged onto the gravel road the caw-cophony greeted us again, this time nearer the road.
I suggested we take our time walking the next section of trail.
Pausing, I searched bare tree limbs in the area of the wild ruckus. Our son Lucas had taught me that old snags are where you often find Barred Owls and this is what I was looking for.
In a near instant, I spotted what I thought was our old friend about half way up on a limb of hardwood. I stayed with it until I was certain that this was what I was seeing. It was.
Seemingly unperturbed by the attention he was causing he kept his pensive gaze largely on the crows involved in the mob. We started in on a new mountain biking loop that brings you into the center of this small wood to see if we might get a better look. Not more than a handful of steps in I turned around. It just didn’t feel right to be sneaking in to an area we know this owl frequents for its daytime perching and with the full knowledge that the owl was there at present. An area which was largely inaccessible to humans a few months ago before the trail was cleared of the low tangle of fallen brush.
The crows fell into the forest's hush; the owl remained silent as always, the picture of poised awareness. We left and continued back on the icy, snow packed trail towards home.
Thanks for reading!
Wishing you an abundant sense of your interconnection with all!
Jill
Addendum:
This morning, while attending to yesterday’s meditation session on awareness which I had missed, I became transfixed by the image they shared of a wide open sky with a bird flying through it. When shown such an image and asked what they see, most people apparently focus on the bird (lovely creature that it is). But what of the sky itself? What if you thought of awareness as the vast expanse of sky and the bird as thought/ sensation/ emotion/ lived experience passing through it? What if you were able to sense that you are a field of awareness through which the passing experiences of your life occur? What if, owl like, it is in your nature to be participant and observer both?
--J