Mindfulness of Nature

Dear friends,

On the third day of the week-long silent retreat in the Pyrenees I’ve been part of, Jaya Ashmore (the retreat leader) read Rainer Maria Rilke’s words below:

“Ah not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition,

Shut out from the law of the stars!

The inner, what is it, if not intensified sky,

Hurled with birds

And deep with the winds of homecoming?”

When I heard these words after 3 days of silence in the hills, every one of them resonated straight to my core. This meeting opened a flow from somewhere deep within me, moving me to floods of tears. I felt expansive, welcomed and allowed like I’d never felt before.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always had a deep longing to ‘know’ life. I’ve never wanted to settle with ‘surviving’ . Of course, as we all have, I’ve had to muddle my way through many challenges of life in ‘survival mode’ . Yet an underlying wish has remained within me to live fully, authentically, to taste the beauty, intensity and uncertainty of life in its purest, most real and natural form.

This wish has at times felt like a curse, born out of an innate willingness I’ve felt inevitably bound to and even trapped in. I’ve always known that it would lead me down an challenging path and at times, I’ve felt willing to risk almost anything to feel real, alive and free – perhaps guided by some magnetic pull to move closer to “the law of the stars”.

Some people have at times wondered why I’d wish for that, and to tell the truth, I fail to truly understand it myself. It doesn’t stand to reason, it feels more like a thirst from within, entirely beyond my control.

At times the longing is quiet, gently whispering in the background of my experience. Other times, my trust in it shatters into panic when the consequences of listening to the longing feel too scary, and my mind hurls me into storms of doubt. But occasionally, in brief moments of connection with others, with nature, with life that make it all so vitally worthwhile, I’m filled with intense, beautiful ‘aliveness’. And then perhaps, as my trust in it grows, what can feel like the greatest curse then becomes the most precious gift.

More importantly maybe, I often wonder whether deep down, we all hold this wish? It can feel terrifying at times, so much that we prefer to bury it deep underneath the ‘surface’ of our lives, the roles we play, the people we think ourselves to be. And indeed there are times when we absolutely need to role play – when life perhaps becomes too intense, too much, too real. This also is part of ‘aliveness’.

But what if authentically ‘knowing life’ were also a necessary, vital wish? One that could lead us to living with greater trust, authenticity and in closer harmony with life – with ourselves, with each other and with the rest of the natural world? A wish that could guide us and the rest of the planet ‘back to life’?

As a teenager, I felt a mistrust of stories and bargains of happiness and ‘success’ in money, marriage, career. I’m not saying these can’t be integrally part of happy lives, they definitely can. I mean rather that they felt to me far from the solutions to happier lives. And most of all, I often wondered, were these my aspirations, my stories, my rules?

It was then that I began to turn to nature. Indeed, as Rilke says, what are we, if not ‘intensified sky”? If we want to find out about how to live life, why not turn to life itself – to this natural world we are part of?

My quest began by studying nature through biology, physics and chemistry. But still, I felt unsatisfied: was that really ‘knowing life’? The more I tried to explore life in this way, the more baffled my mind became seeking for ‘answers’ and meanings that were not there. Life felt unfathomable, ungraspable to my rational mind.

And to quote Wendell Berry:

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, 
we have come to our real work 
and when we no longer know which way to go, 
we have begun our real journey. 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed. 
The impeded stream is the one that sings.“

It was then that I began to turn to nature in a different way – ‘with my heart’. Instead of living in the realm of ideas about life, I experimented with tuning into my direct experience of life. It was terrifying but – what if I trusted it a little more? How would I behave then? What choices would I make?

Our western society believes so firmly in ideas, concepts, beliefs and understanding that perhaps we’ve forgotten how to tune into the direct mysterious truth of our moment-to-moment human experience, how to really pay attention, listen and let all of life in? Could we hold life with all its mysterious contradictions? Do we have to fit it into boxes? Does it have to be one thing or the other?

This was the turning point when my necessary wish to ‘know life’ began to come true. The following 15 years to this date have been a path of discovery towards fulfilling that wish to explore life, to get to ‘know aliveness’.

This deep need to respond to this wish hasn’t been a smooth ride. ‘Mindfulness’ is often represented as a fix-it pacifying practice, bringing us closer to some kind of ‘zen’ coma of acceptance of everything. To me, mindfulness is far from that . It’s about welcoming our reality and feeling the full texture of ‘aliveness’. It’s about changing our relationship to life by exploring our experience with genuine playful curiosity – including our minds, thoughts and emotions and so much beyond – sounds, sights, scents, touch, body sensations and energy formed and formless – all quietly calling us back to belonging, wholeness and connection.

When I heard Rilke’s words last week, it was as if they had met my deepest wish – as if he had understood the beauty and pain of a lifelong longing.

The retreat gifted me with other glimpses of life that at times felt so intensely real to me they were dreamlike. These moments, in the most down-to-earth way possible, felt magical and revealed to me the power of true silence and listening with a depth I had never been touched by before.

The strange beauty of responding to this wish to ‘know life’, is that the more I trust getting to ‘know life’ directly, the more I discover that I really have no graspable idea what life is.

To my controlling mind, this can feel like a terrifying frustration – yet to my heart, it can feel like a playful, mysterious wonder.

We are ultimately alone with our experience and feeling into the beauty and intensity of life on our own can be hard and at times impossibly intense. But this ‘intensified sky’ connects us all – alive in each and every one of us. Perhaps if we turned towards it together, we could hold it with greater ease? Perhaps it could even move us towards creative action for a happier, more peaceful and sustainable world?

Either way, I strive to chose to keep my attention on the wonder of it all. This is which inspires my everyday invitation to you here.